Visual and Material: Tarot Cards from Iconography to Symbolism

The aim of this presentation is to propose visual sociology as a sociology of imaginary based on tarot iconography. From the history of playing cards and tarot, I propose an analysis of the tarot cards iconography, which reveal that, since the Renaissance, the images in the various tarot decks reflect and help to construct meanings about a particular historical worldview.

Based on a sociology of images that goes from Erwin Panofsky to Aby Warburg, the relationship between the production of deck images, both as imaginary and material productions, and the construction of oracular meanings from them will be on exam. My aim, then, is to show the historical attempts to construct oracular meanings from the images on the cards, as well as to show how the iconography of the cards in the Renaissance became, centuries later, a symbolic reading of the tarot, operated by French occultists and esotericists, especially since the publication of Le Monde Primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, (The Primeval World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World) by Antoine Court de Gébelin and Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, the count of Mellet.

I intend to understand how images are constituted from a “game of the imaginary”, that is, how different ways of understanding images in different historical contexts generate different practices, from playing practices to oracle with cards as divinatory practices, given the native iconographic interpretation from who I call “imagineers”.

To this end, this work moves between the sociology of religion, to think about the construction of oracular meaning with cards, as well as a visual sociology, to show how the imagineers agency can construct oracular images and imaginaries. I also reflect on the oracle market and the materiality of playing cards, from their production to their circulation and consumption in an increasingly popular market.