At a time when the tarot was still merely a game of chance, one man made it the mirror of a subtle wisdom. Under the name Etteilla, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a modest Parisian print seller in the 18th century, revolutionized the art of divination. Visionary, daring, and sometimes controversial, he created the very first esoteric tarot, laid the foundations of modern cartomancy, and asserted that the cards were the forgotten fragment of knowledge from Egypt. This is the story of the man who, long before Éliphas Lévi or Papus, opened the doors to the hermetic tarot.
The Origins of an Occultist of the Enlightenment
Jean-Baptiste Alliette was born in Paris in 1738, at the height of the Age of Enlightenment. From a modest background—his father was a master roaster—the young Alliette grew up at a time when the appeal of rational sciences coexisted with a persistent fascination for the occult arts. Little is known about his youth. As an adult, he first took up the profession of grain merchant, like his mother, and married Jeanne Vattier, with whom he had one child. Around 1767, his life took a new turn: he separated from his wife and changed careers, becoming a print seller in Paris. This trade in engravings immersed him in the capital’s artistic and intellectual circles, fertile ground where esoteric ideas were also taking root.
It was in this exhilarating atmosphere that Alliette began studying hermetic knowledge. He took a close interest in astrology, alchemy, the cabala, and the divinatory arts. Tradition holds that he learned the art of card reading very early: according to his own account, as early as 1757 (when he was only 19), a revelation came to him concerning the powers of the cards. Perhaps he met an itinerant mentor from Italy—for later Alliette would claim to have been initiated into tarot in Naples in 1751, long before anyone spoke of it in France. Whatever the case, in the esoteric Paris of the 1760s, a taste for mystery and predictions was spreading through every social class. Female cartomancers began reading cards for ladies of high society, and Jean-Baptiste Alliette would soon make a name for himself in this emerging field.
The Birth of Cartonomancy
In 1770, Alliette anonymously published a short work that would mark the history of divination: Etteilla, or How to Amuse Oneself with a Deck of Cards. The pseudonym “Etteilla” is none other than the anacyclic form (reversal) of his surname, a cryptic wink that would become his pen name. Under this mysterious signature, he presented the first treatise on cartomancy ever published in the West. The book proposed transforming an ordinary deck of cards into an instrument for recreational divination—“amusing oneself,” as a way of softening the boldness of the practice. Alliette used a Piquet deck (32 ordinary cards) and presented reading methods that were innovative for the time. In particular, he systematized the reading of cards upright and reversed, assigning meanings to reversed cards—an important innovation in the art of cartomancy. Thanks to this pioneering work, Etteilla became, in a sense, the first known professional “card reader,” earning a living from consultations and cartomancy lessons. Success followed: the work was reprinted, and contemporaries echoed this new fashion for “recreational” cards used to predict the future.
Excerpt. Source
Buoyed by this growing renown, Alliette broadened his occult explorations. In 1772, he published The Mysterious Zodiac, or Etteilla’s Oracles, a collection of horoscopes and astrological aphorisms. Combining popular astrology and predictions, the text reflects his interest in astrology and the eclectic nature of his hermetic knowledge. Alliette readily presented himself as an adept of every esoteric “higher science”: not only cartomancy, but also chiromancy (reading the lines of the hand) and metoposcopy (divination through the lines of the forehead)—ancient arts that he practiced and would later write about. During the 1770s, Etteilla thus established himself as a versatile occultist, at once an author, seer, and unofficial teacher of esotericism.
Curiously, after 1773, Etteilla maintained an editorial silence for nearly a decade. He seems to have been absorbed by his work as a print seller—which he carried out in partnership with his brother—while no doubt continuing his divinatory consultations. For obscure reasons, he left Paris for a time and settled in Strasbourg in 1777, before returning to the capital around 1780. But this calm was only apparent: in the shadows, Jean-Baptiste Alliette was preparing for a spectacular revival, spurred by a triggering event on the scholarly stage.
The Revelation of the Book of Thoth
In 1781, Paris’s intellectual community was stirred by the publication of the eighth volume of Monde primitif, Antoine Court de Gébelin’s encyclopedia. In this volume, a groundbreaking chapter proposed a then-revolutionary thesis: the tarot deck was not merely a diversion, but the remnant of an ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth, containing the symbolic secrets of ancient wisdom. Court de Gébelin—a Protestant scholar and Freemason—claimed to recognize in it the sacred symbols of ancient Egypt, convinced that each major arcana of the tarot concealed an esoteric truth inherited from the Egyptian priests.
