Introduction to Monique Streiff Moretti: The Isis of the Tarot, or the Birth of a Myth

The Isis of the Tarot, or the Birth of a Myth

Monique Streiff Moretti

Translator’s Introduction

“A subterranean current is awakened by the growing prestige of an unknown civilisation to become a genuine obsession. Begun in a mixture of folk and classical traditions, the Egyptian tale takes shape and develops beneath the sign of erudition. All the ancient and modern writings, unknown authors, are all gathered and methodically commented, to which are added exegeses and scholia. An archaeology and an iconography of monuments, whether authentic, imaginary or false, linguistic, ethnological and scientific systems are all set to the task. It is a baroque architecture in the making to the glory of a fantastic Egypt. The legend of a myth, which was itself a work of poetry and a novel, often reaches the domains of the absurd, and evolves in the impossible. This is why the mythographers of our time have generally excluded it from the fields of their preoccupations, or neglected it.”

– Jurgis Baltrušaitis, La Quête d’Isis, Flammarion, p.13.

Statue of Isis

The phenomenon known as “Egyptomania” is the subject of a growing body of literature, from various points of view, from among which the interested reader may consult the following general works: Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, St. Martin’s Press, 2013; Ronald H. Fritze, Egyptomania: A History of Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy, Reaktion Books, 2016; James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival, a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste, Manchester University Press, 1994; or the following articles: Claudia Gyss, “The Roots of Egyptomania and Orientalism: From The Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century,” in Desmond Hosford et Chong J. Wojtkowski eds., French Orientalism: Culture, Politics, and the Imagined Other, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010 [pp.106-123]; Jean-Marcel Humbert, “Egyptomania”, in Michel Delon (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, vol. 1: A-L, Routledge, 2001, or Antoine Faivre’s entry in the Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, s.v. ‘Egyptomany,’ Brill, 2005. On the subject of the hieroglyphs and their study, one may profitably consult The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition by Erik Iversen, Princeton University Press, 1993. More directly relevant to our subject is Erik Hornung’s The Secret Lore of Egypt, Cornell University Press, 2001. For a scholarly translation and analysis of the myth of Isis and Osiris, see the works Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (1970) and The Origins of Osiris and his Cult (1980) by J. Gwyn Griffiths. Incidentally, Isis Studies is a growing academic discipline in its own right, with a concomitant body of literature.

The study of the influence of this Egyptomania on the Tarot, its iconography and its historiography, has not escaped the attention of scholars, and there are now a number of works dealing with this aspect of Tarot history and myth in some depth. A Cultural History of Tarot (2009) by Helen Farley is one such example. Unfortunately, this work is very uneven and marred by all manner of mistakes. One example, not to labour the point, is that the crude illustrations in volume 8 of Court de Gébelin’s Le Monde Primitif are attributable – “probably” – to … Jean-Marie Lhôte! No one would be more surprised to learn this than the man himself, still among us, at over 94 years of age, although he would no doubt be delighted at this circular turn of events, he himself being responsible for identifying the artist, one Mademoiselle Linot. The article Out of Africa: Tarot‟s Fascination With Egypt by the same author is little more than a descriptive and uncritical list of dates, names and books, without any serious analysis, although it may be useful as a reference timeline.

For an in-depth examination of the origins and development of the so-called “occult Tarot,” one must turn to A Wicked Pack of Cards. The Origins of the Occult Tarot, by Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, Duckworth, 2002; and for a fairly comprehensive overview of the general background and later fortune of this “occult Tarot”, A History of the Occult Tarot by Michael Dummett and Ronald Decker, Duckworth, 2002. These two books, along with Dummett’s groundbreaking The Game of Tarot (1980), may be considered the fundamental works on the subject in English, although they very much focus on the personalities behind the writings on the occult Tarot rather than on the milieu that gave rise to them. Typically, works on the subject tend to focus on the Renaissance and the hermeticising or neo-Platonic circles of the time, rather than on the more pertinent developments of the Enlightenment, most notably Freemasonry.

