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42-572: The Major Arcana are complemented by the Minor Arcana —the 56 unnamed cards of the tarot deck, which more directly correspond to the contemporary standard 52-card deck . Prior to the 17th century, tarot cards were solely used for playing games and the Fool and 21 trumps had simple allegorical or esoteric meaning, mostly originating in elite ideology in the Italian courts of the 15th century when it

84-500: A Jungian psychologist, wrote of the tarot as having deep psychological and archetypal significance, even encoding the entire process of Jungian individuation into the tarot trumps. These various interpretations of the Major Arcana developed in stages, all of which continue to exert significant influence on practitioners' explanations of the Major Arcana. Like the early Italian-suited packs on which they were originally based, in

126-527: A Treatise on the Origins of Language and of Universal Grammar"), in Paris, 1776. With regard to mythology and symbology, he discussed the origins of allegory in antiquity and recreated a history of the calendar from civil, religious, and mythological perspectives. De Gébelin wrote an essay included in his Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne ("The Primeval World, Analyzed and Compared to

168-522: A book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed." Following Etteilla, tarot cartomancy was moved forward by Marie-Anne Adelaid Lenormand (1768–1830) and others. Lenormand was the first well known cartomancer and claimed to be the confidante of Empress Josephine and other local luminaries. She was so popular, and cartomancy with tarot became so well established in France following her work, that

210-559: A cartomantic pack each Major Arcanum depicts a scene, mostly featuring a person or several people, with many symbolic elements. In many decks, each has a number (usually in Roman numerals ) and a name, though not all decks have both, and some have only a picture. Every tarot deck is different and carries a different connotation with the art, however most symbolism remains the same. The earliest, pre-cartomantic, decks bore unnamed and unnumbered pictures on their trionfi or trumps (probably because

252-524: A great many of the people using them at the time were illiterate), and the order of cards was not standardized. Strength is traditionally the eleventh card and Justice the eighth, but the influential Rider–Waite Tarot switched the position of these two cards in order to make them a better fit with the astrological correspondences worked out by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn , under which

294-458: A hall on either side of which are twelve statues, and, between each pair of statues, a painting. These twenty-two paintings, he is told, are Arcana or symbolic hieroglyphs; the Science of Will, the principle of all wisdom and source of all power, is contained in them. Each corresponds to a "letter of the sacred language" and to a number, and each expresses a reality of the divine world, a reality of

336-567: A method of divination using tarot; Éliphas Lévi worked to break away from the Egyptian nature of the divinatory tarot, bringing it back to the Tarot de Marseille , creating a "tortuous" kabbalistic correspondence, and even suggested that the Major Arcana represent stages of life. Marquis Stanislas de Guaita established the Major Arcana as an initiatory sequence to be used to establish a path of spiritual ascension and evolution. In 1980 Sallie Nichols,

378-455: A special deck entitled the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand was released in her name two years after her death. This was followed by many other specially designed cartomantic tarot decks, mostly based on Etteilla's Egyptian symbolism, but some providing other (for example biblical or medieval) flavours as well. Tarot as a cartomantic and divinatory tool is well established and new books expounding

420-461: Is primarily recognized as the founder and propagator of the divinatory tarot, but he also participated in the propagation of the occult tarot by claiming the tarot had an ancient Egyptian origin and was an account of the creation of the world and a book of eternal medicine. Éliphas Lévi revitalized the occult tarot by associating it with the mystical Kabbalah and making it a "prime ingredient in magical lore". As Decker, Depaulis , and Dummett note, "it

462-655: Is spoken of with the words, "Mr. Gibelin of Paris, who is said tho’ to have a very great Reputation." He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1781. In 1783, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. His great project had for its goal to set out to reconstruct the high primeval civilization. Reinterpreting Classical and Renaissance evocation of