For Alliette, this interpretation of the tarot acted as a genuine revelation. Until then, he had confined his oracles to ordinary cards; suddenly, he discovered an infinitely nobler and richer medium: an entire deck of symbolic images, which Court de Gébelin elevated into a key to Egyptian mysteries. In his eyes, the tarot became a bridge between the present and the occult antiquity, a wealth of symbols to interpret. As soon as Court’s essay appeared, Alliette seized upon it enthusiastically: “Etteilla” would explicitly invoke this new theory to rebuild his own divinatory practice. On this occasion, he even invented a term to describe his discipline: Egyptian cartonomancy (as if to say cartomancy through the tarot, bearer of sacred names). This neologism, which he preferred to cartomancy, emphasized that his art of reading cards was entering a new era, tinged with Oriental exoticism and ancient scholarship.
Thus, from 1783, Jean-Baptiste Alliette returned with a series of works devoted to the tarot, which he brought together under the ambitious title Collection of the Higher Sciences. These publications—some of which appeared in Amsterdam, a sign of their international circulation—formed the first treatises on tarot divination ever published. The project was considerable: it involved nothing less than reinterpreting the entire Tarot de Marseille in the light of the occult sciences and Egyptian mythology. Etteilla began with How to Amuse Oneself with the Deck of Cards Called Tarots (the first booklet, published in 1783), followed by several additional booklets released through 1785. In them, he developed Court de Gébelin’s theories, adopting them as his own and taking them further. From then on, the tarot was no longer merely a game for him: it was a book of esoteric images to decipher, carrying sacred knowledge from the depths of the ages.
In his Theoretical and Practical Lessons on the Book of Thoth (published in 1787), Etteilla structured his teaching of tarot as a genuine esoteric course. He explained how each tarot card, renamed the Book of Thoth, was connected to cosmic and symbolic forces. He wove a vast network of hermetic correspondences around the deck: the four elements (water, air, earth, fire) were associated with the four tarot suits, the signs of the zodiac intertwined with the major trumps, and even the Hebrew letters found their place in his system. Long before Éliphas Lévi codified these relationships, Etteilla sketched out a Kabbalistic connection by matching the 22 major arcana with the 22 sacred letters of the cabala. Under his pen, the tarot became an esoteric microcosm: each card was a polyphonic symbol, reflecting Egyptian wisdom, Chaldean astrology, Pythagorean numerology (“arithmology”), and the mysteries of the cabala. Etteilla placed particular emphasis on the heritage of Thoth–Hermes Trismegistus, the scribal god of ancient Egypt whom he regarded as the mythical father of the tarot. According to him, the tarot deck had been designed around 2000 BCE by a college of Egyptian magi who were disciples of Hermes. By claiming such a lineage, Etteilla fully embraced the Egyptomania of his time—this fascination with ancient Egypt that was highly fashionable in 18th-century secret societies—and endowed his tarot with an aura of mystery and archaic dignity.
Etteilla Tarot. Source
The Etteilla Tarot, which he designed in the late 1780s, reflected this innovative esoteric vision. Alliette developed his own divinatory tarot deck, the first of its kind created specifically for cartomancy. From 1788, he had the cards of this original “Egyptian” tarot engraved, giving it the title Grand Book of Thoth or Etteilla Tarot, and obtained the publishing privilege the following year. The cards he circulated combined traditional tarot with new symbolism in a remarkable way: the structure of the Tarot de Marseille could be recognized, but it was enriched with Egyptian allegorical figures, astrological symbols, keywords indicating upright and reversed interpretations, and a slightly modified card order. Etteilla placed the Chaos card first (before the Magician) to symbolize the primordial darkness preceding Creation. He reworked certain attributions of the minor arcana and incorporated elements from the hermetic books. His stated aim was to reform the tarot in order to restore it to what he believed was its original purity, freed from the alterations of time. This boldness would later earn him severe criticism, but it laid the foundations of the occult tarot as it would develop in the following century. In 1789, when his Etteilla Tarot began to circulate, Paris discovered a deck unlike any other—a tarot recreated to reveal oracles, carrying a rich esoteric syncretism.
“Professor of Algebra” and Master of the Hermetic Arts
As he published his work on the tarot, Etteilla gained stature in Paris’s occult circles. He no longer contented himself with writing: he taught and gathered around him a genuine esoteric school. Around 1787–1788, drawing on his expertise in tarot, he began presenting himself under the unusual title of “Professor of Algebra.” Far from indicating mathematical teaching in the literal sense, this enigmatic title belonged to hermetic jargon: the “algebra” Etteilla referred to concerned the art of hidden numbers and symbolic combinations—in other words, the science of numerical correspondences (which he also called arithmology, the esoteric study of numbers). By proclaiming himself a professor in this field, Etteilla asserted his role as a teacher of mysteries.
