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In the essay titled "The Major Arcana" I empha-size that "something happened" to the Tarot inthe late 1600s, when a new trend emerged in theimages of the Major Arcana. I point to theMarseilles family of decks and the Etteilla Tarots

to illustrate my point. Theimages shown by AntoineCourt de Gebelin in hisbook Le Monde Primitiffurther validates this idea.The remainder of thisessay is about exploring"what happened."

Let's review the situationof Tarot in the first half ofthe 1600s. Since the early1400s, both handmadeand woodblock Tarots

showed a remarkable constancy of internalstructure even though some packs were eitheredited or expanded to meet the needs of thevarious games for which they were created.Tarot appeared in 72-card form in Italy around1450, although this model may represents"splice" between preexisting symbol sets: thetwenty-two Hebrew alphabet-keyed set calledthe Major Arcana, and the Turkish Mamlukcards of unknown provenance, a 15th centuryversion of which can be seen in Volume 2 ofStuart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot (see essayon the Minor Arcana).

Kaplan also explains that the numerical order theArcana appear in now is carried over from theFrench pack by Catelin Geofroy, published in1557 (Vol. 1, p. 65). Some earlier fragmentary

Tarots show Roman numerals on some of theirMajor Arcana, but not all of them, and not in theorder we are now familiar with. Those very oldwoodblock decks tend instead to follow the listenumerated in a sermon written by an Italianfriar in the late 15th century (see illustrationopposite page 1 in Volume 1 of Kaplan's Ency-clopedia of Tarot). There is also another orderderived from the Charles VI pack that keepsTemperence, Fortitude and Justice together in agroup. A very small minority of Tarots followthis order, including Etteillas Tarots.

Many of the earliest decks did not show eitherRoman or Arabic numerals, titles or astrologysigils. Some of the images do, however, utilizetraditional scenes and characters from the signsof the zodiac, the personae of the planets andother traditional mythic themes familiar to theculture of the times.

A look at these oldestpacks reveals imagesfrom the persecutedCathar movement as wellas Hebrew, Greek andGypsy occult symbolism.The vehemence withwhich the Church at-tacked the cards and theirmakers only reinforcesthe evidence that Tarotwas the repository ofheretical wisdom pre-served in imagery. Closestudy of the excellentbook called Tarot Sym-bolism by Robert ONeil exposes the falsity ofthe belief that there were no esoteric associationswith Tarot imagery before Eliphas Levi.

THE CONTINENTAL TAROTS by Christine Payne-Towler

MONTEGNASTHEOLOGIA

THE MOON CARY YALE SCAPINI DECK

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The Marseilles family of Tarots began to appearin the late 1400s or early 1500s, slowly evolvingand becoming more distinct as versions werereproduced and a their popularity spread. Thedeck we are featuring from this family is basedon the classical Italian-Piedmontese tarot ofGiusep Ottone, first published in1736. Dr.Lewis Keizer considers this family of decks tobe the best reproduction of the earliest Arcanato have survived the Inquisition (see "TheEsoteric Origins of Tarot: More than a WickedPack of Cards").

ONeil suggests that the Marseilles Tarots wereactually the original "folk" pattern, but sincemost copies were woodblock-print "catchpenny"decks, not expensive works of art like thehandmade decks of the Milanese ducal families,they more easily became worn and were dis-carded and replaced. (I agree to the extent that Itoo think the earliest extant Tarots are probablynot true to the sources that originally inspiredTarot.) This helps explain the uniqueness of the

Visconti Sforza andrelated Tarots, whichhave more in commonwith the Mantegna Tarotsthat the Marseilles.

Most of the differencesfrom one pack ofMarseilles Tarots toanother were simply localdetails entered into thestandard image to identifythe maker and the regionin which the givenversion was produced.But in the early 1660s,

two decks appeared that permanently changedthe look of several Major Arcana. Subsequently,those changes "leaped out" of the Marseillesmold, appearing in the works of de Gebelin andall the Etteilla variants of the following century,effectively obliterating the older versions ofthese cards except in the case of a nostalgic few

Tarot makers who preferred the archaic form.The two Marseilles-style decks that date thistelling change in the Tarot canon are the Tarotsby Jacques Vieville and Jean Noblet, bothParisian cardmakers in the Marseilles tradition.