The book by the Egyptologist, Erik Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt, Cornell University Press, 2001, is perhaps the work that comes closest to providing the most comprehensive examination of the Egyptian question from the point of view of cultural and intellectual history. However, despite containing one chapter devoted to Freemasonry and another to the Tarot, only one line in each mentions the subject of the present article: Court de Gébelin’s singular and seminal contribution, the two essays on the Tarot found in the eighth volume of his Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne [“The Primeval World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World”], published in 1781. The chapter on Freemasonry provides insight into the early Egyptian-inspired Masonic rites and regimes, but otherwise focuses on the figure of Cagliostro, while the chapter on Tarot focuses on later periods, from the Parisian occultists of the Belle Époque and the Theosophical Society to more recent developments. This is all the more regrettable in that Baltrušaitis’ earlier work, cited in epigraph, also lacks a chapter on the subject, as the author of the following piece notes.

A more recent work, Napoleon’s Sorcerers, by art historian Darius Spieth, sheds light on the murky world of the Sophisians, an obscure sect of para-Masonic origin, who had concrete links to Egypt by way of Napoleon’s military campaign in that country (1798-1801). Although that work does not mention the Tarot, and the society in question in fact very slightly post-dates Court de Gébelin’s work, it provides extensive insight into the origins, members, activities and goals of a contemporaneous secret society entirely taken by the myth of Egyptian wisdom. One must bear in mind, in this respect, that the theory of the supposed Egyptian origins of the Tarot is coterminous to that which imputes the same origins to Freemasonry, as well as to the elaboration of the first rites of so-called Egyptian Masonry by the adventurer known as Cagliostro, which we may now date to 1781. (Leaving aside putative predecessors, information on which is scarce and subject to caution, and which will be the subject of a future essay.) Egyptologist Florence Quentin summarises the issue by saying: “The egyptomania of the 18th century and the beginnings of Masonry were contemporaneous, they mingled all the more easily in that the role of religion and its institutions were then being debated.” (Isis l’Eternelle, Albin Michel 2021, p. 187) On the links between Freemasonry and Egypt, whether real or imaginary, one will consult the book by Barbara De Poli, Freemasonry and the Orient: Esotericisms between the East and the West, 2019, especially chapters 1-3.

This is by no means an exhaustive, or even a critical bibliography. One of the most fundamental works on the subject remains unavailable in English translation, La Quête d’Isis by the Lithuanian art historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis. Similarly, an accurate and scholarly edition of Court de Gébelin’s 40-odd pages on the Tarot in English is as yet a major desideratum, despite an annotated edition by one of the leading scholars being available in French for four decades. The translations of the essays by Court and de Mellet by the polemicist Jess Karlin (pseudonym of Glenn F. Wright) in his Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, and the very recent publication of Donald Tyson’s Essential Tarot Writings, go some way to address this lacuna, and generous excerpts are provided in the works by Dummett et al. listed above, to which we may add the new translations by David Vine and Dantzel Cenatiempo. We have already noted that a period manuscript translation by General Rainsford has also been digitised. This is to say that, despite this profusion of works on the subject, there is very little to definitively give the lie to Baltrušaitis as quoted above.

The context provided by works such as those listed above, and especially, those by Lhôte , Hornung, Spieth, and Baltrušaitis, to which we may also add the 2 volumes of Auguste Viatte’s Les sources occultes du romantisme (1928), sheds much-needed light on the manner in which what may now appear as merely “bad history,” conjectural speculation tarted up as fact, or even deliberate mystification, managed to mask itself to later generations of researchers and historians, with the predictable result that it would be first assigned – faute de mieux – to history, and later, written off by mainstream scholars as pertaining to the domain of fiction – rather than being dealt with, as it behoves, as an attempt at historiography, or a fortiori, mythography.

Knowledge of this context is crucial in order to arrive at a critical understanding of the accumulated elucubrations of almost two and half centuries of Tarot literature, which is the point of the following article, the signal importance of which consists in, not in the mere lining up of a series of facts and conjectures, but in interpreting the facts such as they are known, with close reference to the primary text, the sources upon which the author drew for its elaboration, its presiding ideas and thrust, as well as the uses to which it was put. That is to say that it conclusively demonstrates Court de Gébelin’s writings as being the articulation of the founding myth of the occult Tarot.

Portrait of Court de Gébelin

One major flaw in the existing Tarot literature, whether popular or scholarly, has been to neglect to examine Court’s writings on the Tarot within the context of his greater body of work, a most unfortunate omission. Added to this, taking his speculations on the Tarot at face value, or by the same token, rejecting them outright, has also resulted in some equally unfortunate misunderstandings. The purpose of publishing this translation is to present a more nuanced view of the origins of the so-called occult Tarot, and to provide further indications which the interested reader may choose to pursue.

