Earlier this summer, Sylvia Plath's collection of personal items was put up for sale at Sotheby's.
It contained intimate love letters, recipe cards, a rolling pin, a family photo album and her and Ted Hughes' gold wedding rings.
The rings sold for $38.000 a piece — but that's a pittance compared to the most sought-after item in the collection: Sylvia Plath's personal deck of tarot cards.
It was initially expected to fetch between $6.000 and $9.000, but eventually sold for $206.886.
The Marseille deck of tarot cards was a birthday present from Ted Hughes.
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Plath wrote in her diaries about wanting to perfect her tarot reading - but tarot also played an important role in her art.
This is also referred to in the song Tatica ("With gypsy origins and unfortunate fate/and a tarot deck and a tarot deck"), while Ocrazy man the name owes to a tarot card.
Tarot has been the muse of countless writers, painters and designers - TS Eliot wrote of a "wicked deck of cards" in The Waste Land, Salvador Dali made his own deck, while Andy Warhol made a film about members of the Velvet Underground getting their first tarot reading. cards.
Earlier this year, fashion house Dior cast models as characters from a deck of tarot cards for its Spring/Summer 2021 collection (Christian Dior is looked at tarot cards before every show).
Recently, the costume designer of the film Dina revealed that tarot cards were her source of inspiration.
Tarot symbols have been adapted and reshaped hundreds of times to reflect the time and culture in which they were created.
But tarot doesn't just inspire artists and designers - it's a powerful art in its own right.
Take a look at tarot decks over the past 600 years and you'll get a crash course in art history, from Renaissance Italy, through Art Nouveau and Art Deco, to Pop Art and digital collage.
Tarot symbols have been adapted and reshaped hundreds of times to reflect the time and culture in which they were created.
"Tarot is what you make it out to be, and that's why it's such a wonderful medium for artists," writer and editor Jessica Hundley told the BBC.
"It's a blank canvas with some parameters, because the images you create have to have appropriate meanings."
Hundley is the editor of Tashen's series of books entitled The Library of Esoterics, which explore the visual history of mysticism.
The hefty titles deal with Astrology and - in the more recent print edition - Witchcraft, but Hundley says the Tarot was a natural starting point for the series.
"It seemed right to start with the tarot, because there's a completely visual, archetypal language in between," she says.
"It's very much about our intuitive reaction to these archetypes."
The Tarot Book includes more than 500 decks and covers six centuries - and shows how different artists have left their unique stamp on the tarot.
The Strength card, which signifies courage in the face of adversity, typically features a woman with a lion, but depending on the artist, that woman could be an Aztec warrior, an Egyptian queen, or—in the 2015 Black Power Tarot—Tina Turner.
She can caress a lion, ride on his back, or hold his jaw open.
Also, it doesn't have to be a lion at all, but a grizzly or an alligator.
All these images, however, will denote an inner strength that overcomes obstacles.
"It's really exciting to see how people have interpreted it and then completely changed it, but still kept the unifying archetype," Hundley says.
The oldest extant deck of tarot cards, the Visconti-Sforza, dates from the 15th century, from Italy.
Created for aristocrats, these cards are hand-painted works of art full of detail, featuring figures that would become key archetypes in the tarot.
Tarot originated as a parlor game, and only in the eighteenth century did it become a means of divination.
The most famous - and most influential - tarot was created in 1909, when occultist Arthur Edward Waite commissioned artist Pamela Coleman Smith to design a deck.
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If you've only seen one tarot deck, it's probably the Ryder-Waite-Smith (often just called Ryder-Waite), the most widely used deck in the world today.
Both Coleman and Waite were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to the study of the occult (other members included Bram Stoker and VB Yeats).
Their deck reinvented and modernized the tarot, offering a new interpretation of the imagery to create a deck that the user will relate to.
"Pictures are like doors that lead to unexpected rooms or bends in the road beyond which vistas open," Waite wrote in the companion book, "Illustrated Tarot Key".
Pamena Coleman Smith noted in one letter that it was "a lot of work for little money" - but her vivid illustrations were instrumental in spreading interest in the tarot.
"I think there's something about her intuitive understanding of these archetypes and the fact that she was a really, really talented graphic artist," Hundley claims.
"She attended the Pratt Institute and was good at commercial art and posters.
"So she knew how to make them very inclusive and allow others to understand them in a way that, I would say, many people didn't understand them before. Tarot owes a lot to what she created."
Then again, the Ryder-Waite deck, like the tarot itself, could easily have fallen into oblivion if Stuart R. Kaplan, founder and president of US Games Systems Inc. he didn't come across it by chance at a toy fair in 1968.
"He reprinted the Ryder-Waite deck and distributed it all over the world," Hundley says.
"If that hadn't happened, and if the deck hadn't ended up in his hands, I don't know if the tarot would have survived as anything more than an obscure game."
Today, tarot is booming.