In 1788, he gathered his most devoted students into the Literary Society of the Interpreters of the Book of Thoth, a circle dedicated to the collective study of the tarot and the higher sciences. Each member was initiated into the arcana under Etteilla’s direction, deciphering the “Book of Thoth” as one would an ancient grimoire. The following year, in 1790, Alliette set his sights higher and founded a true occult school in Paris, which he named the New School of Magic. In this esoteric academy, opened on July 1, 1790, he offered theoretical and practical courses to understand “with precision the art, science, and wisdom of rendering oracles.” In other words, he taught divination in all its forms, with an emphasis on tarot, of course, but also astrology, the cabala, alchemy, and other branches of the occult sciences. It was one of the first attempts in France to organize esoteric teaching institutionally. Etteilla, by then in his fifties, appeared there as an initiated master transmitting knowledge once reserved for a few adepts to a broader audience of enlightened enthusiasts.
Alliette did not limit his influence to his own circle; he was connected with other initiatory societies of his time. Thus, in 1787, the Philalethes—a learned Masonic group founded by Savalette de Langes—invited him to take part in their convent dedicated to the “higher sciences.” His reputation for occult versatility aroused the curiosity of these mystical Freemasons, who sought to compare different sources of esoteric knowledge. Etteilla is said to have contributed to their work, presenting his research on the tarot and probably his experiments in alchemy and cabala. Likewise, it appears that on the fringes of these circles he founded his own Egyptian Masonic rite: the short-lived Rite of the Perfect Initiates of Egypt, established in Lyon in 1785. This rite, with its Rosicrucian overtones and “Egyptianizing” character, belonged to the fashion for high Masonic degrees inspired by Egypt (such as the Rite of Misraïm or Cagliostro’s rite). Though it remained confidential and short-lived, it reinforced the idea that Etteilla considered himself the custodian of an authentic Egyptian initiation, which he claimed to have received from secret Italian masters and intended to pass on in turn. In a 1786 text, he expressed the greatest respect for “true Freemasonry” while mocking the countless degrees and titles then flourishing, judging them closer to madness than wisdom. This suggests that Alliette was not himself a Freemason—unlike Court de Gébelin—but operated on the margins of that milieu, close enough to adopt some of its esoteric codes while preserving his independence as a mystical free thinker.
Despite the exoticism of his teachings, Etteilla did not cut himself off from the realities of his time. As an observer of society, he was also interested in political and social “sciences.” In 1783, amid his occult work, he published a curious book entitled The Man of Projects. In reality, this title concealed predictions and bold proposals for social reform. Alliette claimed, for example, to have foreseen great upheavals to come in the kingdom of France. Indeed, when the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Etteilla was not surprised; he even proclaimed that he had predicted it in The Man of Projects. More than that, far from being frightened by the revolutionary turmoil, he attempted to contribute to it intellectually. In 1790–1791, he wrote a Prophetic and Patriotic Journal, a weekly bulletin in which, week after week, he presented various projects for society inspired by his clairvoyance. He defended ideas ahead of their time—the establishment of a universal pension for the elderly, social insurance for workers, and the abolition of the death penalty—utopian reforms for the era that would become reality much later. These initiatives reveal a humanist Alliette, who strangely combined his role as mage and prophet with that of a progressive social thinker. However, he would not see his ideas come to fruition: exhausted by his intense activities, Jean-Baptiste Alliette died in Paris on December 12, 1791, at the age of 53. His death went almost unnoticed amid the uproar of the Revolution, but the legacy he left to the occult arts was considerable.
Debates and Controversies Surrounding His Theories
During his lifetime, Etteilla inspired as many fervent followers as he did passionate critics. One of the major controversies surrounding him concerned the originality and legitimacy of his occult sources. He presented himself as the holder of ancient esoteric knowledge, acquired long before Court de Gébelin’s publications—recall his claim to have been initiated into tarot as early as 1751 in Italy. He implied that his knowledge of the “Book of Thoth” came from mysterious Neapolitan masters or ancient writings that had fallen into his hands, rather than from Monde primitif at all. However, historians observe that Alliette only embraced the tarot after Court de Gébelin’s publication in 1781, and that he explicitly borrowed the idea of the deck’s Egyptian origin from him. The probable reality is that Etteilla synthesized diverse sources of inspiration: he drew the Egyptian myth of the tarot from Court de Gébelin, the idea of Kabbalistic and astrological analogies from other occultists (perhaps Masonic or Rosicrucian correspondences), and then added his own experience as a cartomancer. Nevertheless, as historian Thierry Depaulis writes, Etteilla was indeed, together with Court de Gébelin, a co-founder of Tarot divination: one theorized the concept, while the other put it into practice and expanded it.
