Discovering the Tarot of Austin Osman Spare

Claire Gilman: 
Hear Jonathan Allen, Deputy Curator at the Collection of the Magic Circle, talk about Austin Osman Spare’s rediscovered Tarot deck. 

Jonathan Allen: 
I actually stumbled across the cards that you can see here almost completely by chance one evening back in 2013 when I was doing some routine cataloging work in the Magic Circles Museum. Luckily, I already knew a little bit about Austin Spare as an artist, but I had no idea at all that he'd ever produced a deck of tarot cards. I think my strongest memory of that evening was spotting the tiny half drawings that you can see along the edges of most of the cards here and which link up in quite surprising ways to make various images when the cards are lined up next to each other. You can see a pretty good example here with the green and the purple serpent that links up four of the spade cards. 

We're now pretty sure that this was in fact Spare's personal training deck rather than any kind of prototype for publishing. And it's quite interesting to think that he may have used these very cards to read the fortunes of his friends at the time. One of the closest of which was the artist and suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst. Although they've been virtually unknown for more than a century since they were made, Spare's cards can now give us a remarkably detailed glimpse into the world and the language of the late British occult revival.