In addition to several publishers specializing in tarot, samizdati and crowdfunding have made it easy for artists with a vision to create their own deck, leading to a variety of forms and hundreds of different interpretations.
Do you want a deck that shows tarot through the world of pasta?
You are lucky.
Courtney Alexander, a multimedia artist living in Indiana, created her own deck, Dust II Onyx: Highly Pigmented Tarot, after she couldn't find cards that meant anything to her.
"I said to myself, OK, I'm going to make a deck that I'm going to want to have," she says.
"My goal was not to create a deck that was black, but to capture the essence of that color."
All 78 collage images from various media depict cultural myths, symbolism, history and icons within the black diaspora.
She consciously made the archetypes otherworldly, to "allow readers to connect with something beyond their human existence and its limitations."
The deck was funded through Kickstarter, where $30.000 was raised in just one month.
Aleksander has sold more than 6.000 decks so far.
"At one point in history, the tarot offered very limited art and scenes that exuded a very European style.
"Now he has a whole cultural language within him that people can relate to. Everyone can find a version that means something to them."
Tarot offers the artist a powerful challenge as well as a unique way of connecting.
"Creating a series of such works of art really engages your artistic and creative coils," says Alexander.
"I've had exhibitions where people could look at my works for a few seconds, but now people all over the world are constantly reviving the connection with my works. It's very special."
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"Witch Smack"
While the iconography of the tarot is such that anyone can understand it, some other occult visual symbols are more difficult to decipher.
Especially in witchcraft, secret symbols have always played an important role.
"The word occult means hidden, and keeping your magic very private and personal is important for two reasons," says Pam Grossman, a self-described witch, host of the Witch Wave podcast, and one of the editors of Tashen's book Witchcraft.
"One, of course, is that you don't want your community to persecute you for practicing magic, and the other is the popular belief that magic is more powerful the less you share it with others."
In particular, books of spells - or "grimoirs", the mid-nineteenth-century version of the French word grammar - were often illustrated with visual signs and symbols intended only for their creator.
"Magic is somewhat controversial even today, and there is a long history of books that were probably created only for an individual, who did not show them to anyone," says Grossman.
And while some symbols associated with witchcraft - such as the pentagram - are universal, some are more specific.
Perhaps the most personal of these signs are seals, which Grossman describes as a mixture of art and witchcraft.
"They are magical symbols that are meant to change or manifest something in someone's life," she says.
Although seals have been around for centuries, the influential British occultist and artist Austin Osman Speer was the first to develop a method of seal creation that is still commonly used today.
It is necessary to write the intention, close the letters and organize the remaining letters into a picture.
"He developed a method of taking text and designing beautiful glyphs or symbols, which he would then sort of fill in with various magical techniques to try to achieve what he wanted," says Grossman.
"Ever since then we have seen many artists taking inspiration from him and enriching their art with stamps."
Even before Sper, artists had long been fascinated by esoteric symbols.
Hilma af Klint, the originator of abstract art and a dedicated spiritualist, used many enigmatic forms and symbols in her work.
British-Mexican Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington - who also created her own tarot deck - carved or painted magical emblems or secret symbols into her works.
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Contemporary artist Ilajdža Burger uses Sper's method to insert stamps into works.
"A lot of the stamps it incorporates have to do with queerness, identity and sexuality," says Grossman.
“[Stamps] have beautiful design elements and people can be very particular about colors and shapes. There are symbols that are universal, but seals are incredibly individual."
With all these aesthetic elements, perhaps it's no wonder that modern witchcraft has taken root on social networks.
On TikTok, the hashtag #WitchTalk has 20 billion views and features tarot readings, spells, and lessons on how to make your own seal.
On Instagram #witchesofinstagram has almost eight million posts, and #witchyvibes almost three million.
Interest in tarot and witchcraft has been steadily increasing over the past few years.
"I think whenever we find ourselves in times where we feel out of control or feel helpless, we gravitate toward tools and systems that make us feel like we're in control again," says Grossman.
"We may not be able to control this pandemic or climate change, but each of us has an inner strength and is capable of making a difference in our lives and connecting with something bigger than ourselves."
For the social media generation, it's all about self-branding, and secret symbols and seals have a natural appeal - even if not everyone who uses them understands their true meaning.
"Look, witchcraft, let's face it, is not popular because it actually has some meaning and affects people, but because it contains an aesthetic beauty," says Grossman.
"So it's understandable that you have those who use those symbols with a lot of knowledge and conscious intent, but also those who wear them on t-shirts because they think it looks cool."
It's important to understand the cultural context and acknowledge the significance, Hundley says.
"But I think sometimes you like a picture without even knowing why. There is magic in pure aesthetic enjoyment.
"There's a reason we're drawn to something, and we don't always have to dig deep to figure out what it means."
And as for imoji spells and online seal generators, "the fact that people use technology in witchcraft actually keeps magic alive and makes it relevant, and that's its charm, it can adapt to the times."
The book Witchcraft: the Esoteric Library was published by Tašen.
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