We went to the Morgan Library last week to see their new exhibition called Tarot!. The exhibit is divided into two areas. The origins of Tarot of 600 years ago to contemporary Tarot decks created by artisans across the spectrum. In their original form, tarot cards were used for a game played a bit like bridge, but the concept of the game was partly inspired by Petrarch’s “Triumphs,” a 14th-century allegorical poem that set out moral hierarchies. “Chastity defeats Love, Death defeats Chastity, Fame defeats Death, Time defeats Fame.”.“The last one is Eternity, which defeats them all.” Along with teaching morality, “it was a game of the intellect.” Very few full sets from the early tarot years survived, but some cards from the most prized Renaissance decks — the Visconti de Modrone, Brambilla and the Visconti-Sforza — are the basis of the exhibition. In 18th-century France, a few occultists fabricated an origin story for the cards, linking their symbols to Egyptian hieroglyphics, because they were both considered to be mystical and indecipherable image-based languages. Although the story was invented out of whole cloth, this shift altered the course of tarot’s history, giving it its persistent esoteric aura. The set that popularized tarot cards for divination in the English-speaking world was the Rider-Waite-Smith set, created in 1909 by the artist Pamela Colman Smith, under the direction of Arthur Waite. Waite, a poet and scholarly mystic, wrote an accompanying guidebook, “The Key to the Tarot.” Most sets today contain 78 cards, including what’s known as Major Arcana — character cards like the Magician, the Hanged Man and the Devil — and Minor Arcana cards including numbered suits, like cups, swords, pikes and pentacles (or coins). We enjoyed the entire exhibit and are sure we saw a few witches and warlocks wandering through the galleries. The gift shop was fabulous as well. This exhibit is on through October 4, 2026.