July/August 2005 Cosmic
Tarot and the Occult Revival

by Stuart R. Kaplan.

Any summary of the origins and development of tarot cards would be incomplete without mention of the French occult revival that spread throughout the west in the nineteenth century. Not only did it give an important place to tarot as a magical system, but by the end of the nineteenth century, its teachings had spread to England where it had a profound influence on the development of twentieth-century tarot.

Court de Gebelin in 1781 in Paris proposed his theory that tarot was an occult device of Egyptian origin. After his death in 1787, his theories were expounded to a receptive and occult-minded public by Alliette, the French wigmaker who preferred to spell his name backwards, as Etteilla.

The tarot revival flourished in France at a time when the power of the monarchy was waning. In a climate of revolution and change, secret societies came into favor. In 1813 a form of Hebraic occultism was ambitiously propagated by Antoine Fabre d’Olivet in "Les vers dorés de Pythagore" appliqués, which was followed in 1816 by La Langue Hébraïque Restituée.

In 1856 Eliphias Levi published Le dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magic. Levi, whose real name was Alphonse Louis Constant, was the first writer to link the twenty-two Major Arcana with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He also linked the four suits in the card pack with the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters of Yod-He-Vau-He, usually transliterated as YHWH or JHVH(Yahweh or Jehovah) and used as a substitute for the ineffable name of God.

In England MacGregor Mathers, whose real name was Samuel Liddel Mathers, published in 1888 a small book on tarot fortune-telling, The Tarot, Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling, and Method of Play. Mathers was connected with the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, known as Soc. Ros. and in 1888 he helped to found the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which counted among its members Aleister Crowley, Arthur Edward Waite and the poet William Butler Yeats. Working with Pamela Colman Smith in 1910, Waite created a ‘rectified" tarot pack known as the Rider-Waite deck, which was first published by Rider and Company. Waite also published The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, subtitled Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition under the Veil of Divination.

Crowley also authored a guide to tarot, The Book of Thoth, based upon designs with erotic symbolism produced for him by Lady Frieda Harris. Crowley, who died in 1947, was heavily involved with the Order of the Temple of the Orient or O.T.O., a German occult organization preoccupied with sex magic.

No one knows whether the original concept of tarot developed in the East or in Europe. Nevertheless, the development of the allegorical playing cards received strong impetus in Italy during the mid-fifteenth century and spread to France about the beginning of the sixteenth century. From France the game, utilizing Italian suit signs, was disseminated throughout Europe. In the nineteenth century the French occult revival did more than anything else to create widespread interest in the magical tarot, its profound symbolism and arcane meanings.

Excerpt reprinted from The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume I, by Stuart R. Kaplan. Copyright 1978 by Stuart R. Kaplan. Further reproduction prohibited.

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