Tarot as the Book of Thoth: The Power of Fascination with Ancient Egypt

Back in the late 1700s, a Freemason by the name of Court de Gebelin was shown for
the first time a tarot pack. He studied the cards and a revelation hit him: they were
living remnants of ancient Egyptian religion. He was so convinced of his intuition that
he wrote an entire treatise on the Tarot and its Egyptian origins (1). He did not offer
much in terms of evidence to uphold his conviction, but we must keep in mind that he
was writing at a time when the so-called ‘scientific method’ was not part of the
humanistic tradition. A friend of his, the Count of Mellet, wrote a supporting essay
that went even further by claiming that Tarot was the surviving “book of Thoth” that
contained divine Egyptian revelations (2). Gebelin and Mellet’s work gave birth to an
entire esoteric tradition that maintained the Egyptian origin of the play pack.
Following this tradition, a French cartomancer named Eteilla became famous by
expanding on the Egyptian Tarot, and later in the 19th century, the physician Papus
affirmed that the Tarot was the “Bible of Bibles”, the book of Hermes Trismegistus,
kept alive by the Gypsies (3). It was only at the beginning of the 20th century, in the
authoritative work of A.E.Waite, Pictorial Key to the Tarot that he remonstrated those
that believed that the pack could have possibly originated from Egypt (4). However,
remnants of the old esoteric belief can still be found in Aleister Crowley’s Book of
Thoth tarot pack and modern tarot creations like the Ancient Egyptian Tarot (5, 6).

Waite’s deconstructionism was based on a rising modern concern with recorded

history. In this sense, he was correct: apparently, the first tarot packs in a recognizable
form rose in Italy in the 1400s, before spreading far and wide across Europe (7). In
the 1600 and 1700s the tarot game was at its peak, being played in many intellectual
salons throughout the continent (8). There is little evidence that any mystical or
esoteric meaning was associated to the Tarot prior to Gebelin’s revelation: apparently
it was only in the early 1700s that symbolism began to be associated with it (9). What
is certain is that, after Gebelin and Mallet’s “manifestos”, Tarot became less and less
of a game and more and more of an instrument of divination, meditation or esoteric
philosophy, as it remains until today. You can hardly hear of anyone actually playing
the Tarot, even though except for the 22 trumps, the others are very similar to the
normal playing cards.

Leaving prosaic history aside, why did the two Frenchmen choose Egypt as the origin
of Tarot? Some people point out, rightfully I would say, that “Egyptian Tarot” was the
offspring of an Egyptomania craze in the 1700s (10) which culminated with
Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1799 and Champollion’s deciphering of the Rosetta
Stone. Needless to say, Egyptomania is still with us today, witness Stargate, The
Mummy trilogy, Indiana Jones or the Discovery Channel’s fascination with
Tutankhamen. Perhaps Egyptomania makes me write this article today.

However, the Egyptian roots of Tarot cannot simply be attributed to a 1700 folly.
Gebelin himself was the heir of a long Western esoteric tradition that traced its legacy
to Egypt, Thoth / Hermes Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum. By placing Tarot
into Egyptian tradition, Gebelin was only trying to contribute to the long and
laborious work of restoration that Renaissance scholars committed themselves to.
They firmly believed that sometime in the past all religion had been one and the same,
and they were in search of this ancient theological truth. A key piece of the puzzle was
contained in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were seen as hiding the most powerful
mysteries of all, those that could not be betrayed in ordinary words.

Thus, Tarot more likely belongs to the ‘Hieroglyphomania’ that characterized

Renaissance scholars. Yet if some books were written to convey the hidden message
of the hieroglyphs (see for instance Athanasius Kircher’s outstanding Hieroglyphica),
it was more customary in the period to imitate the hieroglyphs by creating similar
mysterious images (11). Thus, an entire art of emblems, painting, statues portraying
enigmatic figures arose. Enigmatic images were particularly pervasive in alchemical
literature and emblem books. It was in this hieroglyph-crazed environment that the
Italian Tarot was either born or grew. Thus it is possible that, whether or not the
original Tarot consciously hid esoteric meaning, its roots may have harkened back to a
fascination for Egypt. It is furthermore possible that Court de Gebelin, glancing at the
enigmatic Tarot images, may have made an intuitive connection between these and the
‘hieroglyphic’ emblems of the 1500s and 1600s centuries.

Therefore, one may conclude that even though the Tarot may not come from Egypt in
a historical sense, in the esoteric imagination, it did. The survival of the esoteric Tarot
practice is in this sense a proof that recorded history is not as powerful as human
imagination.

References

(1) Gébelin, Antoine Court de. (1781). Du Jeu des Tarots, Monde Primitif, Vol. 8, tom.
1, Paris. Online. Available at : http://www.innerlightsociety.org/gebelin.html .
Accessed on 07 December 2008.
(2) Mellet, Count de. (1781). Recherches sur les Tarots,
et sur la Divination par les Cartes des Tarots, Monde Primitif, Vol. 8, tom. 1, Paris.
Online. Available at : http://www.innerlightsociety.org/gebelin.html . Accessed on 07
December 2008.
(3) Papus. (1892). Tarot of the Bohemians, trans. by E.P. Morton. Online. Available
at :
http://books.google.com/books?id=QCX_KoqrKh0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=tarot
&lr=&as_brr=3#PPP3,M1. Accessed on 06 December 2008.
(4) Waite, E.A. (1911). Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Online. Available at :
http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/index.htm. Accessed on 04 December 2008
(5) Crowley, A. & Harris, F. Tarot of Thoth. Online. Available at :
http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/thoth/. Accessed on 06 December 2008.
(6) Barrett, C. (1994). Ancient Egyptian Tarot. Online. Available at :
http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/ancient-egyptian/ . Accessed on 07 December
2008.
(7), (8), (9). Tarot History. (2008). Online. Available at :
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Tarot_History. Accessed on 07 December 2008.
(10) Karlin, J. (2002). How Tarot Became Egyptian. Online. Available at :
http://jktarot.com/egyptomania.html. Accessed on 07 December 2008.
(11) Klossowski de Rola, Stanislas. (1997).The Golden Game : Alchemical Drawings
of the Seventeenth Century. Slovenia : Thames & Hudson.