NOT A TRUTH IN ITSELF

The Tarot of Leonora Carrington by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq

Fulgur PressJanuary 2021Selected by Barbara Epler

It’s in the cards: your fortune is the lucky chance to get your hands on a tarot deck conjured up by Leonora Carrington. — Barbara Epler

All images copyright Estate of Leonora Carrington, ARS New York. Courtesy Fulgur Press

When Leonora Carrington’s hand-painted rendition of the Major Arcana appeared in the 2018 retrospective exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, it was a momentous event for scholars and Carrington fans alike. For any magical practitioner the creation of their own implements is a crucial step on the path of knowledge and self-empowerment, and so we cannot underestimate the significance of these cards to an artist who had already spent many decades studying the tarot. Never a passive follower of any tradition, Carrington’s interpretation of the tarot has significant diversions in terms of colour use, arrangement and symbology. She felt free to transform the deck in accordance with her own ideas and needs, and with a thoughtfulness and confidence that reveal her long and deep involvement with this divinatory system. Not only are Carrington’s cards a reflection of her intense philosophical engagement with the tarot (and other occult disciplines), but they also provide us with considerable insight into many aspects of her paintings.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when the imagery used by Carrington left many viewers confounded, albeit visually dazzled and tantalised. Early scholars approached some of her fantastical content by situating it within her involvement with Surrealism, while later on, beginning in the 1970s and continuing to this day, the feminist messages in her writings and art have been much analysed and celebrated. The esoteric subject matter deeply embedded within her entire oeuvre, and arguably the most serious and groundbreaking aspect of her work, remained largely unexplored until very recently. Early pioneers in this arena, most notably Gloria Orenstein, Whitney Chadwick and M.E. Warlick, reaffirmed Surrealism’s involvement with the occult in general and more specifically with particular esoteric practices, such as alchemy. Now, thanks in great part to a resurgence of scholarly interest in occultism, Carrington’s influences and involvements, as well as the development of her esoteric iconography are finally being given the attention they merit.

Carrington’s reticence towards providing explanations for her work is legendary and the reasons for it were well-grounded. Not only are the fundamental concepts of various occult systems unknown to many, even in the best of circumstances their substance and meanings can shift according to individual interpretations, as well as historical and social contexts. When Carrington repeatedly told viewers to determine for themselves what her paintings meant, she understood that there was no easy path to “reading” her work and that what they were able to “see” was what they were capable of comprehending with the knowledge they possessed at that moment. This open-ended approach applied to her use of the tarot, not as a tool of divination per se, but rather as a guide for the exploration of the psyche. In The Way of Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky recalls an encounter with Carrington in Mexico where she challenges him to examine the 22 Major Arcana and then tell her the meaning of what he sees. After doing so, with some trepidation, he writes: “With a mysterious smile on her lips the painter whispered to me, ‘What you just dictated to me is the secret. As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become 
what you see in it. The tarot is a chameleon.’” ◉