The esoteric turn: how a game became a book of secrets

For three hundred years, tarot was a card game and nothing more. Then, in the years before the French Revolution, it was transformed within a single decade into a book full of secrets. Scholars, dealers and magicians declared the trumps to be Egyptian hieroglyphs, Hebrew letters and the heritage of travelling peoples. Almost none of it stands up to scrutiny. And yet we still read the cards today through the eyes of these men.

Paris 1781: Court de Gébelin and the Book of Thoth

Antoine Court de Gébelin (c. 1725 to 1784) was the son of a Protestant pastor, a Freemason and a respected scholar in Paris. His life’s work, Le Monde primitif, appeared in nine volumes from 1773 onwards and set out to reconstruct the lost original language and primordial culture of humanity. The eighth volume, of 1781, contains an essay on the game of tarot. In it, Court de Gébelin relates that he had watched some ladies playing tarot at a social gathering and recognised within a quarter of an hour that the trumps were Egyptian allegories. The priests, according to his theory, had clothed their knowledge in a game so that it would survive the downfall of their culture. He derived the name from an invented Egyptian Tar-Rosh, “royal road”. In the same volume, the Comte de Mellet published a second essay, which for the first time linked the 22 trumps with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and described a method of fortune-telling.

One fact gives the theory away: in 1781 hieroglyphs could not be read. The Rosetta Stone was not found until 1799, and Champollion’s decipherment succeeded in 1822. Court de Gébelin could not read a single Egyptian text and relied solely on resemblances. He was a child of his time: the Egyptomania of the 18th century ran through lodges, operas and novels, and tarot found its place within it.

Etteilla: the first professional card reader

At the same time, a man in Paris was practising card reading not as scholarship but as a business. Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738 to 1791), originally a dealer in seeds and engravings, called himself Etteilla, his name spelled backwards. As early as 1770 he published a guide to fortune-telling with an ordinary piquet pack; from 1783 to 1785 four booklets on tarot followed, in which he took up Court de Gébelin’s Egyptian thesis and expanded on it. In 1788 he founded a society of “Interpreters of the Book of Thoth”, gave lessons, sold writings and received clients. In 1789 his own deck appeared, the first tarot made exclusively for interpretation. Etteilla rearranged the trumps, numbered all 78 cards consecutively, printed keywords on the margins and gave each card a second meaning for the reversed position. Keywords, reversed cards, fixed spreads: much of what seems self-evident today can first be traced back to him. According to current knowledge, card reading with tarot did occasionally take place before him; a Bolognese manuscript from about 1750 lists divinatory meanings for Tarocchino cards. But it was Etteilla who first turned it into a system and a profession.

Éliphas Lévi: Kabbalah and the Hebrew alphabet

The next stage was set off by a former candidate for the priesthood. Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810 to 1875), who wrote under the name Éliphas Lévi, published the two volumes of his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie in 1854 and 1856. Each volume has 22 chapters, one for each trump. Lévi adopted the link with the Hebrew alphabet but made it the centrepiece of a system: each trump corresponds to a letter and thus to a path on the kabbalistic Tree of Life, while the four suits correspond to the four letters of the divine name and to the four elements. He placed the Fool between Judgement and the World. For Lévi, tarot was a universal key from which all religions and sciences could be derived. He never published a deck of his own, but his drawing of the horned Baphomet shaped later Devil cards. Above all, he became the teacher of the English occultists, who are the subject of the next part.

Papus, Wirth and the “Gypsy” legend

Lévi’s pupils and successors carried the work forward. Jean-Baptiste Pitois, who wrote under the name Paul Christian, told in his Histoire de la magie of 1870 of an Egyptian initiation in which the adept is led past 22 pictures. The term “arcana” for the cards probably goes back to him. Gérard Encausse (1865 to 1916), a physician and, under the name Papus, one of the most active occultists in Paris, published Le Tarot des Bohémiens in 1889; in French, “Bohémiens” meant the Roma. His thesis: the travelling people had brought tarot with them from the East as the bible of their wisdom. In the same year, the Swiss Oswald Wirth (1860 to 1943), prompted by his mentor Stanislas de Guaita, drew 22 trumps following Lévi’s specifications, with Hebrew letters, in an edition of 350 copies. Papus reproduced them in his book; in 1927 Wirth produced a revised version that is still the model for many “kabbalistic” decks today.

The legend of the Roma as the bringers of tarot is easy to check. According to current knowledge, the Roma did not reach Central Europe until around 1417, and Paris in 1427, by which time cards had already been played in Europe for fifty years. That some Roma later made a living from palm reading and card reading turned them into a projection screen, nothing more. The word “Gypsy” is an exonym, a name given by outsiders; the people concerned call themselves Sinti and Roma. The fact that the English called them “Gypsies”, that is, Egyptians, because they were believed to have come from Egypt, allowed the two legends to merge into one another.

Why it does not hold up and still has an effect

What do the sources tell us? Before 1781, no document connects tarot with Egypt, the Kabbalah or a secret doctrine. The trump pictures are Christian and courtly allegories of the 15th century: Pope and Emperor, virtues, Fortune, the Last Judgement. The number 22 and a fixed order are only attested around 1500, and even then they differed from region to region. Had the cards contained a hidden code, those deciphering it would have had to arrive at the same results; in fact, Lévi, Wirth and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn contradict one another even on the question of which letter belongs to the Fool. The historians Michael Dummett, Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis have compiled these findings since the 1980s.

And yet it would be wrong to dismiss the esoteric turn as a mere error. It created something new: decks made for interpretation, meanings for every card, reversed positions, spreads and a language in which people can talk to one another about inner images. The tarot you lay out today is a tradition of around 250 years, not 5000. That is less mysterious, but it is honest.