19-21 Cecil Court, London WC2N 4EZ, UK
Monday - Sunday 11.00 - 18.30
19 - 21 Cecil Court
London, WC2N 4EZ
Tel. 020 7836 2182
Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare - Jonathan Allen
Thu, 07 Nov
|London
Lost Envoy reproduces a lost treasure of Occultism's Golden Age in its entirety, illuminating Spare's radical and unique approach to this timeless divinatory tool.
Time & Location
07 Nov 2024, 17:00 – 18:00
London, 19-21 Cecil Ct, London WC2N 4EZ, UK
About the event
In 2013, a forgotten deck of fortune-telling cards, hand-painted around 1906 by the legendary English artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare, was discovered by Jonathan Allen in the collections of London’s Magic Circle Museum.
Allen's subsequent book, Lost Envoy, was the first critical survey of this glowing relic of the British Occult Revival. On the occasion of the book’s revised second edition, join us as Jonathan discusses Spare’s unique creation, including one of the deck's most unusual features: the “connective media” that links the cards visually when two or more are placed alongside one another. We’ll hear too about how Spare’s cards came to be housed in a museum dedicated to theatrical magic and illusion, and the challenges of publishing a facsimile of Spare’s tarot.
Jonathan Allen is a London-based artist and writer, and currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute. His book Lost Envoy – The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare (2016 /…