Court de Gébelin

Antoine Court de Gébelin was the son of a persecuted Protestant pastor, born in Switzerland around 1725, and one of the most learned men in pre-Revolutionary Paris. He was a Freemason of the Lodge of the Nine Sisters, where Voltaire was initiated and Benjamin Franklin sat, and a patient and defender of Mesmer, in whose clinic he died in 1784. His life's work was Le Monde primitif, nine volumes published between 1773 and 1782, an attempt to recover the original civilisation from which all languages, myths and alphabets descended. It was the Enlightenment's version of the search for lost wisdom, and it was taken seriously.

In the eighth volume, in 1781, he tells how he called on a lady who was playing a card game with friends, looked at the cards, and saw at once what no one had seen in three centuries. The game was not a game. It was the Book of Thoth, the sacred wisdom of the Egyptian priests, disguised as playing cards so that it could survive the fall of the temples. The Juggler was the Magus, the Pope was the Hierophant, the Chariot was Osiris triumphant. He derived the word Tarot from Egyptian, Ta-Rosh, the royal road, an etymology he invented on the spot. A companion essay in the same volume, by the Comte de Mellet, added the piece Lévi would later build on: the twenty-two trumps correspond to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

None of it was true. The Tarot is a card game invented in the courts of Milan and Ferrara around 1440, and its trumps are a procession of Christian and classical allegories of exactly the kind painted on Italian walls at the time. Hieroglyphs would not be read until Champollion in 1822, forty years after de Gébelin, so no one could check him, and Egypt was the fashion. Within four years Etteilla, a Paris seed merchant, had produced the first Tarot deck designed for fortune-telling, rearranged to fit the Egyptian story, and the trade in Tarot as ancient revelation had begun. Cagliostro's Egyptian Rite of Masonry, launched in 1784, belongs to the same enthusiasm, though a direct link to de Gébelin is claimed rather than shown.

His importance on this map is not the error itself but the authority it gave. De Gébelin was a scholar, and his word turned a game into a scripture. When Lévi took up the Tarot seventy-five years later he did not need to argue that the cards were ancient and meaningful; that had been settled. He only needed to say what they meant, and he did so by matching them to the Hebrew letters in the order de Mellet had suggested. Papus, the Golden Dawn, Waite and everyone since have inherited both the ancient Tarot and the Hebrew letters as a package.

You can recognise this root by a single claim. Whenever a book tells you the Tarot came from Egypt, was carried by gypsies, or encodes the wisdom of the priests of Thoth, it is repeating an idea a Parisian scholar had at a card table in 1781. The cards are real, and they may be a good deal wiser than their inventors intended. But their age and their origin are known, and neither runs through Egypt.