Tarot card reading

Many involved in occult and divinatory practices attempt to trace the tarot to ancient Egypt, divine hermetic wisdom,[12] and the mysteries of Isis.

Possibly the first of those was Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman, who wrote that after seeing a group of women playing cards he had the idea that tarot was not merely a game of cards but was in fact of ancient Egyptian origin, of mystical cabbalistic import, and of deep divine significance. Court de Gébelin published a dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the tarot in volume VIII of work Le Monde primitif in 1781. He thought the tarot represented ancient Egyptian Theology, including Isis, Osiris and Typhon. For example, he thought the card he knew as the Papesse and known today as the High Priestess represented Isis.[13] He also related four tarot cards to the four Christian Cardinal virtues: Temperance, Justice, Strength and Prudence.[14] He relates The Tower to a Greek fable about avarice.[15]

Although the ancient Egyptian language had not yet been deciphered, Court de Gébelin asserted the name "Tarot" came from the Egyptian words Tar, "path" or "road", and the word Ro, Ros or Rog, meaning "King" or "royal", and that the tarot literally translated to the Royal Road of Life.[16] Later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support Court de Gébelin's etymologies. Despite this lack of any evidence, the belief that the tarot cards are linked to the Egyptian Book of Thoth continues to the present day.

The actual source of the occult tarot can be traced to two articles in volume eight, one written by himself, and one written by M. le C. de M.***.[17] The second has been noted to have been even more influential than Court de Gébelin's.[2] The author takes Court de Gébelin's speculations even further, agreeing with him about the mystical origins of the tarot in ancient Egypt, but making several additional, and influential, statements that continue to influence mass understanding of the occult tarot even to this day.[18] He made the first statements proposing that the tarot is, in fact, The Book of Thoth and made the first association of tarot with cartomancy.

The first to assign divinatory meanings to the tarot cards was cartomancer Jean-Baptiste Alliette (also known as Etteilla) in 1783.[12][19]

According to Dummett, Etteilla:[2]

• devised a method of tarot divination in 1783,
• wrote a cartomantic treatise of tarot as the Book of Thoth,
• created the first society for tarot cartomancy, the Société littéraire des associés libres des interprètes du livre de Thot.
• created the first corrected tarot (supposedly fixing errors that resulted from misinterpretation and corruption through the mists of antiquity), The Grand Etteilla deck
• created the first Egyptian tarot to be used exclusively for tarot cartomancy
• published, under the imprint of his society, the Dictionnaire synonimique du Livre de Thot, a book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed."[20]

Etteilla also:[21]

• suggested that tarot was repository of the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus
• was a book of eternal medicine
• was an account of the creation of the world
• argued that the first copy of the tarot was imprinted on leaves of gold

In his 1980 book, The Game of Tarot, Michael Dummett suggested that Etteilla was attempting to supplant Court de Gébelin as the author of the occult tarot. Etteilla in fact claimed to have been involved with tarot longer than Court de Gébelin.[2]

Mlle Marie-Anne Adelaide Lenormand outshone even Etteilla and was the first cartomancer to people in high places, through her claims to be the personal confidant of Empress Josephine, Napoleon and other notables.[2] Lenormand used both regular playing cards, in particular the Piquet pack, as well as tarot cards likely derived from the Tarot de Marseille.[22] Following her death in 1843, several different cartomantic decks were published in her name, including the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand, based on the standard 52-card deck, first published in 1845, and the Petit Lenormand, a 36-card deck derived from the German game Das Spiel der Hofnung, first published around 1850.[23]

The concept of the cards as a mystical key was extended by Éliphas Lévi. Lévi (whose actual name was Alphonse-Louis Constant) was educated in the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, was ordained as a deacon, but never became a priest. Michael Dummett noted that it is from Lévi's book Dogme et rituel that the "whole of the modern occultist movement stems."[24] Lévi's magical theory was based on a concept he called the Astral Light[25] and according to Dummett, he claimed to be the first to

"have discovered intact and still unknown this key of all doctrines and all philosophies of the old world... without the tarot", he tells us, "the Magic of the ancients is a closed book...."[26]

Lévi accepted Court de Gébelin's claims that the deck had an Egyptian origin, but rejected Etteilla's interpretation and rectification of the cards in favor of a reinterpretation of the Tarot de Marseille.[27]. He called it The Book of Hermes and claimed that the tarot was antique, existed before Moses, and was in fact a universal key of erudition, philosophy, and magic that could unlock Hermetic and Qabalistic concepts. According to Lévi, "An imprisoned person with no other book than the Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequaled learning and inexhaustible eloquence."[28]

