The Symbols We Become / Tarot

"Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions" at Morgan Library.

Symbols outlive the worlds that created them. They leave traces. They accumulate meanings. They mutate. Tarot is one of those surviving languages, carrying Renaissance allegory, occultism, surrealism and contemporary mythology inside the same images. The Morgan Library follows those mutations across six centuries. But beneath the cards there is a deeper question: why do we keep returning to old symbols to imagine new versions of ourselves?

Every generation has looked at tarot and found itself reflected back. A Renaissance duke saw an exquisite game. Enlightenment occultists saw Egypt. Victorian magicians saw initiation. Surrealists saw another reality after fascism. Contemporary artists see a symbolic language elastic enough to contain uncertainty. The images changed, but even more so, we did. Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum begins with a correction that feels almost heretical: tarot was never born mystical. The exhibition peels away centuries of occult mythology and returns the cards tto fifteenth-century northern Italy, where they first appeared as tarocchi: luxurious playing cards commissioned by the Visconti and Sforza courts, painted with gold leaf, lapis pigments and the same techniques used for illuminated manuscripts and devotional panels.

Bonifacio Bembo Visconti-Sforza Tarot Italy, Lombardy, ca. 1456–1458

Standing in front of the reunited Visconti-Sforza and Visconti di Modrone cards is the exhibition’s first revelation. They are smaller than almost every contemporary deck, yet visually overwhelming. Gold catches the light differently as you move. The surfaces feel alive. These are not illustrations waiting to become symbols; they are Renaissance paintings reduced to the size of a human hand, and nothing about them initially suggests fortune telling. Tarocchi was a game of hierarchy and strategy, played inside courts where symbolism already structured everyday life. The earliest documented use of tarot for divination appears roughly three centuries later. Egypt, the Book of Thoth, hidden priesthoods preserving sacred knowledge through playing cards: those stories belong to the eighteenth century, when occult writers invented a lineage powerful enough to transform history into mythology. The exhibition’s real subject is not whether tarot works, but how images become vessels for belief.

How symbols leave one culture and become something else inside another. Six centuries of Hermetic philosophy, Kabbalah, ceremonial magic, surrealism and contemporary art settled inside twenty-two Renaissance archetypes until they began to feel timeless. Tarot becomes a lens here, rather than simply information: a way of seeing what happens when a culture inherits symbols and begins to change the relationships between them.

Egyptian Papyrus
Rosenwaldl Tarot Sheet

Before Tarot Became a Mirror

Justice. Fortune. Death. Love. The Fool.
For a tarot reader today, these names immediately evoke archetypal forces, planetary currents, alchemical operations, thresholds of consciousness. They are recurring principles, images that reorganize themselves every time the deck is opened. Yet inside the Morgan they return to their original lives. Justice belongs to civic order. Fortune turns the wheel of political destiny. Death is neither punishment nor transformation. It is memento mori, the certainty shared by prince and labourer alike. The Fool is not simply innocence; he is a figure of marginality, unpredictability and social displacement. The exhibition places the cards inside the visual world that produced them: illuminated manuscripts, court textiles, devotional painting and decorative arts from fifteenth-century Italy. A subtle realization follows.

Tarot did not invent a symbolic language, nor did it borrow one wholesale. It crystallized an iconographic universe already circulating through Renaissance culture, compressing allegory, theology, classical mythology and civic power into 22 portable images. These images were already carrying the fears, desires and structures of their time. What changed was the relationship between them. And that relationship would continue changing for centuries. The question is therefore not simply what tarot means. It is what forces make a culture need to change its symbols in the first place.

Unidentified artist Italian, 16th or 17th century / Bonifacio Bembo Visconti-Sforza Tarot Italy, Lombardy, ca. 1456–1458

How Tarot Became Esoteric

The cards were not born inside Hermetic philosophy; they became legible through it. Renaissance Italy already possessed a dense symbolic vocabulary built from Christian allegory, classical mythology, astrology and Neoplatonic thought. Hermeticism, Christian Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism and centuries later, ceremonial magic encountered that visual grammar and reorganized it into an initiatory map. This is tarot’s historical inversion.