A Glance At the Cards in QuestionTwo defining characteristics of the oldest Tarotswere a Lovers card that shows "The Union of theKing and Queen" theme, and a Devil card thatshows the image of a traditional werewolf orlamia from European pagan antiquity. After thechange in the late 1600s, those two cards aredrawn to entirely different models, called theTwo Paths and Typhon (or later Baphomet).These amendments to the Arcana can first beseen in the aforementioned two FrenchMarseilles Tarots which appeared in the early1660s. A century later these same amendmentsappeared as illustrations in Le Monde Primitif byCourt de Gebelin, and Etteilas Tarot also fol-lowed them faithfully. By the beginning of the19th century, all schoolsof Tarot used the "new"models despite theirother differences. Ad-justments were made atthe same time to severalother Major Arcana, butthe Lovers and the Devilserve as perfect "mark-ers" in Tarots thataccepted this newinfluence.

In Volume 2 of StuartKaplans Encyclopedia,we have an excellentillustration of the devel-opment of these two"new" Arcana as they appeared in 1660 inJacques Vieville and Jean Noblets decks. Kaplanwas kind enough to put them on opposite pages,and we can actually see the ideas developing.Apparently Vieville liked the new version of theLovers, but rejected changes to the Devil, while

THE LOVERSJEAN NOBLETS DECK

DEVILJEAN NOBLETS DECK

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Jean Noblet went all the way and changed themboth. It is uncanny how they form the line ofdemarcation--before them, only the old formsappear, but after them, entirely new images takeover. It's hard not to wonder "what happenedhere?"

Introducing Athanasius KircherOne way to answer the above question would beto ask the parallel question, "What else washappening in Europe during the second half ofthe 1600s that might cause a ripple of change inthe Tarot?" This question is easier to answer. In ageneral way the answer is "the closing years ofthe Renaissance." But the more specific answer,very relevant to Tarot, is "Athanasius Kircher."One has only to find a copy of JoscelynGodwin's wonderful presentation AthanasiusKircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest forLost Knowledge from Thames and Hudson torealize that this German Jesuit scholar is a key tomany riddles in the history of esoteric Tarot.

In the essay "Kabbalah/Cabbalah," an entiresection is devoted to Kircher's ChristianCabbalah paradigm. It is he who adapted thepaths of the Tree of Life into the form thatmodern magicians and Tarot practitioners arefamiliar with. It is also Kircher who was soconvinced of the Egyptian source of the ancientmysteries, and so learned and literate in theexposition of his ideas, that the sheer force of hiscertainty impregnated esoteric thought forcenturies afterward. And I think it is he who,either directly or indirectly, affected the look ofthe Tarot forever after.

As you gaze upon his illustration of Pan orJupiter, it is difficult to miss how closely the"new" Devil image that appears in the 1660sresembles Kircher's conception. A shift ingender in evidence by Levi's time (late 1880s),in which the Devil gravitates from a masculineform, through a form with attributes of bothgenders, to the final female form, gives us theBaphomet image favored in the esoteric schools

all over Europe. (see chapter on The MajorArcana) If we accept this resemblance as rel-evant to the changing of the Devil cards of Tarot,then we can see the process by which we mightfind evidence in Kircher's work or that of hiscontemporaries for the shift in the Lovers card,and possibly other details as well. Unfortunately,my catalog of Kircher's work is not extensiveenough to let me point to such a striking parallelimage in the case of the Lovers. But even partialexposure to his ideas and images serves toconvince us that Kirchers voracious mind madeitself an expert on whatever it contemplated.

Meanwhile, the article by Dr. Keizer points tothe mid-1700s as a pivotal time in the history ofTarot, because that is the time of the FratresLucis or Brothers of Light. In essence, Dr.Keizer says that the books published by deGebelin and Etteilla, lauding the Egyptian originof the Tarot Arcana, were not original in theirideas at all, but were "already common under-standing in French occult circles, which were

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essentially Freemasonic" (p. 12). Keizer setsforth that the "Egyptian Initiation" manuscriptthat was translated and published by PaulChristian (aka Jean Baptiste Pitois) in 1870 isactually a Fratres Lucis initiatory document frombefore the French Revolution (which started in1789). Keizer does not say at which point theFratres Lucis got the document or when theimages were created for it. Upon exmining thebook Dr. Keizer refers us to, called EgyptianMysteries, anonymously published by Weiser in1988, we find in its foreword ... EgyptianMysteries was probably translated into Frenchby Christian, though not from the originalmanuscript....but from a handwritten copy, manyof which had been circulating in the occult worldfrom the Middle Ages up to the 19th century.(italics the authors.)

