Take a journey with me through time and space — no, not that one! — but to the city of aquatint last month. I made a quick jaunt to London for the tarot exhibit I decided I could not miss and a few other things (more to come…) and because I flew into Luton I decided it was not utterly insane to dodge over to Oxford to catch Oracles, Omens & Answers at the Bodleian Library before heading into the city.
Take a vicarious visit with my assemblage of photos in the YT link above. Enlarge for the full experience on a big screen: lots of detail, so you might want to pause now and then to take a better look. You can at least get a feel for it. It was terrific to see such a broad collection of fortune-telling technologies from lots of different cultures.
Oscar Wilde’s palms read! Spiders spinning fates! Astrolabes!
I’m glad the next day I’d be seeing the Tarot exhibit at the Warburg. There was very little tarot, alas, and seriously, they didn’t identify Pamela Colman Smith’s art in the singularly most iconic tarot deck in the world? But there was an Etteilla deck so that was cool. And I do recommend the exhibition book which is abundantly illustrated. If you can get to Oxford, do!
Divination, Oracles & Omens
Edited by Michelle Aroney and David Zeitlyn
Published on 5 December 2024
Accompanying the exhibition, a spellbinding collection of twenty-four divinatory techniques from around the world exploring our need to appeal to powers beyond our realm for prediction and clarification.
Curators
- Dr Michelle Aroney, historian of science and religion at Magdalen College, Oxford.
- Professor David Zeitlyn, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and an initiated Mambila gam dù spider diviner.