A History Of The Occult Tarot Apr 2026

Shortly after Gébelin’s publication, a Parisian print-seller named (writing as Etteilla ) took these theories further.

Although historically unfounded, this "Egyptian" narrative transformed the deck from a toy into a sacred text. 2. Etteilla and the First Divination Decks (1780s) A History of the Occult Tarot

The occult Tarot was born from a scholarly mistake. In 1781, , a French Protestant pastor and Freemason, published a volume of his encyclopedia, Le Monde Primitif . Upon seeing a Tarot deck, he became convinced it was a remnant of the lost "Book of Thoth" from ancient Egypt. He claimed that: The 22 trumps were an encoded alphabet of mystical wisdom. Etteilla and the First Divination Decks (1780s) The

The transition of Tarot from a 15th-century parlor game to a pillar of modern Western esotericism is a journey of imaginative reinvention. While the cards originated in Renaissance Italy for a game called tarocchini , their "occult" history began nearly 350 years later in Enlightenment-era France. 1. The Myth of Egyptian Origins (1781) He claimed that: The 22 trumps were an

The cards were brought to Europe by the Roma people (whom he mistakenly identified as Egyptians or "Gypsies").