The esoteric schools did not invent the symbols; they created new relationships between them. The Tree of Life, planetary rulerships, elemental attributions and alchemical stages became ways of reading images that already existed. Tarot did not arrive carrying an occult doctrine. It became one. The same image could therefore survive while its meaning changed completely. The symbol remained. The worldview around it mutated. And with every mutation, tarot became a different tool for understanding the self and the world around it.

Paris Invents Tarot’s Secret History

Every esoteric tradition has an origin myth. Tarot’s was written in Paris. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin looked at an ordinary deck and declared it the surviving fragment of an ancient Egyptian sacred book. His theory was historically indefensible, yet culturally irresistible. Suddenly tarot possessed antiquity, initiation and mystery.

A few years later Jean-Baptiste Alliette, better known as Etteilla, developed the first tarot system created specifically for divination, followed by a dedicated deck in the late 1780s. That moment altered Western esotericism forever. The Tarot de Marseille, a family of inexpensive woodblock-printed decks that crystallized across France and Switzerland, became the foundation for much of modern occult tarot. Even its name is retrospective: “Tarot de Marseille” was standardized centuries later, long after those cards were already in circulation across Lyon, Avignon and Marseille. Occultism did not invent the deck. It inherited familiar images and read them through astrology, alchemy, numerology and sacred correspondences.

A historical misunderstanding became one of Western esotericism’s most enduring myths. This is where tarot begins to reveal something larger than its own history. Cultures rarely inherit symbols intact. They inherit them and begin rearranging the relationships around them. History becomes mythology. Mythology becomes a system. The system becomes a way of seeing.

Rider Waite Smith Tarot

Pamela Colman Smith changed the way the world sees tarot

If Renaissance artists created tarot’s iconography, Pamela Colman Smith created its emotional language. Every contemporary tarot reader lives inside her imagination, whether they know her name or not. Her collaboration with Arthur Edward Waite in 1909 transformed every one of the seventy-eight cards into a narrative image. In most tarot traditions, the Minor Arcana had largely appeared as arrangements of swords, cups, wands and coins. Smith gave them bodies, weather, architecture and emotion. Three Swords became heartbreak. Five Pentacles became exclusion. Eight Cups became departure. She gave tarot atmosphere. The exhibition restores Smith to the centre of tarot history, revealing influences that extend beyond mysticism into theatre, folklore, Symbolism, medieval manuscripts and Japanese printmaking. Her genius was understanding that symbols become unforgettable when they become stories.

Behind her paintings sits Waite’s invisible framework: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The twenty-two Major Arcana become twenty-two paths across the qabalistic Tree of Life. Hebrew letters align with archetypes. Zodiac signs, planets and elemental forces reorganize the deck into an initiatory ascent. Even the numbering changes, with Strength and Justice exchanging places to align with Golden Dawn astrology. What millions experience today as timeless tradition was, in reality, an esoteric redesign.

Smith translated an initiatory system into images that intuition could read before being intellectually processed. And this is another turning point in tarot’s history: the symbol moves from correspondence into experience.

Toth Tarot, Lady Frieda Harris & Aleister Crowley

Crowley rebuilt its metaphysics.

Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot sought to make tarot cosmologically complete. He wanted to make it cosmologically complete. The original paintings by Lady Frieda Harris are among the exhibition’s most extraordinary works, as every card is constructed through overlapping systems: astrology, qabalah, alchemy, sacred geometry, Egyptian mythology, numerology and Thelema, Crowley’s philosophical system centred on Will as the creative force of existence.

Meaning emerges through correspondence. Crowley supplied the cosmology; Harris invented its visual architecture. Influenced by Anthroposophy, colour theory and sacred geometry, she produced thousands of preparatory studies over five years for what was initially imagined as a six-month commission. The paintings behave almost like stained-glass mandalas: colour, proportion and movement become symbolic information. The changes Crowley introduced are philosophical.

