Where tarot comes from · Lesson 2 of 6
How tarot became occult
Trace how a fifteenth-century card game acquired an Egyptian past and Hebrew letters, and learn to sort documented history from origin myth when you read.
A pastor watches a game
In 1781 a Protestant pastor and scholar in Paris, Antoine Court de Gébelin, published the eighth volume of his vast work Le Monde primitif. In it he described visiting friends who were playing tarot, then an ordinary card game. Within a quarter of an hour, he wrote, the pack had been gone through, explained and declared Egyptian.
His argument was bold. The trumps, he said, were the remains of the Book of Thoth, the wisdom of Egyptian priests, hidden inside a game so that it would survive. He even derived the word “tarot” from supposed Egyptian roots meaning “royal road”. In the same volume the Comte de Mellet added two ideas of his own: that the twenty-two trumps matched the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that the cards had been used for divination.
Why the Egypt story fails
No one in 1781 could read Egyptian writing. Hieroglyphs were not deciphered until Champollion’s work in 1822, so Court de Gébelin was matching pictures to a language nobody understood. When Egyptian texts could finally be read, nothing in them resembled the tarot. No Egyptian deck, and no ancient description of one, has ever been found.
What the record does show is plainer. The picture cards appear in the courts of northern Italy by the early 1440s, added as trionfi to an ordinary four-suit pack, and the game spread across Europe from there. Later origin stories follow the same pattern: the claim that Romani travellers carried tarot from the East, spread by occult writers such as Papus in 1889, has no evidence behind it either.
Etteilla builds a reading deck
The Egypt story did not stay in a scholar’s book. Within a few years, a Parisian card reader who called himself Etteilla, his own surname Alliette spelled backwards, took it up. In the 1780s he published a method for reading tarot and later a deck redesigned for the purpose, which he presented as the Book of Thoth restored to its true order.
Etteilla’s history was invented, but his practical legacy was real. His was the first deck made for reading rather than for play, and he gave cards distinct meanings when they fell upside down. Every reader who pauses over an upside-down card is drawing, knowingly or not, on a habit that Etteilla did more than anyone to put into print.
Lévi and the Hebrew letters
De Mellet’s passing idea became a system in the hands of Éliphas Lévi, a French writer on magic whose Dogme et rituel de la haute magie appeared in 1854 and 1856. Lévi joined each trump to a Hebrew letter and set the whole deck inside the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. For him the tarot was a universal key to ancient knowledge.
Later readers kept the idea but changed the details. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, reassigned the letters, and those are the attributions you find on Olivia’s card pages. That the systems disagree is itself the lesson: the letters are a reading tradition built between 1781 and the 1880s, rich and worth knowing, not an original code uncovered.
Three piles, not one
When you meet a claim about tarot, sort it into one of three piles. The first is documented history: printed books, surviving decks, dates. The second is origin myth: stories about where the cards came from that the record does not support. The third is reading tradition: meanings and correspondences that people chose and handed on, which you may use freely as long as you know whose they are.
This is why Olivia’s card pages say “in the Golden Dawn system” rather than “the card means”. A tradition is a lens you pick up on purpose. It can sharpen what you see, but it cannot tell you where the pictures came from, and it never outranks what is actually carved on the card in front of you.
Try this
- Open the Magician’s card page and read its tradition note, marking each claim as documented history, origin myth or reading tradition.
- Choose one Major from the card pages and write three things its carving shows before you read any letter, planet or title.
- Then read its Golden Dawn attribution and write one sentence on what the letter adds that the picture did not already give you.
- Start a notebook page headed “Myth or document” and add each origin story you meet, with the earliest date anyone can show for it.
To remember
- The Egyptian origin was a 1781 theory, made before anyone could read hieroglyphs.
- The Hebrew letters were added from 1781 on, and their own authors disagreed.
- Hold every tradition as a lens you choose, never as proof of origin.