Jean-Baptiste Alliette (Etteilla)

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A man kept a shop in Paris where he sold engraved prints and packets of garden seed, and on the side he told fortunes with cards. His name was Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791). Spelled backward, Alliette gives Etteilla, and it was under that reversed name that he did the thing for which he is remembered: he took a deck of cards used for a trick-taking game and recast it, in print and in daily practice, as an instrument for reading fate. Before him the Tarot was, for nearly everyone who handled it, a game. After him it became, for a widening public, a book of figures to be consulted — the founding act of the occult Tarot and of divination by cards as a profession.

The seedsman who told fortunes

Little of his early life is fixed with certainty, and what survives comes mostly through his own later, self-serving accounts. He was born in Paris on 1 March 1738 into a family of the food trades — a father in the cookshops, a mother who dealt in seed — and he carried the seed trade into his own livelihood, alongside a dealership in prints. By around 1770 he was earning his bread chiefly as a consultant, teacher, and author of fortune-telling, the first man in Europe documented to have made card-reading a regular commercial vocation.

His first book, published in 1770, set the pattern. Etteilla, ou Manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes laid out a method for reading the ordinary thirty-two-card piquet pack — the short deck of the gaming table — as an oracle, with each card bearing a fixed meaning that shifted when it fell reversed, and an extra “Etteilla” card added to stand for the querent. For the art he coined a word of his own, cartonomancie, which the language soon smoothed into cartomancie — cartomancy. The book had nothing to do with the Tarot. Its deck was the small French gaming pack, and its divination rested not on the picture-trumps that would later carry the whole edifice but on the plain suits of hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs. What it established was the grammar: cards as a sentence to be read, position and orientation as syntax, a printed dictionary of meanings as the lexicon. Everything Etteilla later did to the Tarot was the extension of that grammar onto a larger and more freighted alphabet.

The Egyptian spark of 1781

The turn toward Tarot came from outside his shop. In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Protestant pastor and antiquarian then assembling his vast comparative encyclopedia Le Monde primitif, devoted a chapter of its eighth volume to the Tarot. He had encountered the cards, by his own telling, at a card-party one evening, and on the spot persuaded himself that their strange trump figures were no game’s furniture at all but the scattered leaves of an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom — a sacred Book of Thoth, hidden in plain sight as a pastime so that it might survive the ruin of Egypt. A second essay in the same volume, by a contributor signing as the Comte de Mellet, carried the idea further, proposing an inverted ordering of the trumps and a correspondence between the twenty-two picture-cards and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and sketching the first published scheme for divining with them.

The claim has no documentary support of any kind, and modern historians treat it as pure invention. Court de Gébelin produced no evidence; his tar/ro etymology for the word, glossed as Egyptian for a royal road, was fabricated; and the entire framework rested on a reading of Egyptian that no one then possessed, since Champollion would not decipher the hieroglyphs until 1822, four decades on. The chronology alone condemns it: the Tarot appears in the Italian record in the 1440s, a clear thousand-mile and thousand-year remove from pharaonic Egypt, and the trump figures it carries — the Pope, the Emperor, Death, the Devil, Judgement — are the commonplaces of late-medieval Christian allegory, not the iconography of the Nile. The attraction of the Egyptian story was never evidentiary. It answered a hunger the eighteenth century felt for a primordial wisdom older than the Bible and the Greeks, and it gave a humble deck of cards a lineage grander than any it could earn from its actual past in the gaming rooms of Milan and Ferrara. The standard reconstruction of how the legend was made and why it cannot stand is Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett’s A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996), which devotes its central chapters to dismantling both the Gébelin chapter and the Mellet essay. The documented birth of the Tarot lies instead in fifteenth-century Italy — the courts of Milan, Ferrara, Florence, and Bologna, where it began as a trick-taking game of trionfi, later tarocchi. None of this touches the present figure except as the soil he planted in: the Egyptian thesis was the spark, and Etteilla took it.

Building the system, 1783–1791

He did not merely repeat Court de Gébelin; he industrialized him. Where the pastor had offered a flourish of speculation, Etteilla built a working divinatory machine and sold access to it. Through the mid-1780s he issued, in successive installments called cahiers, the Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées Tarots — the first book in the history of the world to describe a method of divination by Tarot cards specifically. The four cahiers appeared out of order between 1783 and 1785, and into them he poured a dense apparatus of correspondences: trump meanings upright and reversed, links to the planets and the signs, to the four classical elements and the four humors, and layouts — spreads — by which the cards were to be dealt and read. He followed with further treatises elaborating the framework, among them his Fragment sur les hautes sciences (1785), and at the end of his life the unfinished Cours théorique et pratique du Livre de Thot (1790), the fullest synthesis of his teaching. He claimed, without any support that can be checked, to have worked out his “high sciences” as early as 1753 — the autobiographical embroidery of a self-taught man backdating his own authority.

Around the practice he gathered people. In 1788 he founded the Société des Interprètes du Livre de Thot, a society of correspondents and pupils through which his system spread by subscription and by post. By the reckoning that circulated after him he left some five hundred students, of whom perhaps a hundred and fifty went on to read cards for a living — a school in the commercial rather than the scholarly sense, a network of working diviners trained in a single proprietary method. Two pupils he singled out as worth the name: Hugand, of Lyon, who joined the society, and a disciple in Berlin remembered as Hisler, whose abridged German rendering of the master’s work trimmed away everything not strictly divinatory. The rest, by Etteilla’s own sour verdict, were charlatans. The judgment is telling. He was building not a priesthood but a trade, and he policed its competence the way a guildmaster polices a craft.