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504-486: Is the second most popular card game in France after Belote . By contrast, cartomantic tarot cards emerged in France in the late 18th century popularised by occultists such as Etteilla . The terms "Major" and "Minor Arcana" originate with Jean-Baptiste Pitois (1811–1877), writing under the name Paul Christian. In their contemporary versions, the Minor Arcana are often illustrated—a convention popularized by

546-552: Is to him (Lévi) that we owe its (the Tarot's) widespread acceptance as a means of discovering hidden truths and as a document of the occult... Lévi's writings formed the channel through which the Western tradition of magic flowed down to modern times." As the following quote by P. D. Ouspensky (Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky) (1878–1947) shows, the association of the tarot with Hermetic, kabbalastic, magical mysteries continued at least to

588-516: The Golden Age in mankind's early history, Court de Gébelin asserted that the primitive worldwide civilization had been advanced and enlightened. He is the intellectual grandfather of much of modern occultism . His centers of focus are the familiar ones of universal origins of languages in deep time and the hermeneutics of symbolism . While his views on hermeneutics and religious matters were largely conservative, his original ideas and research on

630-469: The Lesser Arcana , are the suit cards in a cartomantic tarot deck. Ordinary tarot cards first appeared in northern Italy in the 1440s and were designed for tarot card games . They typically have four suits each of 10 unillustrated pip cards numbered one ( ace ) to ten, along with 4 court cards (face cards) . Tarot games are still widely played in central and southern Europe and French Tarot

672-639: The Order of the Golden Dawn , number cards are associated with planets, corresponding to their placement in Kabbalah . [REDACTED] Media related to Minor Arcana at Wikimedia Commons Antoine Court de G%C3%A9belin Antoine Court , who named himself Antoine Court de Gébelin ( Nîmes , 25 January 1725  – Paris , 10 May 1784), was a Protestant pastor, born in Nîmes , who initiated

714-726: The Rider–Waite tarot in 1910. Used in a tarot card reading in conjunction with the Major Arcana , the cards of the Minor Arcana suggest subtleties and details, and signify day-to-day insights. Cartomantic Tarot cards derived from Latin-suited packs typically have a Minor Arcana of 56 cards, with 14 cards in each suit: Wands (alternately batons, clubs, staffs, or staves), Cups (chalices, goblets, or vessels), Swords (or blades), and Pentacles (coins, disks, or rings). The four court cards are commonly: page, knight , queen , and king . Some variations have princess and prince cards replacing

756-712: The Cabalistic Order of the Rosy Cross in 1888 along with several key commentators on the initiatory tarot, e.g. Papus, François-Charles Barlet, and Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918). These orders placed great emphasis on secrets, advancing through the grades, and initiatory tests and so it is not surprising that, already having the tarot to hand, they read into the tarot initiatory significance. Doing so not only lent an air of divine, mystical, and ancient authority to their practices but allowed them to continue to expound on

798-566: The Egyptian language, Court de Gébelin developed a reconstruction of Tarot history, without producing any historical evidence, which was that Egyptian priests had distilled the ancient Book of Thoth into these images. These they brought to Rome, where they were secretly known to the popes, who brought them to Avignon in the 14th century, whence they were introduced into France. An essay by the Comte de Mellet included in Court de Gebelin's Monde primitif

840-557: The Modern World"), volume viii, 1781. The chapter on Tarot with which his name is indelibly associated is a single section in his vast compendium that he published in series from 1773, to a distinguished list of subscribers, headed by Louis XVI of France . It was his immediate perception, the first time he saw the Tarot deck, that it held the secrets of the Egyptians. Writing without the benefit of Champollion 's deciphering of

882-526: The cards (both upright and reversed), publishing La Cartonomancie française (a book detailing the method), and creating the first tarot decks exclusively intended for cartomantic practice. Etteilla 's original method was designed to work with a common pack of cards known as the Piquet pack because Piquet was the most popular game played with 32 cards. It was not until 1783, two years after Antoine Court de Gébelin published Le Monde Primitif , that he turned to

