Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare

It’s in the cards

Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), an English surrealist artist and occultist, was known for his Art Nouveau approach to creating dark, sexual imagery. He believed in magic and divination, exploring such supernatural techniques as automatic writing and drawing. Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare, edited by Jonathan Allen (Strange Attractor Press, 2016), showcases a hand-drawn deck of tarot cards that Spare made in the first decade of the twentieth century, and which has been hidden from public view since 1944, behind closed doors at London’s Magic Circle Museum. “Spare’s cards take the form of what appears to be a self-instructive deck, one perhaps created simply due to the unavailability of a commercially printed deck,” Allen writes in the introduction. “The deck shows Spare pushing aside the visual and functional histories of both playing cards and tarot cards, sometimes adapting and at other times almost entirely replacing iconographic conventions centuries old.”

Lost Envoy includes essays about the history of tarot cards and their artistry. Spare’s biographer, Phil Baker (Austin Osman Spare: The Life & Legend of London’s Lost Artist, 2010), offers “‘His Own Arcana’: Austin Osman Spare and the Borders of Tarot,” in which he explains that while Spare took inspiration from many well-known tarot decks, his idiosyncratic deck was filled with many of his own obsessions, including the goat legs he gave to the man in The Lovers, the sixth card of the major arcana. Spare’s cards are reproduced in the book with limited commentary and explanations about the images. Also included is information on how to read the cards for the purposes of divination.