These ideas in mind, we can now see a themeemerging: In the late Renaissance Kircheramalgamates the Ari version of the SephirYetzirah with the Pythagorean astro-alphanu-meric code, and the basis for Christian Cabbalahis born. Kircher may have also been exposed tothe Fratres Lucis document, which by then wasavailable to occultists in Europe, and which alsoreflects the Hermetic asto-alphanumeric varient.He declares in no uncertain terms that the entireoccult canon of the Renaissance comes fromEgypt. The stream of Marseilles Tarots showssudden and characteristic changes that couldeasily reflect the mammoth catalog of sacred artKircher both created and commissioned.

The Freemasonic community either picked up orwere bequeathed Kircher's works, stimulatingthe enhancement of the already existing Gnostic-inflected folk Tarot with his fabulous and ex-tremely occult images. Secret initiatory docu-ments would then have been created to furtherilluminate the teachings contained in the images.Court de Gebelin and Etteilla (both Freemasons)each publicized the story of the Egyptian originof the Arcana just as Kircher asserted it. How-ever, the resulting initiatory document, which

became associated with the Fratres Lucis by thetime of the French Revolution, was not revealedpublicly until 1870, by Paul Christian.

Meanwhile, the descriptions of the Arcana inthat manuscript match exactly the changeswhich appear spontaneously in the Marseillesfamily of Tarots during the first half of the1660s. I draw the conclusion that the inspira-tion for those changes is to be found in theFratres Lucis manuscript, traveling throughthe underground stream of the Secret Societ-ies.. And if Kircher himself did not have ahand in mirroring the Fratres Lucis imagesinto the Major Arcana of Tarot, then theRosicrucian and Masonic community whofollowed in his immediate footsteps did.

Tarot historians havenever seen the originalmodels for the changesthat appear in the Vievilleand Noblet Tarots, butthat may be just becausewe are not studying atheRenaissance magicarefully enough. Thetelling fact that theimages first appeared onTarot cards two centuriesbefore Paul Christian'spublication of the FratresLucis document meansthat we have to reevalu-ate the current theory thatthe "Egyptian-styleimages" on some Tarots are late developments inTarot art.

The very first of these Egyptian-style Tarots toemerge after Christian's publication was theFalconnier/Wegener Tarot of 1896. GarethKnight, in his fascinating book The TreasureHouse of Images, tells us Designs for theFalconnier Tarot were taken from original

LE TYPHONAKA THE DEVIL

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frescos and bas-reliefs in the Louvre and theBritish Museum, but they nonetheless retain avery French flavour (p. 20) In the article writtenabout this deck in Volume 2 of the Encyclopedia,Kaplan says "Interestingly, he [Falconnier] citesthe 1760 Tarot of Marseilles by N. Conver [seeVol. 1 of the Encyclopedia] as one that is closestto the 'traditional' Tarot." Perhaps now we canunderstand why Falconnier would make such acomment!

The catalog of Egyptian-style Tarots, matchingthe Fratres Lucis manuscript, also includes thePapus Tarot, the St. Germaine Tarot, the Ibis, theBrotherhood of Light Tarot, Egypcios Kier, Tarotof the Ages and a few others. Thee informationaccompanying these Tarots all create the impres-sion that their images come to us from sourcesfar anterior the first historical decks of the 1400s,and yet each shows the Two Paths andBaphomet rather than the earliest "European"images. We cannot prove such an early date asthe origin of the manuscript or the images thathave become associated with it. But it's clear thatthose who say it's "proven" that Pitois/Christianmade that manuscript up for his book are simplynot looking at the cards themselves.

Dr. Keizer also reminds us that the images thathave become associated with the Fratres Lucisdocument might be influenced by the Isaian/Serapian cult that existed in Italy duringAlexandrian times (until the 400s AD). TheItalians were excavating and studying Serapiantemples by the 10th century (see the essay "TheEsoteric Origins of Tarot"). Kircher spent thelater decades of his life in Italy, and was knownas an omnivorous thinker and student of theworld. Can we really imagine that he missed outon visiting one of those Serapis temples duringhis decades in Italy, when Egypt was his pas-sion?

To summarize, although the temptation formodern historians has been to look at the pivotal19th century and the work of Eliphas Levi as

defining the epoch of esoteric Tarot, upon closerexamination, the situation is not so easy tocharacterize.

