Tarot - Origins & Afterlives

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 gorgeous, intricate etchings and card drawings on display. The oldest example belongs to the Milanese Visconti-Sforza dynasty and dates to the 15th century, but even the more modern interpretations of tarot will catch your eye. Large boards show prints of British artist Suzanne Treister’s deck, which explores worldly issues from climate change (via a menacing Greta Thunburg card) to the AI info-apocalypse (one ‘ace of swords’ card shows grey clouds scribbled with the words ‘infowar’, ‘cyberwar’ and ‘netwar’). 

While this exhibition does a great job of attempting to pin down the history of tarot, visitors should be aware that it is very nerdy, which makes sense considering its scholarly surroundings. What it doesn’t do is explain how tarot actually works – and while you can work out bits and pieces from the iconography by yourself, I’m not convinced your average guy will leave with an understanding of how the ‘hanged man’ differs from ‘the devil’. But then again, maybe that’s the point: tarot has always been about the art of interpretation. 

We’re left with the view that, for all of its superstitions and magical alignments, tarot is now harking back to its humanist origins: in 2025, cards are ultimately used to trigger conversations and to help us imagine a different world. That’s something we could all do with, now and then.