Tarot Design Before and After the Golden Dawn - Emily E. Auger

Tarot Design Before and After the Golden Dawn

Tarot originated as a gaming deck in the 1400s and in later centuries became a prop for esoteric practices and a tool for meditation and creative exercises. This diversification of uses was paralleled by a diversification of approaches to Tarot interpretation, design, and artistic style. This talk illustrates these changes with reference to allegory, archetype, and narrative in decks produced before and after the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888.

Bio

Emily E. Auger (MA, MA, Ph.D.) is the author of numerous books, articles, and reviews, including Tarot and Other Meditation Decks (McFarland 2004; expanded edition 2023), Cartomancy and Tarot in Film 1940-2010 (Intellect 2016), Tech-Noir Film (Intellect 2011), and The Way of Inuit Art (McFarland 2004). She edited the multi-author anthology Tarot in Culture Volumes I and II (2014) and is co-editor with Janet Brennan Croft of Divining Tarot: Papers on Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps and Other Works by Nancy-Lou Patterson (2019). She also served as the founder and area chair for the Tarot area at the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association conference from 2004–2020.

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Image credits:

Image credits: Pamela C. Smith (artist) and Arthur E. Waite’s The Rider-Waite Tarot. First pub. 1909. U.S. Games Systems The Rider-Waite Tarot® © 1971.

Curated & Hosted by 

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.