Temperance becomes Art, transforming moderation into the alchemical marriage of opposites. Justice becomes Adjustment, replacing moral judgment with equilibrium inside a living universe. Judgment becomes The Aeon, announcing a new spiritual epoch rather than biblical resurrection. Even The Fool changes species. Crowley’s Fool brings together Dionysus, Harpocrates, Pan, the Green Man and the divine child simultaneously. He is potential before manifestation, chaos before form. The Fool becomes more than a character but a question of becoming. Reading Thoth is less like reading tarot than reading a Renaissance grimoire rewritten through twentieth-century occultism. It asks for astrology, qabalah, alchemy, mythology and ceremonial magic all at once. The system expands. The mythology expands with it.

Austin Osman Spare Invented a Private Alphabet

Austin Osman Spare occupies a completely different branch of Western esotericism. He entered London’s magical world at the same moment as Crowley, then walked away from it. Where Crowley believed power emerged through mastering ceremonial systems, Spare believed every existing system eventually became another prison. Magic began before ritual, before doctrine, before language. It began inside the unconscious. His tarot, produced around 1906 and only recently reconstructed, feels uncannily contemporary. Bodies dissolve into sigils. Faces become psychic masks. Archetypes fracture into erotic hybrids and dream anatomies. Rather than illustrating established correspondences, Spare generated symbols from psychic impulse. This developed into what he called the Alphabet of Desire

His most radical idea was simple: the most powerful magical symbol is the one nobody has ever seen before because it originates inside an individual psyche. This became one of the important antecedents of what would later develop into Chaos Magic, not its beginning, but one of its deepest foundations. Placed beside Crowley, Spare becomes his perfect counterpoint. Crowley universalizes the cosmos. Spare internalizes it. Crowley constructs an encyclopaedia of correspondences. Spare dismantles the library and writes a private language instead. This is the “outsider” as we here at Nasty understand it: not someone who simply exists outside a scene, but someone who constructs their own symbolic system rather than inheriting one intact. People who build worlds, not careers. Spare does not simply interpret an existing mythology. He creates another one. His influence can still be traced through later underground magical cultures, including sigil practice, Genesis P-Orridge and TOPY, post-punk occultism and experimental magical practice. The Morgan includes him quietly, yet his influence is anything but quiet.

Exile Invents Another Cosmology

The Surrealist galleries are where the exhibition stops feeling historical and becomes intimate. Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo did not simply reproduce tarot. They painted worlds governed by its symbolic intelligence. After fascism, exile and war, alchemy ceased to be chemistry and became transformation. Astrology became composition. Myth became autobiography. Tarot offered an operative mythology: a symbolic structure capable of reorganizing reality after political, religious and personal certainties had collapsed. Carrington’s priestesses, beasts and lunar ceremonies inhabit the atmosphere of the High Priestess and the Moon without depicting them directly. Varo transforms esoteric philosophy into architecture, machinery and dream logic. The cards disappear. The language remains.

One absence becomes strangely visible here: Carl Jung is almost nowhere in the exhibition. Despite the enormous influence Jungian psychology has had on twentieth-century readings of tarot, the Morgan deliberately returns to image history rather than making psychology its organising framework. Tarot before therapy. Tarot before self-help. Tarot before archetypes became personality language. The symbol is not being used to explain the individual. It is being used to build another world. And this is where the question of transformation becomes more personal. What happens to identity when inherited systems of meaning stop being enough? Carrington and Varo answered by constructing worlds of their own.

When Tarot Escaped the Occult Orders

The Morgan gives unexpected historical weight to the American occult revival, when tarot left initiatory societies and entered public culture. Marjorie Cameron carries Thelema into California. Betye Saar reworks tarot through Black spirituality, race and gender. Niki de Saint Phalle turns archetypal imagery toward feminist and personal mythology. Bea Nettles photographs an autobiographical tarot. Motherpeace dismantles patriarchal iconography. Tarot escapes ceremonial orders and becomes visual culture. It appears in feminist spirituality, underground publishing, psychedelic art, photography and independent print culture. The deck stops belonging to magicians. It becomes available to anyone willing to build a mythology around it. The sacred object becomes personal. The ritual becomes portable. The inherited symbol becomes material for another identity. The people entering this symbolic system are no longer simply reading a mythology. They are constructing one.

