Eighteenth- to Twentieth-Century Esoteric Reinterpretations

Overview

Between 1781 and 1943, tarot underwent a radical transformation. What had been, for over three centuries, a family card game played across Italy, France, Switzerland, and Germany became the central symbolic text of Western esotericism. This transformation did not happen gradually or organically. It was driven by a small number of specific individuals — a Protestant pastor, a self-taught occultist, a French magician, a secret society, and two rival magicians — each of whom imposed a new layer of meaning onto the cards. None of these interpretations can be traced back to the original card-makers of 15th-century Milan. Yet each built upon the last, creating a cumulative tradition that now feels inseparable from the cards themselves.

This article covers the major figures and movements that reshaped tarot between the Enlightenment and the mid-20th century. It presents their claims, their evidence, and the scholarly critiques of those claims. It does not endorse or dismiss the esoteric tradition as a whole; rather, it documents what was said, by whom, and on what grounds.

Antoine Court de Gébelin and the Egyptian Theory (1781)

The Claim

In 1781, Antoine Court de Gébelin (1725–1784), a Protestant pastor and amateur scholar, published Volume VIII of his nine-volume encyclopedia Le Monde Primitif ("The Primitive World"). In a chapter titled "Du Jeu des Tarots" ("On the Game of Tarot"), he made two extraordinary claims:

1. The tarot trumps encode the secret wisdom of ancient Egyptian civilization — specifically, they are pages from the legendary Book of Thoth, the mythical repository of all knowledge compiled by the Egyptian god Thoth (identified with Hermes Trismegistus).
2. The very word "tarot" derives from the Egyptian words tar ("road" or "path") and ro ("royal"), meaning "the royal road of life."

"The astrological use of tarot cards derives from scholarly misinformation published by Antoine Court de Gébelin in 1781. He traced their origin to ancient Egypt, identifying them with the Book of Thoth, the scribe of the Egyptian gods."
— The Morgan Library & Museum, "Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards"
Source: https://www.themorgan.org/manuscript/158525

The Evidence (and Its Problems)

Court de Gébelin's argument rested on visual resemblance. He looked at the trumps and saw Egyptian motifs: the figure he identified as Isis (The Star or The High Priestess), the figure of Osiris (The Hanged Man or The Devil), and various architectural elements he read as Egyptian. He also pointed to the word "tarot" itself.

The problems with this theory are substantial:

• No linguistic evidence. Court de Gébelin could not read Egyptian. The hieroglyphic script was not deciphered until Champollion's work in 1822, forty-one years after Le Monde Primitif. The etymology "tar + ro" has no basis in any known Egyptian language.
• No documentary evidence. No Egyptian text, no archaeological find, no historical record connects tarot to Egypt. The cards are documented as appearing in northern Italy around 1420–1450.
• Visual confirmation bias. The trumps depict standard medieval and Renaissance allegorical figures (the Pope, the Emperor, Death, the Wheel of Fortune) that have clear European precedents in Petrarch's I Trionfi, Christian moral allegory, and Italian civic festival culture.

Why It Mattered

Despite its scholarly weaknesses, Court de Gébelin's theory was enormously influential. It provided the intellectual framework that transformed tarot from a card game into a system of hidden knowledge. Before 1781, nobody had suggested the cards contained anything beyond game rules. After 1781, an entire tradition of esoteric interpretation became possible.

"Then, in the coffeehouses of Enlightenment Paris, everything changes. A Protestant pastor who cannot read Egyptian announces that the cards encode the secrets of Pharaonic civilization. A hairdresser-turned-mystic designs the first fortune-telling deck. And a tradition begins that is historically groundless, internally complex, and still growing."
— Crazy Alchemist, "Tarot and Cartomancy: from Mamluk warrior poetry to the cards in your hands"
Source: https://www.crazyalchemist.com/mysteries-esoterica/tarot-cartomancy-history-how-to-read

Context: Egyptomania and the Enlightenment

Court de Gébelin was not working in a vacuum. The late 18th century saw intense European fascination with Egypt, fueled by:

• Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798–1801) and the subsequent publication of Description de l'Égypte
• The Freemasonic fascination with Egyptian symbolism (Mozart's The Magic Flute, 1791)
• The broader Enlightenment project of finding a single "primitive" source for all human knowledge

In this context, claiming that a set of playing cards encoded Egyptian wisdom was not as outlandish as it sounds. It fit a widespread intellectual fashion for finding hidden unity beneath surface diversity.

