Tarot of Leonora Carrington

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Another missed opportunity and one that might have a more direct bearing on Carrington is scarcely any discussion of the theories of Gurdjieff and, especially Ouspensky in relation to her tarot. For example, the authors reference her famous 1939 ‘Portrait of Max Ernst’ who is shown carrying a lamp which the authors assert represents Carrington as his ‘guiding light’. In a later self-portrait, she also carries a lamp representing Ouspensky, but this ’guiding light’ not explored at all despite it being known that Carrington (and Varo) were involved with Ouspensky’s post-Gurdjieffian’ Fourth Way’ in Mexico City, although, to be fair, Carrington appeared to wary of most organised groups of occultists. Her account of her escape from this situation is also remarkable. Her parents planned to send her to another institution, this time in South Africa, and she was accompanied to Lisbon so that she might take a ship. She told her chaperone she needed to go to the lavatory, nipped into a cafe, ran out of the other exit and into a cab which she had take her to the Mexican embassy, where she knew a diplomat, Renato Leduc. He did indeed come to her aid – by marrying her and taking her with him to Mexico (via New York, where she once served André Breton a meal of hare stuffed with oysters). She never saw her father again. No wonder, perhaps, that after this life of reversals, flights, expulsions and exiles, she craved routine in Mexico City. Aridjis remembers someone “sane and stable but giving the impression that she lived in a permanent state of anxiety – had no inner peace”. One day, the neighbours sent in workmen to prune the overhanging branches of the tree she had planted in her front yard decades before. She passionately, angrily, pleaded with them to let its wide-spreading boughs alone. Another book by Carrington’s biographer, Joanna Moorhead, examining the places Carrington was most strongly associated with, is due out next spring, amid growing interest in the artist’s work and her ideas as a pioneering feminist figure with an interest in ecology. This week, a widely expanded edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington will be published that will place her tarot in the context of her wider career.

Aberth believes the opportunity to study Carrington’s tarot finally has made sense of elements in her wider art that have long perplexed those who have tended to place her fantastic figures in the context of surrealism alone. Once you start reading and finding all about the occult life of Leonora Carrington though you are transported to another time, a brilliant introduction, touching opening essay from her son, then onto the meat of the book, her work. A key figure in the surrealist movement, and a noted writer as well as a painter, Carrington was highly regarded by peers such as André Breton, although long overlooked by the art establishment.

The images, both extraordinary and vivid, are part of a set of tarot cards, painted by the British-born Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Spirituality was very fundamental to her. She was a seeker all her life and Leonora was always searching, always going out of her comfort zone, looking for where mystery of life might be revealed. She went through periods of intense interest in Buddhism, the Kabbalah, tarot. All these worlds around that felt closer when she took you with her, including the worlds of plants and insects. Some diverged greatly, with different colours and icons used whilst others stayed mainly the same though with important changes to fit into the mythology of the cards that were being developed. This initially explores her work and the influences from the occult learnings of various groups in the 19th and 20th century, including The Golden Dawn, mesoamerican myths and culture, Celtic gods and goddesses, feminism, Jungian theory, and explored this amalgam through examples of Leonora’s works.

Of the essays, the first is an illuminating introduction/memoir by her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington which offers direct insight into Carrington’s world as experienced by one who both lived and collaborated with her. On the basis of this, I look forward to a lengthier volume of his recollections due to be published later this year by Manchester University Press. It is nearly impossible to put into ordinary language anything meaningful about why Carrington's art is as impactful, significant, and wonderful as it is. Somehow, she was able to access deep unconscious material and alloy it with the core visual messages of surrealism, the persecuted esoteric knowledge of European culture, and the fabulous folk mythologies of Mexico to produce a large body of imagery that can never cease to astound the beholders. The Tarot of Leonora Carrington is the first book dedicated to this important aspect of the artist’s work. It includes a full-size facsimile of her newly discovered Major Arcana; an introduction from her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington; and a richly illustrated essay from Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth that offers new insights—exploring the significance of tarot imagery within Carrington’s wider work, her many inspirations and mysterious occult sources. The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview.Born in Lancashire in 1917 into a family of wealthy mill owners, Carrington rebelled at school, later attending art school. Meeting Ernst in the late 1930s, who left his wife for Carrington, the couple moved to France where Carrington became part of the surrealist circle around Breton. Ernst, a German citizen, was interned twice after the outbreak of the second world war, prompting Carrington to suffer a breakdown in Spain – where she had fled – and she was admitted to hospital. Moorhead is a relative of the artist who became close to her at the end of her life. “She was a very spiritual person. We’d both been raised in the Catholic tradition but she became very critical of it and she had broken away from formal Catholicism although it still imbued her thinking,” she says.

