This article discusses the role of the occult in the making of modernity
through the material practice of tarot reading, a relatively marginal form
of magic that gained surprising currency in a vast array of modernist
cultural spaces, ranging from psychological laboratories to the visual
and performing arts, from the esoteric rituals of High Magic to the
secular magick of popular entertainments. This is taken as a test-case
to reconsider the much debated opposition between modernity and
primitive enchantment in the light of more recent historiographic accounts
of modernity as a multilayered phenomenon, fractured into alternative
and competing cultural conceptions. While making room for the occult
among these other modernities, we suggest that the temporal montage
allowed by tarot cards was a strategy already devised to shuffle the times
of modernism.