Etteilla and the First Divinatory System (1783–1785)

Who Was Etteilla?

Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791), who published under the reversed spelling "Etteilla," was a Parisian wigmaker and self-taught occultist. He is often described as the first person to make a living from cartomancy (card reading).

Key Publications

• 1770: Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes — a guide to reading standard playing cards (not tarot specifically)
• 1783–1785: Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de tarots — the first dedicated tarot divination manual
• 1789: Published a redesigned tarot deck specifically for divination, with modified imagery and added astrological correspondences

What Etteilla Actually Did

Etteilla's contribution was not the idea that tarot could be used for divination (that already existed in folk practice). His contribution was systematization:

1. He assigned specific divinatory meanings to each of the 78 cards
2. He created a structured method for laying out and reading cards
3. He designed a deck specifically for fortune-telling, altering the traditional imagery
4. He established a commercial practice — teaching students, selling decks, giving readings

"Etteilla had actually published a cartomancy work as early as 1770, eleven years before Court de Gebelin, but that work dealt with standard playing cards."
— Crazy Alchemist, "History of Tarot Cards: Game to Divination"
Source: https://www.crazyalchemist.com/mysteries-esoterica/tarot-cartomancy-history-how-to-read

The Etteilla–Court de Gébelin Relationship

The relationship between these two figures is debated:

View 1: Etteilla was independent. His 1770 publication predates Court de Gébelin, suggesting he developed cartomancy independently.

View 2: Court de Gébelin provided the framework. Etteilla's 1770 work dealt with ordinary playing cards. It was only after reading Le Monde Primitif that he turned to tarot specifically and incorporated the Egyptian narrative.

View 3: Mutual reinforcement. Both men were part of the same Parisian intellectual milieu. The "Egyptian tarot" narrative served both their interests — it gave Court de Gébelin evidence for his universal history, and it gave Etteilla a prestigious origin story for his commercial practice.

Eliphas Lévi and the Kabbalistic Connection (1854–1856)

The Claim

Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–1875), writing under the pen name Eliphas Lévi, made the single most influential connection in tarot history: he linked the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and, by extension, to the 22 paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

In Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–1856), Lévi argued that:

• The tarot is a universal symbolic language encoding all knowledge
• The 22 trumps correspond to the 22 Hebrew letters
• The four suits correspond to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton (YHVH)
• The entire deck is a "book" that can be "read" as a complete system of philosophy

The Evidence (and Its Problems)

• No historical connection. There is no evidence that the 15th-century Italian card-makers knew Hebrew, studied Kabbalah, or intended any connection to Jewish mysticism.
• Numerical coincidence. The fact that there are 22 trumps and 22 Hebrew letters is a numerical coincidence. The number of trumps was not fixed at 22 until relatively late in tarot history — early decks had 16 (Marziano da Tortona), 21, or other numbers.
• Retroactive fitting. Lévi's system requires rearranging and reinterpreting the traditional trump sequence to make the correspondences work.

Why It Mattered

Lévi's Kabbalistic framework became the structural backbone of all subsequent esoteric tarot. The Golden Dawn, A.E. Waite, Aleister Crowley, and virtually every modern esoteric tarot author builds on Lévi's basic premise: that the trumps map onto Hebrew letters and Kabbalistic paths.

"What prompted de Gebelin, Levi and Etteilla to find esoteric connections in tarot?"
— Reddit r/tarot discussion
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/tarot/comments/avbwh5/what_prompted_de_gebelin_levi_and_etteilla_to

Lévi's Broader Project

It is important to understand Lévi's tarot work in context. He was not primarily a tarot reader. He was a ceremonial magician and occult philosopher who saw tarot as one piece of a larger system connecting Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, and Christian mysticism. Tarot was useful to him because it provided a concrete, visual, 78-piece symbolic system that could serve as a "filing cabinet" for correspondences drawn from multiple traditions.

