Shuffling the time of Modernism: primitive magic and the making of Modernity

The 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 cultural spaces, ranging from the psychological laboratories to the visual and performing arts, from the esoteric rituals of High Magic to the secular magic 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.