Antoine Court de Gebelin

Antoine Court de Gebelin was born around 1725 in Nimes or Geneva, son of Antoine Court, the pastor who rebuilt French Protestantism in the desert years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The son carried the family cause to Paris as an advocate for Huguenot civil rights, and built alongside it a career as one of the great system building savants of the late Enlightenment. His life's work, Le Monde primitif, the Primitive World, ran to nine quarto volumes between 1773 and 1782 and attempted nothing less than the reconstruction of the original civilization of mankind, its language, grammar, calendar, myths and monuments, from the comparative study of everything: etymologies, allegories, coats of arms, agricultural festivals. Subscribers included the king, and Gebelin was a fixture of enlightened Paris, an active Freemason of the Nine Sisters lodge in the company of Voltaire and Franklin, and late in life a defender of Mesmer's animal magnetism.

The eighth volume, published in 1781, contained a short essay that outlived the rest of the enterprise combined. In it Gebelin recorded seeing the game of tarot played in a salon, recognized at a glance, he wrote, that the trumps were no game but the leaves of an ancient Egyptian book, the Book of Thoth, saved by its disguise as a trifle, and decoded the cards accordingly. A companion essay by the Comte de Mellet added the correspondence to the Hebrew letters and described a method of divination.

As Egyptology, Gebelin's essay was already indefensible within a lifetime: when Champollion read the hieroglyphs in 1822 nothing about tarot emerged, and the playing card record, reconstructed exhaustively by Michael Dummett in The Game of Tarot, shows the deck arising in fifteenth century Italian courts as a trick taking game, its trumps drawn from familiar Christian and classical imagery, with no Egyptian connection at any point. Gebelin had performed, as Dummett put it, an act of pure imagination announced as discovery: no evidence, no argument, only the confidence of a system builder for whom every artifact confirmed the primitive world he had already constructed.

The essay's failure as scholarship did nothing to slow its career. The professional fortune teller Etteilla built the first divinatory tarot deck and practice directly on the Egyptian claim within a few years; Eliphas Levi bound the trumps to the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah in the nineteenth century; the Golden Dawn, Waite and Crowley built in turn on Levi. Every esoteric tarot in circulation, and the entire practice of tarot reading, descends from the 1781 essay through that chain. The atlas therefore records Gebelin twice over: as the author of a debunked historical claim, and as the founder, in effect, of one of the most widespread divinatory practices of the modern world, an influence entirely independent of his being right.