The French Occultist Tradition (1860s–1900s)

Papus (Gérard Encausse, 1865–1916)

Papus was a French physician and occultist who popularized Lévi's system in Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889). He:

• Systematized the Hebrew letter correspondences
• Added astrological and alchemical layers
• Presented tarot as the "absolute key to occult science"
• Made the system accessible to a wider audience through clear diagrams and tables

Papus's work is notable for its encyclopedic ambition — he attempted to show that tarot encoded not just Kabbalah but also Hindu philosophy, Egyptian religion, and Greek mythology. The scholarly consensus is that these connections are imposed rather than discovered.

Paul Christian (Jean-Baptiste Pitois, 1811–1877)

Paul Christian, a student of Éliphas Lévi, published L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries (1863), which included an influential description of tarot initiation rituals set in ancient Egyptian temples. This work:

• Popularized the "Egyptian initiation" narrative
• Described a sequence of 22 rooms corresponding to the 22 trumps
• Was almost certainly fictional — no historical evidence supports these rituals
• Nevertheless influenced later Golden Dawn ritual design

Oswald Wirth (1860–1943)

A Swiss occultist and secretary to Stanislas de Guaita, Wirth created one of the first esoteric tarot decks designed specifically for occult study (1889, revised 1926). His Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen Âge (1927) remains a reference work, though its historical claims are largely unsupported.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888–1900s)

What Was the Golden Dawn?

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a British secret society founded in London in 1888 by three Freemasons: William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. At its peak (1890s), it had approximately 300 members, including:

• A.E. Waite (later creator of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck)
• Aleister Crowley (later creator of the Thoth deck)
• W.B. Yeats (the poet)
• Arthur Conan Doyle (briefly)
• Pamela Colman Smith (artist of the RWS deck)

The Golden Dawn's Tarot System

The Golden Dawn developed the most detailed and internally consistent system of tarot correspondences ever created. Their system assigned to each card:

• A Hebrew letter (for trumps)
• An astrological sign, planet, or element
• A position on the Tree of Life
• A color from the Queen Scale
• Specific magical and divinatory meanings

This system was recorded in the Order's secret manuscripts (the "Cipher Manuscripts" and subsequent documents) and taught progressively through the Order's grade system.

Key Innovations

1. Decans for minor arcana. The Golden Dawn assigned each numbered minor arcana card (2–10) to a specific decan (10° segment of the zodiac), giving each card a precise astrological address.
2. Elemental dignities. They developed a system where the meaning of a card is modified by the cards surrounding it, based on elemental relationships (fire strengthens air, water weakens fire, etc.).
3. The Tattwa system. They incorporated Hindu elemental symbols (tattwas) into their visualization practices.

The Split and Its Consequences

The Golden Dawn collapsed in internal conflict around 1900–1903. The split produced two rival successors:

• A.E. Waite founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross (1915)
• Aleister Crowley founded the A∴A∴ and later led the O.T.O.

Both men went on to create their own tarot decks, each claiming to represent the "true" Golden Dawn teaching while diverging significantly from it.

A.E. Waite and the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck (1909)

The Commission

Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) was a prolific occult author and former Golden Dawn member. In 1909, he commissioned artist Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) to paint a new tarot deck. The deck was published by William Rider & Son in London in December 1909.

What Made It Revolutionary

The Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck's key innovation was fully illustrated pip cards. Before 1909, the minor arcana in virtually all tarot decks showed only arrangements of suit symbols — five cups, eight swords, ten coins. Smith painted narrative scenes for every single pip card, giving each one a distinct visual story.

"Multiple pip card designs in the RWS deck appear to draw directly on Sola Busca compositions. The Three of Swords: a heart pierced by three blades. The Ten of Wands: a figure carrying a heavy burden of staves. The 'revolutionary' fully illustrated pips that transformed tarot reading were not entirely original. They were, at least in part, a revival of a 400-year-old Italian experiment that history had forgotten."
— Crazy Alchemist, "Tarot and Cartomancy"
Source: https://www.crazyalchemist.com/mysteries-esoterica/tarot-cartomancy-history-how-to-read

The Sola Busca Connection

In 1907, the British Museum exhibited engravings and photographs of the Sola Busca tarot (1491), the oldest complete fully illustrated tarot deck. Pamela Colman Smith, who was in London at the time, is believed to have seen this exhibition. Several RWS pip designs closely mirror Sola Busca compositions, suggesting Smith drew direct inspiration from this 15th-century Italian deck.