A Bit of Secret Society HistoryThe term Secret Societies is used to refer to anunderground affiliation of esotericists deemedheretical by the Catholic Church since the 1100s,made up of pagans, Jews, Arabs, Gnostics,Gypsies and other people of minority beliefs inChristian Europe. The Churchs abuses drovethem into each others arms over time, and bythe earliest publication of Tarot there weresophisticated international organizations withinwhich mystically and philosophically inclinedpeople, including Christians of a tolerant ilk,could associate and cross-pollinate their ideas.

A particularly important group in the history ofTarot is the Rosicrucians (having their beginningin Germany in 1614), whose membership wasalways kept secret, and who were dedicated tokeeping aspects of ancient wisdom alive despitethe Catholic overthrow of pagan Europe. Overtime the Rosicrucians created various MasonicOrders to serve as a doorway through which toattract new menbers. Masonry became toleratedas the only legitimate non-Christian "religion" inCatholic Europe, providing a haven of refugefor alternative thinkers who were spirituallyinclined but would not bind themselves to thePope and all he stood for.

The Order of Elect Cohens (established in thesecond half of the 1700s by Martines dePasqually) is the more recent origin of a lineagewhose members have included many esotericscholars pivotal to the history of Tarot, includingCourt de Gebelin and Etteilla. A century later,this lineage produced The Martinist Order,named after the philosophical stream ofMartinez de Pasqually and Louis Claude de St.Martin and started by Papus in 1891.

So we can confidently assert that, from the timeof Etteilla, the first to popularize a Tarot with

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overt esoteric content in the 1780s, virtually allthe pivotal writers and makers of esoteric Tarotdecks in Europe have been Secret Societymembers. It may prove true that the Tarot isitself a Secret Society creation, although theconditions of persecution under which it origi-nated make that assertion difficult to eitheraffirm or deny.

It is possible to find many books of Tarot "exper-tise" professing to recount the known history ofTarot but that entirely gloss over the SecretSociety connections of the people who havebeen most pivotal in the history of Tarot. Thisresults in a view of Tarot development withholes big enough to swallow an entire esotericlineage! Thus I am infinitely grateful to have inmy possession, due to a simple twist of fate, athree-volume restatement of the history of theEuropean lodges, (called The Book ofRosicruciae, published in 1947) which puts anentirely different spin on the situation.

The author, E. Swynburne Clymer, also assertsthat many of the people whose names areintertwined with the 18th and 19th centuryTarots were members in the remarkable, multi-layered web of connections linking the mysticalintelligentsia of Europe. In his giant Book, hestarts with the publication of the seminal docu-ment "Fama Fraternatis" in Germany, around1614. From that event he moves forward in timewith biographies of all the leaders through thegenerations who were willing to have theirnames go down in history (many more arementioned, but anonymously).

I have been greatly enriched by reading theesoteric biographies of St. Germaine, Cagliostro,Stanislas de Guaita, Eliphas Levi and GerardEncousse/Papus. All these names are familiar tostudents of Tarot, but the public record on thesepeople is in some cases scant, in others distorted.Clymer's information has given me a less lop-sided perception of these dedicated and culti-vated persons. Although some have felt that

Clymer is a less than unbiased source andtherefore his word is not taken as gospel, wecannot correct his excesses or gain perspectiveon his contribution unless his work is repub-lished in accessible form for all.

When I looked for confirmation of Clymer'sexcellent volumes, I found Isabel Cooper-Oakley and her book The Count of Saint-Germaine, (as derived from the Masonic Ar-chives, with all sources cited). Cooper-Oakleyaffirms that a whole cohort of magical personali-ties--St. Germaine, St. Martin, Etteila, Mesmer,Cagliostro and others --collectively representedthe French at the Masonic Convention in Paris in1785 (see pages 108-9). By the end of thechapter she has supplemented that quote withsimilar remarks from other contemporarysources. As in the previous paragraphs, we are

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seeing the names of people who have featuredheavily in the history of the Orders, in thehistory of occultism, and in the history of Tarot.

I find it fascinating to imagine just what thechemistry of those times and this group was like.Some of these people were tremendously contro-versial in their times, in particular St. Germaineand Cagliostro. It has piqued my interest that inthis century, Tarots have emerged bearing thenames of St. Germaine and Cagliostro. Subtledetails on these Tarots point back to this excitingmoment in history when Etteilla, Cagliostro, St.Germaine and their Brothers were fanning theflames of the Tarot revival begun in the previouscentury.

