Antoine Court de Gébelin

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Antoine Court de Gébelin (c. 1725–1784) was a French Protestant pastor, Freemason, and savant whose immense unfinished work Le Monde primitif did one thing that outlived everything else in it: it gave the tarot an Egyptian origin and a sacred purpose, and so founded the esoteric reading of the cards that has governed them ever since.

Born in Nîmes to a family of Huguenot ministers, he trained for the pastorate but made his career in Paris as a scholar of a peculiarly eighteenth-century ambition. Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, published in nine volumes from 1773, set out to reconstruct a single lost civilization of remote antiquity from which all later language, myth, writing, and custom were held to descend — a project of comparative etymology and allegory pursued with great learning and almost no method that scholarship would now accept. The work was a sensation in its day; it numbered Louis XVI and Benjamin Franklin among its subscribers.

The tarot enters in the eighth volume, around 1781. The story de Gébelin told of his own discovery has become part of the cards’ legend: shown a deck of Italian playing cards at a friend’s house, he claimed at once to recognize in its trumps the wreckage of an ancient Egyptian temple-book — the Book of Thoth, preserved through the centuries by the Romani — “gypsies” in the parlance of his day — whom he took, on the false etymology then current, for refugees out of Egypt. The twenty-two trumps he read as hieroglyphic pages of a hidden wisdom; the suits he mapped onto a cosmology of the four elements. None of it has any historical support. The tarot is a fifteenth-century north-Italian card game, the trumps a Renaissance invention, and no link to Egypt has ever been shown.

What matters is not whether the claim was true but what it set in motion. Before de Gébelin the tarot was a game; after him it was a book of secrets. Within his own volume an associate styling himself the Comte de Mellet added a scheme tying the cards to the Hebrew alphabet, and within a few years the Parisian fortune-teller Etteilla had built a divinatory practice on the foundation. Through the nineteenth century the line ran on — Éliphas Lévi welded the trumps to the Kabbalah, and Papus systematized the whole into the occult tarot the library preserves in The Tarot of the Bohemians. Each later author treated the Egyptian origin less as de Gébelin’s conjecture than as recovered fact.

He did not live to see any of it. He died in Paris in 1784, reportedly while undergoing the magnetic cure of Mesmer, another of the period’s enthusiasms. His vast Monde primitif is unread now except by specialists; the few pages on the tarot, almost an aside in a work about everything, are the part of him that endured — the source of a tradition that took an Italian card game for an Egyptian scripture and has never quite let it go.

→ In the library: Papus — The Tarot of the Bohemians (1910)

→ Related: Papus Gerard Encausse · Divination · Hermes Trismegistus