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924-560: The case of Jean Calas , by his work Les Toulousaines, ou lettres historiques et apologétiques en faveur de la religion réformée (Lausanne, 1763). His father was Antoine Court , a famous religious leader of the Huguenots . Court de Gébelin had been ordained a pastor in 1754 before departing Switzerland and remained openly Protestant, a rational advocate for freedom of conscience in Enlightenment France. In Paris , he

966-456: The development of a cartomantic method using the standard (i.e. Marseilles) tarot deck. His work was published in the book Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots and the creation of a society for tarot cartomancy, the Société littéraire des associés libres des interprètes du livre de Thot. The society subsequently went on to publish Dictionnaire synonimique du livre de Thot ,

1008-425: The early 20th century. The fact that we question the Tarot as to whether it be a method or a doctrine shows the limitation of our 'three dimensional mind', which is unable to rise above the world of form and contra-positions or to free itself from thesis and antithesis! Yes, the Tarot contains and expresses any doctrine to be found in our consciousness, and in this sense it has definiteness. It represents Nature in all

1050-473: The eighth card is associated with Leo and the eleventh with Libra . Today many decks use this numbering, particularly in the English-speaking world. By the 19th century, the Tarot was being claimed as a "Bible of Bibles", an esoteric repository of all the significant truths of creation. The trend was started by prominent Freemason and Protestant cleric Antoine Court de Gébelin who suggested that

1092-510: The formation of an occult journal in 1889 entitled L'Initiation , the publication of an essay by Oswald Wirth (Joseph Paul Oswald Wirth) (1860–1943) in Le Tarot des Bohémiens by Papus (Gérard Anaclet Vincent Encausse) (1865–1916) that stated that the tarot is nothing less than the sacred book of occult initiation, the publication of a book by François-Charles Barlet (Albert Faucheux) (1838–1921) entitled, not surprisingly, L'Initiation , and

1134-401: The formerly mundane pack of cards that can usefully be distinguished. It was the Comte de Mellet who initiated this development by suggesting, entirely incorrectly, that ancient Egyptians had used the tarot for fortune telling and provided a method purportedly used in ancient Egypt. Following the Comte de Mellet, Etteilla invented a method of cartomancy, assigning a divinatory meaning to each of

1176-454: The godhead, or between god/spirit/consciousness and profane human existence. Christina Nicholson used the tarot to illustrate the deep wisdom of feminist theology. Santarcangeli wrote of the wisdom of the fool, and Sallie Nichols spoke about the archetypal power of individuation boiling beneath the powerful surface of the tarot archetypes. Now popularly associated in English-speaking countries with divination, fortune telling, or cartomancy, Tarot

1218-466: The intellectual world and a reality of the physical world. The secret meanings of these twenty-two Arcana are then expounded to him. Christian attempted to give authority to his analysis by falsely attributing an account of ancient Egyptian initiation rites to Iamblichus , but it is clear that Christian was the source of any initiatory relevance to the tarot trumps. Nevertheless, Christian's fabricated history of tarot initiation were quickly reinforced with

1260-419: The interpretation of the Tarot as an arcane repository of timeless esoteric wisdom in 1781. The New International Encyclopedia of 1914 reports that Court de Gébelin, who adopted the surname of his grandmother, was a literary man of recognized rank, and rendered excellent service, first as his father's amanuensis and assistant and afterward as a scholar at the capital. He is remembered in connection with

1302-464: The magical and mystical significance of the presumably ancient and hermetic tarot. Be that as it may this activity established the tarot's significance as a device and book of initiation not only in the minds of occult practitioners, but also in the minds of new age practitioners, Jungian psychologists, and general academics. [REDACTED] Media related to Major Arcana at Wikimedia Commons Minor Arcana The Minor Arcana , sometimes known as

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1344-535: The mystical utility of the cartomantic tarot are published all the time. By the early 19th century Masonic writers and Protestant clerics had established claims that the tarot trumps were authoritative sources of ancient hermetic wisdom, of Christian gnosis and revelatory tools of divine cartomantic inspiration. In 1870 Jean-Baptiste Pitois (better known as Paul Christian) wrote a book entitled Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples . In that book, Christian identifies