According to Dummett, Lévi's notable contributions include:[29]

• Lévi was the first to suggest that the Magus (Bagatto) was to be depicted in conjunction with the symbols of the four suits.
• Inspired by de Gébelin, Lévi associated the Hebrew alphabet with the tarot trumps and attributed an "onomantic astrology" system to the "ancient Hebrew Qabalists."[30]
• Lévi linked the ten numbered cards in each suit to the ten sefiroth.
• Claimed the court cards represented stages of human life.
• Claimed the four suites represented the Tetragrammaton.

Occultists, magicians, and magi all the way down to the 21st century have cited Lévi as a defining influence.[31] Among the first to seemingly adopt Lévi's ideas was Jean-Baptiste Pitois. Pitois wrote two books under the name Paul Christian that referenced the tarot, L'Homme rouge (1863), and later Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples (1870). In them, Pitois repeated and extended the mythology of the tarot and changed the names for the trumps and the suits (see table below for a list of Pitois's modifications to the trumps).[32] Batons (wands) become Scepters, Swords become Blades, and Coins become Shekels.[33]

However, it wasn't until the late 1880s that Lévi's vision of the occult tarot truly began to bear fruit, as his ideas on the occult began to be propounded by various French and English occultists. In France, secret societies such as the French Theosophical Society (1884) and the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (1888) served as the seeds for further developments in the occult tarot in France.[34].

The French occultist Papus was one of the most prominent members of these societies, joining the Isis lodge of the French Theosophical Society in 1887 and becoming a founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross the next year.[34] Among his 260 publications are two treatises on the use of tarot cards, Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), which attempted to formalize the method of using tarot cards in ceremonial magic first proposed by Lévi in his Clef des grands mysteries (1861)[35], and Le Tarot divinatoire (1909), which focused on simpler divinatory uses of the cards.[36]

Another founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, met the amateur artist Oswald Wirth in 1887 and subsequently sponsored a production of Lévi's intended deck. Guided entirely by de Guaita, Wirth designed the first neo-occultist cartomantic deck (and first cartomantic deck not derived from Etteilla's Egyptian deck).[37] Known as Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique, it consisted of only the twenty-two major arcana and was revised under the title of Le Tarot des imagers du moyen âge in 1926.[38]

Outside of the Kabbalistic Order, in 1888, French magus Ély Star published Les mystères de l'horoscope which mostly repeats Christian's modifications.[39] Its primary contribution was the introduction of the terms 'Major arcana' and 'Minor arcana,' and the numbering of the Crocodile (the Fool) XXII instead of 0.[40]

The following is a comparison of the order of the Major Trumps up to and including the A. E. Waite deck. This table is based on Dummett (1980) and actual inspection of the relevant decks.

Next to the usage of tarot cards to divine for others by professional cartomancers, tarot is also used widely as a device for seeking personal advice and spiritual growth. Practitioners believe the tarot cards can help the individual explore the depths and nodes of one’s spiritual path and discover a new realm of possibility for enrichment in regard to the inner self; whereas, professional tarot is often seen as charlatanism.

People who use the tarot for personal divination seek insight on topics ranging widely from health or economic issues to what they believe would be best for them spiritually.[49] Thus, the way practitioners use the cards in regard to such personal inquiries is subject to a variety of personal beliefs. For example, some tarot users may believe the cards themselves are magically providing answers, while others may believe a supernatural force or a mystical energy is guiding the cards into a layout.

Alternatively, some practitioners believe tarot cards may be a utilized as a psychology tool based on their archetypal imagery, an idea often attributed to Carl Jung. Jung wrote, "It also seems as if the set of pictures in the tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation, a view that has been confirmed for me in a very enlightening lecture by Professor Bernoulli." During a 1933 seminar on active imagination, Jung described the symbolism he saw in the imagery:

"The original cards of the Tarot consist of the ordinary cards, the king, the queen, the knight, the ace, etc., only the figures are somewhat different, and besides, there are twenty-one [additional] cards upon which are symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations. For example, the symbol of the sun, or the symbol of the man hung up by the feet, or the tower struck by lightning, or the wheel of fortune, and so on. Those are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which mingle with the ordinary constituents of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment."[50]