Bucking the trend, mention must be made, once again, of Dummett, Decker and Depaulis, who call Le Monde Primitif “a monument to misdirected erudition” (op. cit. p. 56), an assessment that is harsh but fair, though, as we shall see, it is perhaps the latter who are misdirected as to the true intent of the work. In any event, A Wicked Pack of Cards (pp. 56-57) gives a very brief overview of the work and its content. For a comprehensive summary of the thought of Court de Gébelin in English, one must consult F. E. Manuel’s ’The Great Order of Court de Gébelin’ in the work The Eighteenth-Century Confronts the Gods, Harvard University Press, 1959. Ronald Grimsley’s From Montesquieu to Laclos: Studies on the French Enlightenment (Droz, 1974, pp. 23-26) provides a good summary of Court’s ideas, although citations are left untranslated. We have adapted his opening summary and translated the citations into English.

“Convinced of the universality of language, he proposed to seek “the analogy of all languages,” which were ultimately to be reduced to a single form – “the primitive language bestowed by nature.” More especially, he insisted on the idea of a universal order and harmony in which every particular element had its appointed place. Language therefore, was not the result of mere chance but followed the universal rule that “everything has a cause and a reason.” Moreover, since the spoken word is given by nature herself, “nature alone can guide us in the search for all she has produced, and alone can explain the wonders of speech.” Gébelin believed that with “nature” and “primitive religion” as his guide, he could make an illuminating philological study of ancient religion, mythology and history.”

Another reason Court’s work has been systematically overlooked in the Tarot world is the fact that, by and large, the only sustained attention it has received has been in largely unpublished doctoral theses, unavailable to the general reader, and treating of philology, linguistics and seemingly unrelated specialised subjects. Let us cite a couple, for the enterprising reader: Joseph George Reish, Antoine Court de Gébelin, Eighteenth-Century Thinker and Linguist. An Appraisal, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1972; William Henry Alexander, Antoine Court de Gébelin and his Monde Primitive, Stanford, 1974. For more accessible analyses of this dense work, one must consult Gérard Genette’s ‘Generalized Hieroglyphics’ in Mimologics, University of Nebraska Press, 1995; and especially, Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre’s important body of work, notably, ‘Le Monde primitif d’Antoine Court de Gébelin, ou le rêve d’une encyclopédie solitaire,’ ‘Antoine Court de Gébelin et le mythe des origines,’ in Porset and Révauger, Franc-maçonnerie et religions dans l’Europe des Lumières, Champion, 1988; ‘Le Langage d’Images de Court de Gébelin’ in Politica Hermetica vol. 11, 1997; Un supplément à « l’Encyclopédie » : le «Monde Primitif» d ‘Antoine Court de Gébelin, suivi d’une édition du « Génie allégorique et symbolique de l’Antiquité », extrait du «Monde Primitif» (1773), Champion, 1999; and, in English, her biographical entry on Court in the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Brill, 2005. Above all, let us cite the crucial essay by Dan Edelstein, “The Egyptian French Revolution: antiquarianism, Freemasonry and the mythology of nature,” in Dan Edelstein ed., Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 215-241.

The idea that secular Masonic ideals sought to replace Christian values is one dear to Catholic apologists, repentant (or unabashed) Freemasons and conspiracy theorists of all stripes, beginning with Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme in 1797-1798, Cadet de Gassicourt’s Le Tombeau de Jacques de Molay, ou Histoire secrète et abrégée des initiés anciens et modernes, templiers, francs-maçons, illuminés, 1796-1797, and John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free-Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies, 1798, to name but a few. Although this theory of the Masonic origins of the French Revolution has been disproved in its particulars, there is nonetheless a certain commonality of purpose among these movements and societies that must be examined, pace Albert Soboul and his La franc-maçonnerie et la Révolution française, as shown by Charles Porset in his Hiram Sans‑Culotte ? Franc-maçonnerie, Lumières et Révolution (Honoré Champion, 1998). This is equally true of what may be called the “myth of Egypt” and its contribution to Enlightenment or revolutionary ideals, a contribution detailed in the article by Michel Malaise, La révolution française et l’Égypte ancienne.

