Warburg Institute

From tattoo art to TikTok readings, in recent years tarot has infiltrated popular culture in ways that were previously unimaginable. In 2025, tarot is cool. And the Warburg Institute’s newly refurbished galleries, which opened last Autumn, feel like a particularly appropriate place to house London’s first major deep-dive into its history – its founder, Aby Warburg, was one of the first to give it a proper scholarly look-in.  A small but mighty exhibition, Tarot – Origins & Afterlives looks at how the function of tarot has shifted over the centuries while showing how card designs have also evolved with the times. The exhibition offers up various theories as to tarot’s origins, tracing it back to the courts of the mid-15th century Italian Renaissance via the Florentin variant known as Michiate, a 97-card deck, used for narrative-based games. There are some truly gorgeous, intricate etchings and card drawings on display By the 18th century, tarot became adopted by the occult, where it began its association with fortune telling and divination, and in 1781, a French clergyman claimed that tarot originated in ancient Egypt via the ‘Book of Thoth’. A few eccentric characters later, we learn that the mainstream decks most of us are familiar with these days can be traced to the excellently named ‘Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, a secret society headquartered in London, that was formed in the late nineteenth century and devoted to the study of magic. There are some truly...