The Older Alexandrian StreamIn addition to the revolutionary reemergence ofthe Fratris Lucis-style images of the Devil and theLovers (among others), the European Lodges alsorevived the traditional astro-alphanumeric corre-spondences of the Alexandrian Hermetic systemset into place by Pythagoras around 600 BC andrevived during the flowering of Alexandrianculture after 300 BC. These correspondences,slightly different from those given in the SephirYetzirah of the Jews, are the only other version ofthe letter/number/Arcana correspondences we canbe sure are truly authentic and founded in antiq-uity. Etteila taught these correspondences in hisbooks published in the late 1700s, but the corre-spondences printed on his decks are a blind. Levimade subtle modifications in the late 1800s, andall the European Rosicrucian and Masonic lodgesused them, with the exception of the English,right up to the 20th century

Etteilla's Tarot became the most famous deck inEurope in the century after its inception. Itsoffshoot, the Catalan Tarot, became the first 78-card Tarot deck published in Spain in 1900,according to Fournier's playing card encyclope-dia. Etteilla-style Tarots became more ornate inthe 19th century (see Kaplan's Encyclopedia,Vol. 1, p. 141-144 and Vol. 2, p. 400-410). A

shortened version was also printed in France atthe end of the 19th century to simplify it forfortune telling. In Italy, the 19th centuryCartomancia was the homegrown response toEtteilla, and that Tarot has made it considerabllyeasier to unscramble which of Etteilla's imagesgo with which Arcana of the usual Tarots, asboth of the sources mentioned below have onlypartial information in their lists, and over twocenturies of reprinting in various countries, theEtteilla cards began to show considerablecorruption in the letter/astrologycorresponcences, making a confusing situationeven more difficult to unravel.

The two lists I am citing to detail Etteillas astro-alphanumeric correspondences are the one givenby Papus in the late 1800s, and Stuart Kaplansversopm in Vol I of his Encyclopedia. Athough Icannot read French to confirm those earlierconnections, I know that Papus was the recog-nized expert of his time and was cited by allEnglish, French and Spanish Tarot writers of hisday. I trust his reporting, although his informa-tion only goes so far as to link Etteillas Arcana tothe more usual versions from the MarseillesArcana. Stuart Kaplan shows a differently orga-nized version of the same set in his Encyclopediaof Tarot, Vol. 1, having taken the trouble to supplythe astrology correspondences from Etteillasbooks. These correspondences became standardfor all of Europe's Secret Societies and theirTarots by the time of Levi.

That would make Etteilla the harbinger of thelate-appearing Egyptian-style decks, whichinclude the Falconnier/ Wegener Tarot, itsmodern cognate the St. Germaine Tarot, the Ibis,the Egypcios Kier and the Brotherhood of LightTarot. All these Tarots bear Egyptian-styleimages (which I stated earlier could be Serapian-inspired, reflected through A. Kircher's syntheticgenius). The texts of these decks reference, to agreater or lesser degree, the Fratres Lucis texttranslated and published by Paul Christian in hisHistory of Magic.

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Again, the numbers and signs printed onEtteilla's' cards exist in their own little universe,as they are purposefully rearranged compared toany previous Tarot ordering. This body ofattributions is a blind. What is true to theAlexandrian stream are his astro-alpha-numerol-ogy connections.

Why Did Etteilla Modifythe Major Arcana?It seems that Etteilla was attempting to realignthe images of the Major Arcana with a Greekcreation story, a later, Alexandrian modificationof the ancient Hebrew mythos of middle-eastern

origin. Recentresearch shows thatin changing theimages of the MajorArcana, Etteilla wasdrawing from aHermetic book, ThePoimandres, aGreek treatise on thecreation of the worldand the fall ofhumanity into Eros.Essentially it's aGreek version of theGenesis story, butwith differing names

and an altered ordering of events. It fits thestandard type of a hypostasis narrative.

The hypostasis is a detailed recitation of thestages that The Creator used to step downuniversal power so it can be organized into atime-space world peopled with creatures. TheKaballah Tree is one hypostasis narrative,evident when you follow the angles of theLightning Bolt as it descends through the plan-etary Sephira into matter. Such presentations area recognizable feature of a Mystery Schoolformat. This is the classic "how the world cameto be" narrative (see A Wicked Pack of Cards byDumett et. al.).