Doubts also focused on Alliette himself, who was sometimes attacked ad hominem. In the 19th century, the occultist Éliphas Lévi—who would nevertheless continue the tarot work—judged his predecessor harshly. Lévi disdainfully described him as “an old hairdresser who had never learned either French or spelling.” This jibe, largely imaginary (Alliette had never worked professionally as a hairdresser), reflects the contempt some scholars felt for what they perceived as Etteilla’s lack of classical education. It is true that Jean-Baptiste Alliette was self-taught, without academic training, in a field—esotericism—where Masonic credentials or knowledge of Latin and Hebrew conferred prestige. His writing style, sometimes digressive and fanciful, contrasted with the more learned tone of Court de Gébelin and other occultists. Nevertheless, Alliette possessed his own practical and symbolic learning, forged through years of solitary work on cards and grimoires. His “philosophy of the higher sciences,” set out in a work of the same name in 1785, reveals an original mind seeking to unify the hermetic arts into a single universal key.
Another criticism directed at Etteilla concerned his treatment of the tarot itself. In seeking to reform it, he freed himself from certain iconographic traditions of the Tarot de Marseille, for which 19th-century purists reproached him. Papus (Gérard Encausse), the great French occultist of the Belle Époque, went so far as to call Etteilla’s modifications a “mutilation” of the classic tarot. Éliphas Lévi, for his part, saw Etteilla’s tarot as an aberration and made no secret of his contempt for this deck with its “displaced” cards. These posthumous judgments were partly explained by the fact that Lévi and Papus, attached to the esoteric symbology they read in the Tarot de Marseille, regretted that Etteilla had disrupted the “canonical” order and iconography. However, it is important to remember that when Alliette made his changes (in the 1780s), no orthodoxy of esoteric tarot yet existed—he was precisely in the process of creating one. His choices followed an internal logic consistent with his sources and his era: he placed the unnamed arcana (Death) at the end of the series so that it would correspond to the letter Tau, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, through a system of correspondences he believed correct. He replaced the figure of the Papess (considered too Christian) with a high Egyptian priestess in his deck, to remain faithful to the pharaonic spirit. The future would vindicate Etteilla on at least one point: the very idea of making the tarot a coherent esoteric system—even if it had to be adjusted—would be adopted by every subsequent generation of occultists. Etteilla had opened the way, enduring the criticisms often directed at bold pioneers.
Legacy and Influence in the World of Esotericism
Jean-Baptiste Alliette permanently transformed the landscape of tarot and Western occultism. He is rightly regarded as the first occult tarot reader, the man who shifted the tarot from the status of an ordinary card game to that of a fully fledged esoteric divination tool. His direct influence first manifested itself through the success of his cartomancy methods. In late-18th-century Paris, and even more so in the 19th century, card reading became an increasingly widespread practice, particularly among women. Famous cartomancers, beginning with Mademoiselle Lenormand, followed in Etteilla’s footsteps. Marie-Anne Lenormand (1772–1843), who was the occult adviser to Joséphine de Beauharnais and numerous figures of the Empire, certainly knew the writings of Etteilla—her elder—and drew inspiration from them when developing her own oracles with modified playing cards. She used a distinctive 36-card deck, but the very idea of codifying fixed meanings for each card and extending them into detailed predictions came directly from Alliette’s work.
The Etteilla Tarot itself enjoyed a long afterlife. After Alliette’s death in 1791, his disciples or associates continued to publish and refine his “Egyptian” deck. Throughout the 19th century, several derivative versions of the Grand Etteilla were published in Paris, helping to popularize this occult tarot among esotericism enthusiasts. In 1807, in particular, the Little Oracle of the Ladies appeared, a kind of simplified version of the Etteilla Tarot adapted for a fashionable female audience. Although this divinatory parlor game appeared after Etteilla, it followed the legacy of his work by offering cards illustrated with prophetic scenes and interpretations that were easy to use. Etteilla’s name thus remained attached to the first divinatory tarots popular throughout the 19th century.