Deliberate Departures from the Golden Dawn

Waite made several conscious changes to the traditional trump order:

• Strength (VIII) and Justice (XI) were swapped — in the Golden Dawn system, Leo (Strength) comes before Libra (Justice); Waite reversed this
• The imagery was simplified — Waite removed much of the dense ceremonial detail
• Christian symbolism was foregrounded — the Hierophant became more explicitly papal, the Lovers became an Adam-and-Eve scene

Waite's Companion Volume

Waite published The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) as a companion to the deck. It is notable for:

• Providing divinatory meanings for all 78 cards
• Being deliberately vague about the deeper esoteric system (Waite guarded Golden Dawn secrets)
• Expressing Waite's personal mysticism, which blended Catholic symbolism, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism
• Being somewhat poorly organized and difficult to use as a practical reference

The Deck's Legacy

The RWS deck became the most widely used tarot deck in the English-speaking world and the template for the vast majority of modern "indie" decks. Its imagery is so familiar that many people who have never studied tarot recognize the Fool stepping off a cliff or the Lovers standing beneath an angel.

Aleister Crowley and the Thoth Tarot (1938–1943)

The Commission

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), the most controversial figure in modern occultism, commissioned artist Lady Frieda Harris (1877–1962) to paint a new tarot deck. Work began in 1938 and was completed in 1943, though the deck was not published in card form until 1969 (after both Crowley and Harris had died).

The Thoth System

Crowley's The Book of Thoth (1944) presents his tarot system, which:

• Retains the Golden Dawn's basic structure (Hebrew letters, astrology, Tree of Life)
• Adds Crowley's own Thelemic philosophy ("Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law")
• Incorporates the I Ching, Egyptian mythology, and Crowley's personal magical experiences
• Renames several trumps (e.g., "The Aeon" instead of "Judgement," "The Universe" instead of "The World")
• Uses the "Egyptian" spelling of "Thoth" to emphasize the Egyptian connection

Harris's Artistic Achievement

Frieda Harris painted 78 watercolors in the style of Projective Geometry and Synchromatic art, influenced by her studies with the artist and mathematician Aleister Crowley's associate, the painter Ithell Colquhoun. The paintings are abstract, colorful, and visually striking — quite different from Smith's narrative illustrations.

Key Differences from RWS

The Thoth Deck's Legacy

The Thoth deck is the second most influential esoteric tarot deck after the RWS. It is preferred by practitioners who want a more abstract, energetically focused tool, and by students of Crowley's Thelemic system. Its abstract pip designs influenced many subsequent "art decks."

The 20th Century: Proliferation and Diversification

Post-War Developments (1945–1970)

After World War II, tarot entered a period of relative quiet in the esoteric world, while the game tradition continued in France and Italy. Key developments:

• Paul Foster Case (1884–1954) founded the Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.) in 1922, creating a correspondence course that taught tarot through the Golden Dawn system
• Eden Gray published The Tarot Revealed (1960) and Mastering the Tarot (1971), making tarot accessible to a general American audience
• The counterculture movement of the 1960s brought renewed interest in occultism and alternative spirituality

The Tarot Boom (1970–2000)

The 1970s–1990s saw an explosion of tarot publishing:

• Stuart R. Kaplan founded U.S. Games Systems (1968) and published The Encyclopedia of Tarot (1978), the first comprehensive reference work
• Hundreds of new decks were published, many following the RWS template
• Tarot became associated with the New Age movement, feminism, and Jungian psychology
• Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980) became the most widely recommended interpretive guide

The Digital Age (2000–Present)

The internet transformed tarot practice:

• Online communities (Aeclectic Tarot Forum, Reddit r/tarot, Biddy Tarot)
• Digital tarot apps and online readings
• Crowdfunding platforms enabling independent deck creators
• YouTube and social media creating new tarot content formats
• Academic tarot studies emerging as a legitimate field (Thierry Depaulis, Andrea Vitali, the Trionfi.com research group)

Debates and Different Perspectives

Is the Esoteric Tradition a "Corruption" or a "Legitimate Evolution"?