1386-405: The origin of language earn him a place among pioneers of linguistics. Court de Gébelin presented dictionaries of etymology , what he called a universal grammar, and discourses on the origins of language. His volumes were so popular he republished them separately, as Histoire naturelle de la parole, ou Précis de l'Origine du Langage & de la Grammaire Universelle ("Natural History of Speech, or

1428-455: The page and knight cards; the historical Visconti-Sforza Tarot expands the court with two additional cards: the damsel and the mounted lady. While the historical Tarot of Marseilles contains 56 cards, later packs based on the French suits of clubs (♣), hearts ( ♥ ), spades (♠), and diamonds ( ♦ ) have only three court cards per suit, with a jack (also known as a page or knave) in addition to

1470-407: The publication of Le Tarot des Bohémians by Papus. Subsequent to this activity the initiatory relevance of the tarot was firmly established in the minds of occult practitioners. The emergence of the tarot as an initiatory tool was coincident with the flowering of initiatory esoteric orders and secret brotherhoods during the middle of the 19th century. For example, Marquis Stanislas de Guaita founded

1512-512: The queen and king. In divinatory, esoteric and occult tarot , the Minor Arcana are believed to represent relatively mundane features of life. The court cards may represent the people whom one meets. Each suit also has distinctive characteristics and connotations commonly held to be as follows: Illustrations from the Rider–Waite tarot, the most popular amongst English speakers, divided by suit and arranged in ascending order of face value . In

1554-501: The richness of its infinite possibilities, and there is in it as in Nature, not one but all potential meanings. And these meanings are fluent and ever-changing, so the Tarot cannot be specifically this or that, for it ever moves and yet is ever the same. Claims such as those initiated by early Freemasons today found their way into academic discourse. Semetsky, for example, explained that tarot makes it possible to mediate between humanity and

1596-404: The tarot had an ancient Egyptian origin, and mystic divine and kabbalistic significance. A contemporary of his, Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, comte de Mellet, added to Court de Gébelin's claims by suggesting (attacked as being erroneous) that the tarot was associated with Romani people and was in fact the imprinted book of Hermes Trismegistus . These claims were continued by Etteilla . Etteilla

1638-429: The tarot trumps as representing the "principle scenes" of ancient Egyptian initiatory "tests". Christian provides an extended analysis of ancient Egyptian initiation rites that involves Pyramids, 78 steps, and the initiatory revelation of secrets. Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett write: At one stage in the initiation procedure, Christian tells us...the postulant climbs down an iron ladder, with seventy-eight rungs, and enters

1680-595: Was initiated into Freemasonry at the lodge Les Amis Réunis, in 1771, and moved on to the lodge Les Neuf Sœurs where he welcomed Benjamin Franklin as a lodge-brother. He was a supporter of American Independence who contributed to the massive Affaires de l'Angleterre et de l'Amérique , of the new theories of economics, and of the "animal magnetism" of Mesmer . In a letter from the Reverend James Madison to James Madison dated 15 June 1782 he

1722-436: Was invented. The occult significance began to emerge in the 18th century, when Antoine Court de Gébelin , a Swiss clergyman and Freemason , published two essays on Tarot in his Le Monde Primitif (The Primeval World), a never-completed encyclopedia. In the first essay, " Du Jeu des Tarots " (The Game of Tarots), Court de Gébelin assigned Egyptian, kabbalistic, and divine significance to the tarot trumps. Etteilla created

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1764-424: Was not invented as a mystical or magical tool of divination, but as an instrument for playing card games with a permanent trump suit. The people who published esoteric commentary of the tarot (e.g. Antoine Court de Gébelin and the Comte de Mellet) also published commentary on divinatory tarot. There is a line of development of the cartomantic tarot that occurred in parallel with the imposition of hermetic mysteries on

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