A New Mythology

The final galleries refuse nostalgia. Marcel Dzama, Alison Saar, Elizabeth Colomba, Elijah Burgher, Kerstin Brätsch, Edie Fake, Kim Krans, Hilma’s Ghost and Chris Ofili inherit tarot without preserving its rules. Some redraw archetypes through queer mythology. Others dissolve them into abstraction.  Ofili does not simply reproduce an existing tarot archetype. He merges the Renaissance Conjuror with Trinidadian Carnival’s Midnight Robber, creating a hybrid figure that belongs simultaneously to tarot, Caribbean cultural memory and his own visual mythology.
The gesture matters: a new archetype can enter an ancient symbolic system. The mythology remains alive because it can still absorb something that did not exist before. These artists are not simply interpreting tarot. They are building worlds from its fragments. Cinema tells the same story. Agnès Varda, Alejandro Jodorowsky and decades of filmmakers borrow tarot because its imagery has become instantly legible even outside occult culture. Tarot now moves effortlessly between museums, fashion editorials, experimental cinema, underground club graphics and contemporary painting. It no longer belongs exclusively to esotericism. It belongs to visual culture. The cards have become part of the atmosphere of contemporary culture even when the deck itself is absent.

The Infinite Life of the Arcana

Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions ultimately proposes something every serious tarot reader discovers sooner or later. The cards have never carried one fixed meaning. They have survived because they remain structurally incomplete, open enough for every century to inhabit them differently. Perhaps that is tarot’s oldest secret. A symbol survives because it never exhausts itself. It leaves enough space for another philosophy, another religion, another revolution, another artist to recognize something unfinished inside it. Tarot was never a container of answers or simply a tool to predict the future. It was more like a vessel for correspondences. For six centuries, it has expanded whenever culture enters a period of uncertainty. The Renaissance produced allegory. The Enlightenment invented its occult genealogy. Industrial modernity built ceremonial systems around it. The twentieth century opened tarot to psychology, surrealism, feminist spirituality and new forms of personal mythology. Each crisis generated a new reading. Yet the twenty-first century is different. We are watching the decline of inherited belief without the disappearance of spiritual desire.

People assemble meaning from astrology, tarot, neuroscience, mythology, therapy, ancient philosophy, AI and digital practices instead of belonging to a single doctrine. An age of personal cosmologies. Tarot is uniquely adapted to this shift because it has never required one mythology. It allows us to build one. The High Priestess can become hidden knowledge. The Fool can become potential before identity. Death can become the reconstruction of the self. The Tower can become collapse as revelation. The Moon can become the unstable territory between dream and reality. The meanings change because we change. Tarot survives not because it gives us a fixed map of the world, but because it gives us a symbolic architecture inside which we can keep rebuilding one. For centuries people asked what the cards meant. Perhaps the more interesting question now is what kinds of worlds they are still capable of imagining. Perhaps tarot has survived six centuries for the same reason identity do

The Forces That Transform Identity

Perhaps this is the deeper story hidden inside the exhibition. Every transformation of tarot corresponds to a transformation in the way people understand themselves. The Renaissance gave the cards a language of hierarchy, morality and fate. Occultism turned them toward hidden knowledge and initiation. Pamela Colman Smith transformed them into emotional experience. Crowley built a cosmology. Spare turned the system inward. Carrington and Varo used symbolic language to construct worlds after exile and rupture. Feminist and underground cultures turned the deck into a space for rewriting inherited structures. Contemporary artists use it to construct new mythologies around identity, desire, memory and the body. The cards change because the world around them changes. But something else changes too. The person looking at them. This is why tarot remains culturally useful beyond divination. It provides a symbolic architecture through which people can negotiate uncertainty, transformation and becoming. It is not simply a record of what cultures have believed. It is a record of what cultures have needed to imagine themselves becoming.

“The Tarot is a language. If you speak it, it will speak to you.”
— Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Symbols We Become / Tarot

Credits:
Exhibition was on view  June 26 – October 4, 2026
Location: The Morgan Library / @themorganlibrary

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