View 1: A corruption of the original.

Game historians and academic scholars (notably Michael Dummett, Thierry Depaulis) argue that the esoteric overlay distorts the cards' original purpose. The trumps were designed for a card game, not to encode Egyptian wisdom or Kabbalistic secrets. The esoteric tradition is built on a foundation of historical errors.

View 2: A legitimate cultural evolution.

Practitioners and some cultural historians argue that cultural objects naturally accumulate meaning over time. The esoteric tradition, whatever its historical accuracy, represents a genuine and creative engagement with the cards' symbolic potential. The fact that Court de Gébelin was wrong about Egypt does not make the interpretive tradition he inspired worthless.

View 3: Both are true simultaneously.

Many modern tarot scholars and practitioners hold both positions: the historical claims are false, but the symbolic system built upon them has its own internal coherence and practical value. One can use tarot as a reflective tool without believing it encodes Egyptian secrets.

Was the Golden Dawn System "Discovered" or "Invented"?

View 1: Invented.

The Golden Dawn's correspondences (Hebrew letters, decans, Tree of Life paths) were designed by Mathers, Westcott, and Woodman in the 1880s. They are a creative synthesis, not a discovery of pre-existing truth.

View 2: Discovered (or received).

Some practitioners believe the correspondences were received through spiritual channels or represent genuine archetypal patterns that the Golden Dawn founders intuited correctly.

View 3: Functionally true.

A pragmatic middle position: the system works as a coherent symbolic language regardless of its origin. Whether the correspondences are "true" in some metaphysical sense is less important than whether they produce useful interpretive frameworks.

The Waite–Crowley Rivalry

The two most influential modern decks were created by former Golden Dawn colleagues who became bitter rivals. Their disagreements were both personal and philosophical:

Both men claimed to represent the authentic Golden Dawn teaching. In reality, both departed significantly from it, and neither claim to exclusive authenticity is supportable.

The "Egyptian" Question Today

Modern tarot scholarship has thoroughly debunked the Egyptian origin theory. Yet the Egyptian connection persists in popular tarot culture:

• Many decks still use Egyptian imagery
• "The Book of Thoth" remains a popular title for tarot books
• Some practitioners find the Egyptian framework useful as a symbolic language, even while acknowledging it is historically inaccurate

The question is no longer "Did tarot come from Egypt?" (the answer is definitively no) but "Does the Egyptian framework add value as a symbolic overlay?" — a question on which reasonable practitioners disagree.

Timeline Summary

Key Takeaways

1. The esoteric tradition is young. It dates from 1781, not from ancient Egypt or medieval Kabbalists. The cards are ~600 years old; the esoteric interpretation is ~245 years old.

2. Each layer built on the last. Court de Gébelin → Etteilla → Lévi → Golden Dawn → Waite/Crowley. Remove any one layer and the subsequent ones change.

3. The historical claims are false. No evidence supports Egyptian origin, Kabbalistic encoding, or any pre-18th-century esoteric use. This is the scholarly consensus.

4. The symbolic system has internal coherence. Despite false origins, the correspondences form a workable interpretive framework that many practitioners find genuinely useful.

5. The tradition is still evolving. New decks, new interpretations, and new scholarly research continue to reshape how tarot is understood and used.

Sources and Further Reading

• Dummett, Michael. The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City. London: Duckworth, 1980.
• Decker, Ronald, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett. A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot. London: Duckworth, 1996.
• Place, Robert M. The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005.
• Waite, A.E. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. London: William Rider & Son, 1910.
• Crowley, Aleister. The Book of Thoth. London: O.T.O., 1944.
• Pollack, Rachel. Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. London: Aquarian Press, 1980.
• The Morgan Library & Museum. "Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards." https://www.themorgan.org/manuscript/158525
• Crazy Alchemist. "Tarot and Cartomancy: from Mamluk warrior poetry to the cards in your hands." https://www.crazyalchemist.com/mysteries-esoterica/tarot-cartomancy-history-how-to-read
• Depaulis, Thierry. "Tarot, jeu et magie." Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1984.

This article is part of the Soothia Archive. It presents historical information and multiple perspectives without endorsing any single interpretation. Tarot is presented as a tool for reflection and self-exploration, not as a means of predicting the future.