Cartomancy Day

Friday 9 May 2025, 10 am - 5pm

School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography

All welcome

Cartomancy Day Schedule:

10-11 Helen Farley (Teams from NZ)

11-12 Jeff Ravel

12-13 David Zeitlyn

Lunch

14-15 Katie Swancutt

15-16 Will Pooley

16-17.00 Discussion

Helen Farley

A Cultural History of Tarot: Beyond divination

Tarot cards, often associated with fortune-telling and mysticism, have a rich and varied history that stretches back centuries. This presentation explores the cultural evolution of tarot, examining its origins in 15th-century Italy as a card game before its transformation into a tool for divination and spiritual insight during the French Revolution. We will explore the ways tarot has been embraced and adapted across different cultures, tracing its connections to the occult, art, psychology, and even pop culture. By delving into the symbolism of tarot imagery, its shifting meanings over time, and the ways it reflects societal beliefs, this talk provides an understanding of tarot as both a cultural artifact and a modern spiritual practice. Through this historical lens, we will also consider the role of tarot in contemporary society.

Jeff Ravel

Title: "Oracular AI: 3655 Questions Posed to an Online Cartomancy Game"

Abstract:  In the 2022-23 academic year, my students and I created an online cartomancy game based on the writings of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a late eighteenth-century Frenchmen.  This game, in which ChatGPT "reads" the cards, has been made available via a touchscreen installation to visitors to the Bodleian Library exhibit entitled "Oracles, Omens, and Answers."  In this paper, I analyze 3655 questions posed by Bodleian visitors to the online cartomancer between early December 2024 and mid-January 2025.

David Zeitlyn

Meanings in the cards: Cameroonian spider divination cards. A limiting case and a proto-writing system

The wide distribution of forms of ŋgam divination in Cameroon show its age. This can also help understand the observed variation and differences between what are in some cases near neighbours. In an area known for the invention of writing systems, divination cards provide a pre-existing resource set of available symbols, but Mambila practice provides a limiting case of symbols whose symbolism is known but not used

Katherine Swancutt

Destiny in the Hands of a Parakeet:
Half-Serious Divination at a Southwest Chinese Travelling Fair

Divination is often envisioned as either an occasional pastime or a way of coming to grips with important matters in life. But what happens when it is seen as both or neither? Each year, travelling fairs pass through the Liangshan mountains, which are home to the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China. Hawking foods, wares, games, rides, and more, these fairs attract a side hustle of itinerant vendors, including diviners, who trade their goods and services at the outskirts of the main event. I offer new ethnography in this talk on Nuosu who visit Han diviners at these fairs who, as members of China’s ethnic majority, practice a form of Chinese divination that makes use of a set of small cards featuring words and images. These diviners momentarily release a parakeet from its cage to select a card that is frequently understood by their Nuosu clients to give half-serious answers to their half-serious questions. Many Nuosu who put their destiny in the hands of a parakeet––rather than consult their own animistic bimo priests or shamans––laughingly declare that the itinerant diviners reading their cards ‘trick people’ and ‘rip them off’. Yet their divination sessions often give rise to the feeling that the more one asks, the more the parakeet’s selection, the cards themselves, and the diviner may reveal. Ultimately, the enigma surrounding what lies behind streetside forms of divination and travelling fairs entices many Nuosu to push at the edges of what may or may not in fact be serious or even ‘real’ about divination.     

Will Pooley

Queen of Oracles: The Cartomancy of Marie-Anne Lenormand (1772-1843)

Marie-Anne Lenormand was probably the most famous fortune-teller in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Among the clients she claimed to have advised were the leading men and women of her age, including the Tsar Alexander I and the Empress Joséphine. But posterity has not been kind to ‘Mademoiselle Lenormand’. For her near contemporary, the theorist and historian of occultism Éliphas Lévi, there was ‘nothing more wearisome than her writings, but as a teller of fortunes by cards she was most successful.’ This typically ambivalent summary goes to the heart of the problem Mademoiselle Lenormand poses to the history of cartomancy: she is both a hugely important and influential figure in the development of modern European practices of divination with cards… and at the same time the fount of a thousand impossibilities and falsehoods. Her own accounts of her fortune-telling are deliberately obscure and misleading.

So how did Lenormand practice cartomancy in the most literal senses? Which cards did she use, and how did she interpret them? This paper unpicks the myths that Lenormand herself and her subsequent critics have spun by putting her published writings into the context of three other sets of sources: diarists who claimed to have consulted her, the trial records of her prosecution for fraud, and contemporary cards.