Etteilla's Tarot assimilated the seven days ofcreation theme directly from The Poimandres (or"Pymander"; there are several spellings). This isone of the manuscripts the Moors saved when itwas taken from Alexandria in the sixth century.It was later returned to Europe in the 1500s. Byso explicitly detailing a seven days of creationtheme that is not the Judeo-Christian version, heis waving a red flag, stating without words that"this is not the folk Tarot that can be passed offas Catholic." Perhaps the workings of demo-cratic groups like the Fratres Lucis emboldenedhim to tell his truth, if only in veiled form, andonly in the pictures. In hindsight, he was gettingaway with a lot!

Along with referencing the Greek and Hermeticstream of Gnosis as the source of his Arcana,Etteilla also reintroduced certain themes thatwere present in the earliest handmade andwoodblocked Tarots but which had been sup-pressed through the efforts of the Church.Etteilla put back the earliest Goddess images thathad been replaced by male figures like Hercules(Strength), Mars (The Chariot), the Hanged Man(Prudence), not to mention any extra Popes andEmperors.

To my eye, Etteilla attempted to revive the moreblatant representation of the Sophianic, HebrewGoddess-based suppressed Gnostic and HolyGrail mythos so threatening to the Church fivecenturies earlier among the Cathars. GershemScholem asserts this very theme in many placesin his excellent works--that the Gnostic religionof the Cathars was by no means a purely Chris-tian phenomenon, but instead was imprinted bythe Jewish Gnosticism fermenting locally at thesame time. Remember, the earliest handmadeTarots (from the mid-1400s) prominently featurethe Popess card as a woman in full ecclesiasticalgarb, intimately identified with the Catharheresies. Perhaps by clothing these oldestGnostic images in Hermetic garb, he hoped tocement the link between Alexandrian culture andGnosticism in Tarot tradition. It is too bad that

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the layers of veiling he applied to his Arcanahave obscured them for so long!

Etteilla also put the signs of the zodiac on hisfirst twelve Arcana, although again following noprevious traditional ordering system, but super-imposing his own logic, then claiming it wasfrom the Hebrew. However, as we have seenabove, he was, in fact, working with the Her-metic/ Alexandrian variation, which dates backto the Pythagorean corrections to the Greekalphabet in the 7th century bc.

Reassessing Etteilas Work

Elizabeth Cooper-Oakley's book The Count ofSt. Germaine names Etteilla as a compatriot toMasons and Martinists in his time. We also can

see that he wasusingKabbalisticcorrespondencesthat are in linewith what weknow ofPythagorean andHermeticteachings. Aswell, his Tarotsbecame the mostpopular andinfluential of theworld's Tarots inthe centuryfollowing theirpublication.Why, then, doTarot historiansinvariably skimover him solightly? It is ameasure of his

success as a lodge member that the popular presshas never seen the esoteric merit of these Tarots."Hidden in plain sight," indeed!

It is more than likely that the Etteilla Tarot is the"blind" that the English writers from the early20th century were warning students againstgetting caught up in. I can appreciate the thicketof considerations the Etteilla Tarot raises, appear-ing as it seems to, "out of the blue" and stealingthe show so completely in its century that somescholars of his day feared Etteilla's Tarots wouldpush out all the other decks on the market.

But if Papus and Kaplan are correct, and thesimilarities between Etteilla's Arcana images andthe Fratres Lucis model are not accidental, itbecomes clearer how important Etteilla's Tarot isfor transmitting historical values, like a fly inamber, until we could finally decode them. Hiscorrespondences, both in the images and in theoccult attributions, reach back to an ancientstrata of magic, theurgy and mysticism referingus to Alexandrian sources rather than the olderJudeo-Christian ones.

It is important to note that in the Arcana whichEtteilla chose to rework to his own liking, heshows a high degree of literacy in the canon ofmagical art and the original Tarots. This suggeststhat the portrayal of Etteilla by exoteric history isanother aspect of the "blind" around his Tarot. Forall of Levis bluster about the imperfection of theEtteilla Tarots, it is no accident that a centurylater, Papus would borrow the entire frameworkfor his own Minor Arcana from Etteilla!

One Century Later: Eliphas LeviReturning to Secret Society lore, let us note thatClymer spares no pains in mentioning, amongthose rosters of illustrious lodge members andesoteric scholars, that Eliphas Levi was theSupreme Grand Master of the Fraternitas RosaeCrucis of Europe (with the exception of En-gland) from 1856 until his death in 1875. Thismakes him a distinctly more interesting personthan has yet been admitted by his translators orbiographers. The public perception of this manand his life work would have one believe that hisimportance to the transmission of the esoteric

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In his introduction to Oswald Wirths insightfulbooklet Introduction to the Study of Tarot,Stuart Kaplan states that Wirth was followingLevi in putting the Fool between Judgment andthe World, while in the Arabic sequence, TheFool was designated 22 or 0 (p. 9). This is theone and only time I have seen the Arabicsequence mentioned, but it suggests a periodwhen the astro-alphanumeric correspondenceswere diverted to the Moslem libraries and thereforgotten. After the waning of Alexandrianculture, they reappeared in Europe in the late1600s to effect the correction that theMarseilles and Etteilla Tarots represent.

