Art History Students Read Tarot Cards, View Nude Photos

Art History Students Read Tarot Cards, View Nude Photos

Surrealism students read Tarot cards and are shown graphic sexual images.

(Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), by Leonora Carrington | SOURCE: The New Yorker) 

On October 31, 2024, a guest speaker in a Surrealism art history class gave a lecture on magic, tarot cards, and Leonora Carrington, a feminist surrealist painter. Professor Taylor Walle, who gave the lecture, is an english professor at Washington and Lee University specializing in women’s literature and women’s and gender studies. The class is taught by Professor Elliott King, an art history professor who focuses on Surrealism and Salvador Dalí.

Dr. Walle began with a biography of Leonora Carrington, who lived from 1917 to 2011. Although Carrington was a painter, she also studied alchemy and witchcraft.

Walle then addressed witchcraft and the occult. She claimed that witchcraft had been historically misrepresented by the church, citing examples such as the Salem Witch Trials. Additionally, she mentioned a recent discovery of decks of tarot cards created by Leonora Carrington herself.

Tarot cards are a fortune-telling device that were invented in Italy during the 15th century. A tarot deck consists of 78 cards, 22 of which are called the “major arcana,” a set of decorated cards with various names such as “The Fool,” “Lovers,” or “Strength.”

Walle gave the class a brief explanation of how tarot cards could be used for two purposes: divination and self-revelation. Divination attempts to make predictions about the future, while self-revelation is guided toward helping people understand themselves.

To introduce the idea of using them as a tool of self-discovery, Dr. Walle handed a deck of tarot cards to groups of three students. Students were asked to choose a card out of the deck that “resonated with them” and explain why.

For the next activity, the groups were instructed to shuffle the tarot deck and place all the cards on the table. Then, they were told to ask a “vague question” meant to inform a decision or experience. She said that the best questions were deeply personal, vulnerable questions.

After asking their questions, each student drew randomly from the deck and answered their question in light of the card. The professor asked students to share which cards they had drawn and how they had answered their original question.

One student shared that they were struggling with post-graduation plans, and had drawn the “Highpriestess” card. The student explained that this card can be interpreted to mean that she should trust her gut and her feelings.

Another student drew the “Hanging Man” card in response to a question on anxiety about her future. The teacher interpreted the card as meaning that she should be okay with a state of limbo, and that the “Hanging Man” represented being in a kind of waiting stage.

The Spectator later interviewed one of the students in this class. She said that she felt that doing tarot cards in class created “a more relaxed … learning experience.”

In terms of whether she approved of the content, she replied: “I think it's really important to have multiple perspectives in any classroom that you're in. I think it's very constructive and it allows people to see how your friends are thinking, how your professors are today. And I think religion is part of that. So I don't really see a problem with the way that it was presented.”

When asked about her tarot card reading, she said, “I don’t think I did it the correct way so to speak. I think maybe I didn’t ask my question in a way that was very pondering … So I asked something like, you know, how are my midterms going to go? Like how can I get through the next few weeks, etc? And I pulled the ‘Devil’ card which was pretty alarming. But I mean it’s really just a testament to in the end we are just pulling cards.”

* * *

Five days later, the class learned about Hans Bellmer, a German surrealist artist. He is most famous for the creation of a series of life-sized female dolls, which were displayed in an exaggerated and overtly sexualized manner. After showing multiple slides with these dolls, Dr. King showed more of Hans Bellmer’s work, this time pictures of nude women tied up with rope.

When asked about Bellmer’s work, the student interviewed by The Spectator stated that “I thought it was pretty offensive to women and, just actually women in general, not even like the feminism movement in any way as it was pretty objectifying and really problematic.”

“I think it does have some merit showing it in class,” the student said, “because it demonstrates that … we still have people like this, who have these very antiquated beliefs, and have these very problematic and incorrect methods of expression.”

The student felt that the professor had not adequately warned them about the content of the images being shown. “So I think maybe if we had some more lead up to that along with a more overt trigger warning, so to speak, that would have been probably more constructive of a class … I think maybe [Hans Bellmer’s work] could have been dealt with slightly more grace, but I also recognize the fact that you know, teachers are in a really hard position at every university.”

Despite these criticisms, the student still expressed positive feelings about the class. “Love the professor. It's been really engaging and I definitely would not have known anything about Surrealism had I not taken this class.”