This commercial cast is the key to him, and it is what made him an irregular figure to the learned occultists who later claimed and pruned his legacy. He sold consultations; he sold subscriptions; he sold a deck with the answers printed on it. The high theurgists and ceremonial magicians who came after worked, or said they worked, toward illumination; Etteilla worked toward a clientele. Yet the two are not so cleanly separable, and his vocabulary betrays the larger ambition behind the cash register. He did not frame fortune-telling as a parlor amusement. He cast it as a recovered science — his “high sciences,” a body of ancient knowledge that the cards encoded and that a trained reader could draw out. The Egyptian provenance he had taken from Court de Gébelin gave the trade its dignity: a fortune read from the Grand Etteilla was not a guess but a consultation of the Book of Thoth, the oldest wisdom of humankind reduced to a deck that fit in a coat pocket. The provenance was false. The dignity it conferred was real, and it is the reason the practice outlasted the salons where it began.

The Grand Etteilla deck

The capstone came near the decade’s end. Working with the engraver Pierre-François Basan, Etteilla had a Tarot pack made to his own design and brought it to market around 1789 — the deck later known as the Grand Etteilla. It was redrawn from the ground up for prediction rather than play: the order of the cards rearranged, the imagery reworked to carry his correspondences, astrological and elemental signs printed onto the faces, and on many cards the divinatory keyword itself lettered directly onto the pasteboard, upright and reversed, so that the reading was no longer recalled from a manual but read off the card in hand. The luxury edition carried seventy-eight brush-colored cards in a fitted case. This was the structural innovation that mattered: it was the first Tarot pack ever conceived, from the first stroke of the design, for occult use. Every divinatory deck that followed descends in its conception from this one decision — to make the object itself the manual.

Etteilla’s particular system was, by the measure of the occultists who came after, a muddle. The renumbering of the trumps was idiosyncratic; the astrological assignments were rough; the Egyptian framing was inherited wholesale and never grounded. He did not, for instance, work out the Hebrew-letter scheme that the Comte de Mellet had floated and that would become the spine of nineteenth-century occult Tarot; that systematic identification of the twenty-two trumps with the twenty-two letters waited for Lévi. Etteilla’s contribution lay elsewhere — not in the symbolic architecture of the cards, which his successors rebuilt, but in the act of turning the pack into a divinatory object and the reading into a method that could be taught, sold, and repeated. His successors said as much, and reworked it. But the idea of a Tarot built to be read held, and so did the practice he sold. After his death the design propagated through the nineteenth century in a string of editions and imitations — the so-called Etteilla II issued at Lille around 1838 under the pen-name “Julia Orsini,” the Egyptianizing Etteilla III of the 1860s later branded by Grimaud — until the “tarot égyptien” of the back-parlor fortune-teller was a fixture of French popular life.

The line that runs from him

What Etteilla founded outgrew him in two directions at once: downward into a mass cartomantic trade, and upward into the learned occult Tarot of the next century. The learned line ran first through Éliphas Lévi — Alphonse-Louis Constant — who in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56) fused the Hebrew-letter correspondence first floated by the Comte de Mellet with a Kabbalistic theology, assigning the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters and to the paths of the Tree of Life. Lévi worked at a level of ambition Etteilla never reached, and he disdained the seedsman’s clumsier machinery; but he took up exactly the inheritance Etteilla had made possible — the Tarot as a sealed book of wisdom, a deck to be deciphered rather than dealt. After Lévi the system passed to Papus — Gérard Encausse — whose Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889) systematized Lévi’s attributions into a textbook, and whose later Le Tarot divinatoire (1909) reversed his own earlier contempt for fortune-telling and supplied a full divinatory apparatus drawn, in the end, straight from Etteilla. Each of these men refined or disowned the particulars of what the cartomancer had assembled while keeping its substance: that the Tarot is read, and that the cards carry meaning to be read out of them.

Sources and scholarship

The primary record is held in his own books, all of which entered the public domain long ago. The first cartomantic treatise, the piquet-deck Manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes (1770), is digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and served openly through Gallica; the first of the 1783 Tarot cahiers is likewise on Gallica. The source-text on the other side of the 1781 turn — Court de Gébelin’s Le Monde primitif, volume eight, containing both his Tarot chapter and the Comte de Mellet’s essay — is digitized by the BnF as well, at Gallica. Etteilla-pattern decks of the nineteenth century survive in the BnF’s print collections, including an 1826 Mongie edition on Gallica.

The governing modern scholarship is Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (London: Duckworth, 1996), which set the historical record straight on the whole eighteenth-century French reframing and remains the standard account of both Court de Gébelin and Etteilla; it is complemented for the documented, non-occult origins by Dummett’s earlier The Game of Tarot (1980) and by Helen Farley’s A Cultural History of Tarot (2009). The systematic iconographic history of the cards themselves — the trumps, their orders, and their visual descent — belongs to the Tarot tradition proper and is treated there.

The irony at the center of him does not fade with the correction of his history. A print-and-seed dealer with no Egyptian and no learning to speak of, who manufactured a false pedigree he had borrowed from a pastor who had manufactured it first, nonetheless fixed the working grammar of card divination — the upright-and-reversed meanings, the printed keyword, the deck made to be read — so firmly that two centuries of practitioners, including the learned men who scorned his methods, kept reading by the rules he set down in his shop.

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

→ Related: Divination · Tarot Cartomancy · Antoine Court De Gebelin · Ancient Egypt · Thoth · Eliphas Levi Alphonse Louis Constant · Papus Gerard Encausse