Levis work on the Vatican treasures stolen byNapoleon made him and his co-workers,Nodier and Pitois, privy to materials that hadbeen out of circulation for centuries already,materials we would give our eyeteeth to seeagain today. Quite likely it was all very care-

paradigm was mostly in his own mind! Somemodern Tarot scholars seem genuinely puzzledthat he commanded such respect from theEuropean intelligentsia of his day, a huge over-sight in view of the facts as stated by Clymer.

Whatever aspersions have been cast by thedubious upon the name of Eliphas Levi, esoterictradition reveals his steadying influence in thechaos which the Secret Societies were experi-encing during his tenure as Supreme GrandMaster. Not only did he serve as Grand Masterfor over twenty of the most difficult years thecombined orders had faced in his century (thesiege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War),but his name and writings were the turning pointfor esoteric Tarot, making it more accessible forthe masses after the century of Etteilla's confus-ing tarots. Clymer also names him as aKabbalistic and Magean Initiate, and a memberof L'Ordre Du Lit.

The books for which Levi is most known ap-peared during his earliest years as the GrandMaster. In them he indicated the Sephir Yetzirah,Pythagoras and Court de Gebelin (among others)as sources for the letter/Arcana/astrological codesand correspondences used within the Fraternitas(Levi's History of Magic, p. 76-7). In an articlecalled "The Science of the Prophets" found in TheMysteries of Magic, a digest of Levi's writingstranslated by A. E. Waite (p. 275-288), Levi laysout his Hebrew letter/Arcana correspondencesvery clearly, with no ambiguity. If his attributionswere spurious or mistaken, there was plenty oftime for the world to critique his assertions whenhe was still alive. But no such controversy evererupted, because these were the common corre-spondences all over Europe and had been so forover a century. Only after his death, upon thedisposal of his papers and the translating of hisworks, did the efforts at revisionism begin.

Levi's Significant Contributions to TarotIt is clear that Eliphas Levi's monumentalscholarship and high status in the Secret Societ-

ies made it easier for his attributions to becomethe standard European pattern from the late1900s until today. Yet a few Tarots continued tofollow the older pattern represented by Etteilla.The switch is subtle, because nothing changesbetween the Hebrew letters, their numbers ortheir astrology. But Levis work and the decksthat grew out of his work show the letter Tav onThe World and Shin on The Fool. The element/planet correspondences with the letters stay thesame, but the Arcana themselves switch placesin the alphabet.

It is possible that while working with CharlesNodier and Jean Baptiste Pitois (aka PaulChristian) on the spoils of Napoleons sack ofthe Vatican, cataloging and translating manu-scripts from disbanded heretical monasteries ofearlier centuries, Levi discovered something thatinspired him to make this adjustment. So far Ihave found nothing among his translated writ-ings which explains this transposition.

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fully arranged to enlist Levi and his student(Papus) when the time came to catalog it allwho else at that time would have known whatthey were looking at? With access to theseremarkable papal treasures as well as to thearchives of the Rosicrucian and Masonicsocieties they each belonged to, they wereinsiders in the most inside sense of theword! (This, by the way, shows one possiblepath the Fratres Lucis manuscript could havetaken to reach Pitois/Christian, although it iscertainly not the only possible way.)

We can now attribute to Levi the pattern ofcorrespondences leading to the decks byPapus, Wirth and the one named afterCagliostro. The lions share of modern Euro-pean esoteric Tarots seems to be informed bythis style of connecting the letters to theArcana, no matter whether or how they spliceon the astrology after the fact.

Reinstating LeviEliphas Levi was not the only person to sufferpostmortem redactions and come out lookingsignificantly reduced in the translation. Ibelieve an unwritten mandate within theSocieties states that when a member comesout with a book, deck or course of trainingthat is too power-packed with the real teach-ings, or if it looks like it might be misunder-stood or misapplied, several generations oflodge members following after them will beassigned to disclaim them. Etteilla disclaimsde Gebelin. Levi disclaims Etteilla. LevisGolden Dawn translators play havoc with him.Papus disclaims Christian/Pitois, and Waiterepudiates them all.