This is also the view of mainstream scholars, such as Claudia Gyss, who writes that: “Concurrent with the evolution of views on Egypt from the fantastic to the scientific and Orientalism, Egyptian art also served political functions. […] Egyptian art became an instrument of propaganda, and antiquity became the object of a true cult.” (op. cit., p. 116.) Similarly, Florence Quentin notes that: “All these fables (which relate, as we have seen, to egyptomania) will fuel a revolutionary movement which will seek to emancipate itself from Christian authority by attempting to establish a syncretism which would unify all the cults of humanity. … In its effort to struggle against Christianity all the while opening up other symbolic and religious (in the sense of religare, “to bind”) fields, the Revolution will in its turn make use of Isis.” (Isis l’Eternelle, Albin Michel 2021, pp. 176/191) Dame Frances Yates notes that, “The cult of a Supreme Being, using Egyptian symbols, was the religion of the Revolution.”  Baltrušaitis, for his part, states that: “The Revolution combatted the Church by reanimating the Egyptian divinities” (op. cit. p. 46); “Egyptian theogony became a instrument of atheism, and at the same time, a temptation, and a secret belief” (p. 79); and “Egypt is no longer a myth that rubs shoulders with the Old Testament and which is elevated by the vision of the Gospels, which it prefigures. The Egyptian myth now serves to dismantle Christianity, reduced to the category of a primitive religion. […] Every anti-religious struggle ends in religion. It is less the destruction of one cult than its replacement by another. Christianity being, for the theoreticians of sidereal dogmas, a later, disfigured form of the first theogony of man, the truth is reestablished in a return to the origins. […] A Freemasonic fantasy? Perhaps… but beneath the signs of the times, for all the promoters of these intellectual systems, from Court de Gébelin to Lenoir were Freemasons.” (pp. 307-308.) As far as Court is concerned, as Baltrušaitis says, “by his encyclopaedic spirit and his liberalism, he belongs to the line of philosophers and economists who prepared the Revolution.” (op. cit. p. 28.) Frances Yates will not say otherwise: “Gébelin died before the outbreak of the Revolution but he held an important position in the intellectual world of liberals and philosophes which was moving toward it.” (op. cit.)

Edelstein cogently notes:

“There were two crucial links connecting Revolutionary culture and ancient Egypt. First, Freemasonry had made Egyptian mythology both respectable and popular; in the hands of Antoine Court de Gébelin, it even became the vehicle of the true, original religion of humanity.” (Edelstein, op. cit., p. 216)

“… If the golden age really had existed in Egypt, and was not just as poetic fiction, then it could conceivably serve as the model for future social and political transformation.” (ibid. p. 217)

“Through the medium of Antoine Court de Gébelin, Masonry’s appropriation of Egyptian culture helped redeem the maligned body of pagan mythology. Court de Gébelin accomplished this feat in his multi-volume Monde primitif, a gargantuan study of the language, beliefs, social structure and scientific knowledge of a vaguely defined primitive world, but one which was closely associated with Egypt. (ibid. p.220)

“Not only did he there portray the monde primitif as an embodiment of Masonic social ideals, but he used Masonic symbolism to decipher the mysteries of ancient myths. (ibid. p.221)