When you’re ready, walk over to the last figure at the table. The most central one in the pink flowing gown. Who is this magical creature? . . . Examine the thin, almost translucent hand extending out from the sleeve. As the figure reaches out their hand to you, picture yourself placing your hand in theirs. How does this feel? How do you communicate with this being, and what would you like to ask? Hers was, as her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington puts it, “a permanent inquiring mind” shaped by a range of influences including Golden Dawn literature, Egyptian mythology, Surrealist rejection of logic, and indigenous witchcraft in Mexico, where she lived for most of her life. And, of course, she was a devout student of tarot. She not only read spreads but also incorporated icons such as The Magician, The Hanged Man, and The Chariot into her paradoxical visuals that refused intellectualization. She spent the first part of her childhood in a gloomy gothic pile in Lancashire riding (and to her later regret, foxhunting). She was passionately attached to animals, a love that persisted and is evident in the magical bestiary of her art, her paintings a menagerie of cats and dogs and birds but also griffins and salamanders and many nameless creatures that hover between human and animal. She was expelled serially from Catholic boarding schools; she seemed to have an inbuilt loathing of institutions and authority of all kinds. Her short story, The Debutante – in which the young narrator of the story, about to have a ball held for her, swaps places with a hyena, with gruesome consequences – gives a sense of her absolute hatred of the tropes of upper-class life (and also, perhaps, of the nastiness and even violence veiled beneath manners and polite rituals). Nonetheless, her writing does have a kind of crystalline detachment and light irony that connects her to her class and to a literary tradition that includes Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.For the former, she took inspiration from Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, the poet’s 1948 study of poetic myth-making and divinity, a subject to which she was drawn throughout her adult life. Fulgur has a reputation for producing nice books and this is certainly the case here. Large format, finely printed, full size, full-colour reproductions of Carrington’s Tarot cards alongside two essays on the artist, each of these accompanied by other Carrington and related images such as images by Remedios Varo. I have a liking for Carrington’s work (one of the few British surrealists I do like) so in this respect I am a happy man. It also talks about her relationship with other artists who used the subconscious and the occult as part of their practice and shows her influence on them, placing her firmly within the canon of surrealism and at the same time making you wonder how she was so firmly hidden for so long. This new edition also reproduces previously unpublished photographs and images, as well as exciting new research into Carrington's influences, emphasizing the authors' claim that her work on the Major Arcana represents an esoteric roadmap to Carrington's feminist vision and wish for a new global gender equality toward a better ecological future for our planet.

A significantly expanded edition of Carrington’s acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research The Tarot of Leonora Carrington is the first book dedicated to this important aspect of the artist's work. It includes a full-size facsimile of her newly discovered Major Arcana; an introduction from her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington; and a richly illustrated essay from Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth that offers new insights--exploring the significance of tarot imagery within Carrington's wider work, her many inspirations and mysterious occult sources. The cover of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, edited by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq (Fulgur Press, 2021) (image courtesy the publisher) When you see the cards, you realise they were central to her entire production, including the question of what is the nature of the esoteric. What makes the cards so unique is that they were her own tools for exploring her own personal consciousness.” We then move on to the cards of the Major Arcana themselves and look at each one in turn. Each cards symbolism is explored in relation to traditional forms and how this was adapted to be significant to Leonora’s idea of divination from the card.

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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/8/2022 Magical 'The Tarot of Leonora Carrington' is NEW from RM Featured spreads (picturing The Hanged Man, The Lovers and The Sun) are from RM's highly-anticipated, expanded edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, featuring new archival materials and research by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq, alongside an essay by Carrington's son Gabriel Weisz Carrington. "Leonora's tarot is endowed with a subliminal iconography, a window opening to a performance of the marvelous," Weisz Carrington writes. "What retains such a seductive allure is that whenever we get the opportunity to play with these cards, each one of us is invited to day dream; the cards also guiding players and observers through an adventure into an unknown domain of feeling and subliminal transformation." continue to blog A far more exhaustive joint essay follows by Susan Arbeth and Tere Arcq. Both are art historians with a lot of previous with regard to female surrealists (especially Carrington) and their/her relationship with Mexico and Latin America. Although I suspect that neither are occultists per se, I cannot imagine there will many better placed to give insight into some of the symbolism found within her Tarot and their comments and observations are hugely interesting, especially to those Europeans (like me) largely unfamiliar with Mexican mythology and iconography. As any occultist knows, it is important to create your own magical tools, and the essay gives us some sense of Carrington's possible processes that led to the symbolic content of the cards. However whilst much of the essay is masterful there were some elements within it that grated on me, pitfalls(?) that might have been avoided given more rigorous editing. After all that digging around I just had to get the book as soon as it came out and brilliantly enough the release coincided closely enough with Christmas for it to be one of my presents! Although she grew up in a traditional Catholic household in the north of England, it was the examination of other spiritual traditions including magic and later Buddhism which most informed her art.