Furthermore, 19th-century occultists built extensively on the foundations laid by Etteilla. Despite his mockery, Éliphas Lévi pioneered around 1854 an approach to the tarot as a “book of arcana” steeped in cabala and mysticism, implicitly acknowledging Etteilla’s intuition regarding the deck’s esoteric nature. Lévi differed in that he returned to the iconography of the Tarot de Marseille and established a precise correspondence between the 22 arcana and the 22 Hebrew letters according to his own Kabbalistic calculations. But the very idea of a divinatory tarot–alphabet correspondence had already been initiated by Etteilla. Papus (Gérard Encausse) and Oswald Wirth, leading figures in French occultism at the end of the 19th century, would also incorporate Etteilla’s legacy. In The Tarot of the Bohemians (1889), Papus discussed the history of esoteric tarot at length and, although he criticized Etteilla’s departures, credited him with being the first to glimpse the tarot as a network of universal symbols rather than a mere game of chance. By designing an initiatory tarot in 1889 under the guidance of Stanislas de Guaïta, Oswald Wirth placed himself within a lineage in which Court de Gébelin and Etteilla were the intellectual ancestors who had “awakened” the tarot to its sacred dimension.
Outside France, Etteilla’s influence traveled through books and cards. By the end of the 18th century, his tarot was known abroad, thanks to editions published in Amsterdam and the interest of European occultists. In the 20th century, the idea of an Egyptian tarot was taken up and popularized by Anglo-Saxon esoteric organizations: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, followed by Aleister Crowley with his own Book of Thoth Tarot in the 1940s, drew on the Egyptian myth of the tarot widely disseminated by Etteilla and his successors. The simple fact that Crowley named his deck the “Book of Thoth” shows how deeply Etteilla’s legacy—transmitted through the writings of Court de Gébelin and French occultism—had permeated international esoteric culture. Today, every history of occult tarot and every tarot-card museum reserves a place of honor for Jean-Baptiste Alliette. His name, Etteilla, is cited alongside the great initiators Court de Gébelin, Éliphas Lévi, and later Arthur Edward Waite—all indebted, in one way or another, to his original vision.
Ultimately, the figure of Etteilla remains fascinating and exemplary. Fascinating because it illustrates the singular meeting between a man of the people—a modest Parisian merchant—and the most esoteric arcana of occult knowledge. Exemplary because his journey traces the birth of a discipline: esoteric tarot. Alliette/Etteilla lived astride two worlds: the rationalist world of the waning Enlightenment and the mysterious world of emerging occultism. With remarkable entrepreneurial spirit, he organized previously scattered divinatory practices into a coherent body consisting of books, theories, and even institutions (schools and an initiatory society). His Etteilla Tarot, the product of his imagination and occult scholarship, opened the door to more than two centuries of symbolic interpretations of the tarot. Even today, enthusiasts of occult history and tarot remember Jean-Baptiste Alliette as the great innovator who was the first to make the cards speak with the voice of the ancients.
Sources:
-
Thierry Depaulis – reference works on the history of tarot, particularly his articles in Le Monde du Tarot and The Playing-Card Journal; a recognized specialist in the history of playing cards and 18th-century French occultism.
-
Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis & Michael Dummett – A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (Duckworth, 1996): a major academic work tracing in detail the origins of esoteric tarot, with an in-depth analysis of Etteilla’s role.
-
Michael Dummett – The Game of Tarot (Duckworth, 1980): a historical and critical study of the divinatory uses of tarot and its founding figures, including Etteilla.
-
Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica) – digitized original editions of Etteilla’s works: Etteilla, or How to Amuse Oneself with a Deck of Cards (1770), Theoretical and Practical Lessons on the Book of Thoth (1787), The Mysterious Zodiac (1772), The Man of Projects (1786), Prophetic and Patriotic Journal (1790–1791).
-
Jean-Baptiste Alliette (Etteilla) – Philosophy of the Higher Sciences (1785): a treatise in which he presents his overall conception of the hermetic arts.
-
Yves-Fred Boisset – Etteilla, Master of Tarot (Éditions Trédaniel, 1993): a popularized yet well-documented biography.
-
Jean-Claude Flornoy – articles on the history of tarot and the iconography of the Etteilla Tarot, available on Tarot-history.com.
-
Jean-Marie Lhôte – Cartomancy (PUF, coll. "Que sais-je ?", 2001): a serious introduction to the history of card divination, including a chapter on Etteilla.
