Etteilla

"Etteilla," the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738 – 1791), was the French occultist who was the first to popularise tarot divination to a wide audience, and therefore the first professional tarot occultist in recorded history. Etteilla published his ideas of the correspondences between tarot, astrology, and the four classical elements and four humors, and was the first to issue a revised tarot deck specifically designed for occult purposes.

Aside from the death certificate recording that he was born in Paris in 1738, and that he was the son of a "restaurateur", very little is known about him or his youth. [Later accounts imagined that he was a barber or wig-maker.] His father's trade was in concocting "restoratifs" for the chronically ill, broths and tonic salads, "heating" and "cooling" ingredients to correct every imbalance of the four humors; this, with an instinctive belief in astrology and portents of his social class may have laid the foundation for his concerns with the occult in later life. His formal education reveals itself in the limitations of his uncritical and enthusiastic but turgid discursive sub-literary writing style. He married Jeanne Vattier in 1763, a marriage that lasted half a decade, during which he worked as a seed merchant, before publishing his first book, "Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes" ("Etteilla, or a Way to Entertain Yourself With a Deck of Cards") in 1770. "Etteilla" is simply the reverse of his surname. This first book was a discourse on the usage of regular playing cards (the piquet deck, a shortened deck used in gaming, with the addition of an "Etteilla" card). Features included the "spread", or disposition on the table, and strictly assigned meanings to each card both in regular and in reversed positions, characteristics that are still central to Tarot divination today. In his preface, "Etteilla" explained that he had learned his system from an Italian; it remains unclear to what extent his assigned symbology was his own contribution. The book was reprinted the following year. He was working as a printseller, but from this time, approximately, he earned his livelihood by working as a consultant, teacher and author.

In 1781 the French Swiss Protestant clergyman and occultist Antoine Court who named himself Court de Gébelin published in his massive work "Le Monde primitif" his idea that the Tarot was actually an ancient Egyptian book of arcane wisdom. There is no evidence to support the notion that tarot has an Egyptian lineage, but in the credulous stir that followed, Etteilla responded with another book, "Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nomées Tarots" ("How to Entertain Yourself With the Deck of Cards Called Tarot") in 1785. It was the first book of methods of divination by Tarot. In it Etteilla claimed that he had been introduced into the art of cartomancy in 1751, long before the appearance of Court de Gebelin's work.

By 1790, he was interpreting the hermetic wisdom of the Egyptian "Book of Thoth": "Cour théorique et pratique du Livre du Thot", that included his reworkings of what would later be called the "Major" and "Minor Arcana", as well as the introduction of the four elements and astrology. He proceeded to found a Tarot society, "the Société des Interprètes du Livre de Thot"; he produced a special deck for divination according to his schemes, the first deck of cards specifically designed for occult purposes, in 1791, the year that he died, at the age of 53.

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External links

* [http://www.villarevak.org/bio/etteilla_1.html James W. Revak, "Great Tarotists of yesteryear"] : Biography of Etteilla
* [http://www.spiritone.com/~mfilipas/Masquerade/Reviews/historye.html A History of Egyptian Tarot Decks]