Court de Gébelin

Born in Nîmes in 1725 into a Huguenot family that took refuge in Lausanne after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Antoine Court de Gébelin was a pastor of the Reformed Church, a polygraph, and a figure of Parisian Freemasonry. A member of the Nine Sisters, the lodge where he rubbed shoulders with Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire, he devoted the final years of his life to a colossal encyclopedic project: Le Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, nine volumes published between 1773 and 1782. Volume VIII, published in 1781, contains the famous essay Du jeu des tarots, in which he claims to recognize in the 22 trumps the vestiges of the Book of Thoth, a sacred work that the Egyptian priests had supposedly transmitted to the Bohemians.

This Egyptian thesis is entirely speculative: Champollion would not decipher the hieroglyphs until 1822, and the earliest documented tarots date from fifteenth-century Italy (Visconti-Sforza). Yet the idea immediately caught on. The Comte de Mellet, who contributed to the same volume, proposed a correspondence with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet — an intuition taken up by Éliphas Lévi in 1854. A few years later, Etteilla systematized cartomancy by drawing on the authority of Court de Gébelin. In the nineteenth century, Papus, in Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), further extended this imaginary lineage. The Golden Dawn, then Waite and Crowley in the twentieth century, indirectly inherited this construct.

Knowing Court de Gébelin helps to understand why so many modern decks — such as Saint-Germain's Egyptian Tarot (1901) or the Brotherhood of Light (1936) — display Pharaonic iconography, sphinxes, pyramids, and invented hieroglyphs. On Tarotoui, you will encounter this legacy whenever a commentator mentions the Book of Thoth, an expression directly drawn from the 1781 essay. The Marseille deck, contemporary with Court de Gébelin (Conver, 1760), actually carries no authentic Egyptian iconographic trace: it is indeed the a posteriori reading that projects Egypt onto its figures.

Contemporary historians — Michael Dummett, Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis — have definitively demonstrated the emptiness of the Egyptian origin theory. The tarot was born as an aristocratic card game in Lombardy around 1440, long before any divinatory use. This in no way diminishes the symbolic scope of the modern tarot, but it invites us to distinguish documented history from founding myth. Court de Gébelin remains one of the most influential authors of Western occultism, despite (or thanks to) his initial error.