This is all part of the ancient debate over howmuch of the inner teachings should be sharedwith the masses. Built into the Secret Society

paradigm is the notion that our group is privyto esoteric truths that others lack. The Churchwas continually trying to infiltrate the SecretSocieties and criminalize their activities, soSociety members could not freely share theirteachings even if they had wanted to. Manyoccultists were also scientists, mathemati-cians, doctors, inventors and the like whorightly feared that their experiments andinventions would fall into the hands of thosewho would exploit them materially withoutadequate moral or spiritual guidance. (This isexactly what has happened in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, with the rise ofsecular scholarship disconnected from reli-gious frameworks and ethical considerations.)

So even those who were seen by Secret Soci-ety members as teaching the esoteric paradigm(Etteilla and Levi, for instance) felt they hadto resort to a bit of obfuscation, retaining theinnermost secrets for those who had eyes tosee. Even though Levi states in public that hethinks of Etteillas Tarots as misguided anderroneous, in truth he is using the very samesystem, with only the slightest amendments.And neither he nor Etteilla were entirelytruthful about where the attributions camefrom. We must try to keep this trend in mindwhen we see how disparaging the EnglishTarot writers were about Levi just forty orfifty years later (see The English School).

Interestingly enough, both Etteilla and Leviwere educated occultists who would mostlikely have been exposed to whatever versionsof esoteric correspondences were being taughtand used in the widespread Secret Societygroups of their respective times. Yet theychose not to specify that they were eachrepresenting the Alexandrian/Hermetic branchof the Hebrew tradition rather than the consid-

12

momentum.

As mentioned earlier, the crowd that hasfollowed Levis adjusted correspondences,from the late 1800s to this day, places the Tavon the World card, while the letter Shin is onthe Fool (see the essay The Confluence ofAncient Systems). I think we can use thisvariation as another marker to show whichTarots were constructed by Fraternitas mem-bers after Levi and which were drawn fromthe Fratres Lucis document from the 1600s.

For further insight into the more recent eso-teric decks that promote the assignment ofShin to the Fool, see Valentine Tombergspriceless Meditations on the Tarot. Tombergtells us that this correspondence was given tohim from a Martinist-Templar-Rosicrucianconfederation he belonged to in St. Peters-burg, Russia in 1920. The modern occultwriter Mouni Sadhu uses a redrawing of Courtde Gebelins images with Levis correspon-dences in his extraordinary manual, The Tarot.Irene Gads valuable Tarot and Individuationalso teaches this arrangement. I hope that thepublication of these essays within the TarotMagic Cd-Rom will stimulate more scholar-ship to emerge on the European esotericparadigm.

erably older Semitic branch as originallytabulated in the Sephir Yetzirah.

In ConclusionIn light of the above, we can now define theContinental Tarot as comprised of a lineage oflodge brothers collectively committed to thesurvival of the Hermetic/Alexandrian Gnosis,already old and revered at the time of thefounding of the Fraternitas. The first, hand-made Tarots revealed the Hebrew/Cathar/Gnostic origins of the Arcana, but those Tarotswere eventually either lost or misunderstood,resulting in the promulgation of mass-produceddecks with little but folk meanings, taking theplace of the original flash cards for the Myster-ies (see The Confluence of Ancient Systems).

Kircher, the Fratres Lucis, Etteilla, Levi andother Tarot reformers eventually imprinted amore esoteric version of the ancient Arcanainto the collective consciousness. This waslargely an underground endeavor until Levilaid it out in a systematic way for the whole ofthe Fraternitas. We have seen that this streamof Tarots has formed the riverbed in whichmost modern European Tarots (not of theEnglish stream) are flowing.

My meta-theory that underlies most of whatIm working with here is that theRosicrucians, especially the Martinist Lodge,has made it their business to save and revivethe Inner Tradition of Tarot. The ContinentalEsoteric Tarots perpetuate representations ofthe ancient Hermetic/Alexandrian Mysteries,of the earliest proto-Tarots, and of the secretdocuments from the Middle Ages. This is onereason for calling the nineteenth century theFrench Occult Revival. Most sources point toLevi as the figurehead, but the dates prove thathe was coasting on the previous centurys

13

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6 V v 6 V p w p p

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TABLE OF CORRESPONDENCES FOR THECONTINENTAL DECKS

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