The peculiarly mythographic type of subversive undertaking would be further developed by Charles-François Dupuis in his ambitious Origine de tous les Cultes, ou la Réligion Universelle, published in 1795 to Masonic acclaim. Incidentally, Dupuis’ work also allegedly contributed to spark Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign – yet another Egyptian connection, although the political, military and commercial reasons for the campaign remain much more prosaic. (On the Egyptian Campaign, see Napoleon in Egypt by Paul Strathern, Napoleon’s Egypt by Juan Cole, Bonaparte in Egypt by J. Christopher Herold, and Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt by Nina Burleigh. On Freemasonry and the Egyptian expedition, see Les francs-maçons de l’Expédition d’Egypte by Alain Quéruel.) Dupuis, writing in the Revolutionary era, was able to go further than Court had in his critical interpretation of religion and myth. Dupuis, “disciple of the astronomer and Freemason Lalande and successor of Court de Gébelin, is frequently quoted with approval in the freemasonic writings. He also thinks that the base of all religions is exactly the same. It is simply sun-worship, or the worship of nature or the generative forces, born in Egypt. The various fables and myths, including Christianity, are but astronomical allegories, of which the most recent are the most bizarre. In effect, the dominant idea of his Origin of All Religious Worship is that Christianity is but a fiction or an error, a sequence of allegories copied on the sacred fictions of the Orientals. Even more critical than Court de Gébelin, Dupuis describes religions as diseases to be eliminated.” (Helena Rosenblatt, ‘Nouvelles perspectives sur De la religion: Benjamin Constant et la Franc-maçonnerie’, Annales Benjamin Constant, N° 23-24, 2000, p. 146.) F. E. Manuel sums up the nature of their works accurately when he states that, “The writings of Court de Gébelin and Dupuis … are memorable more for their influence – like the revolutionary oratory they resemble – than for their intrinsic worth …” (op. cit. p. 249) Dupuis’ lasting contribution to religious studies, in one way or another, will have been the elaboration of the controversial ‘Christ Myth‘ theory.

Another eminent Freemason and Egyptianising savant, Alexandre Lenoir, would also follow more or less directly in Court’s footsteps, elevating the myth of Egypt to ever more dizzying heights in his work La franche-maçonnerie rendue à sa véritable origine, and in his numerous other works of Egyptology. The works of Freemasons such as Nicolas de Bonneville, Lenoir, Ragon, and the other successors of Court explicitly outline the perceived elective affinities between the hieratic initiatory institutions of ancient Egypt, on the one hand, and the progressive and equally initiatory Masonic values on the other. Rosenblatt (op. cit., pp. 148-149) provides entire pages of relevant – and highly telling – quotations, which only serve to highlight the fundamental  and inherent contradiction between the elitist, esoteric, nature of Freemasonry, and its professed egalitarianism and rationalism. This paradox forms the basis for the detailed article by Michel Malaise, La révolution française et l’Égypte ancienne.  Another contradiction, symbolic this time, is further underlined by Hornung when he notes that the orientation of the modern Masonic myth of Egypt “is not toward the “Beautiful West” of the ancient Egyptian afterlife but rather toward the “Eternal East.”” (op. cit., p. 127.)

Je suis toujours la grande Isis! Nul n’a encore soulevé mon voile! – Odilon Redon, 1896.

As Dame Frances Yates noted in her review of Sir Michael Dummett’s book, “The role of Freemasonry, with its Hermetic-Egyptian rituals, is a force very much to be reckoned with in all this movement.” (In the Cards, New York Review of Books, February 19, 1981.) Further examining the matter, Jean-Marcel Humbert says that, “The ties uniting Freemasonry – which officially drew its vital strength from the sources of ancient Egypt – to Isis are of course very close, as with Egyptomania in general.” (Jean-Marcel Humbert, ‘Les nouveaux mystères d’Isis, ou les avatars d’un mythe du XVIe au XXe siècle,’ in L. Bricault ed. De Memphis à Rome, 2000, p. 171) And as the Masonic historian Gérard Galtier states, “There exists, thus […] a revolutionary element in the Egyptian Rites which is their spiritual reference and their desire for an attachment to a non-Christian tradition. Note that during the Revolution itself, the Egyptian influence affected the revolutionary cults, such as that devoted to the goddess Reason.” (Gérard Galtier, ‘L’époque révolutionnaire et le retour aux Mystères antiques : la naissance des rites égyptiens de la maçonnerie,’ in Politica Hermetica n°3, « Gnostiques et mystiques autour de la Révolution française », 1989, p. 124)

The question then arises as to how and why the Freemasons of the late 18th century became associated in such an enterprise, namely, the reanimation of an Egyptian deity, to use Baltrušaitis’s terms, when many of them were in fact devout Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, and in some cases, churchmen themselves. One must bear in mind that the anti-clericalism associated with French Freemasonry only took off in earnest from the mid-nineteenth century. The schism within Freemasonry, resulting in the so-called Anglo-Saxon and Continental traditions, dates to 1869, then 1877, when the split was fully consummated on account of the French Grand Orient removing the need for candidates to profess a theistic belief. This answer to this question lies both at the periphery, and paradoxically, at the heart of the matter.

One may surmise that perceived deeper affinities between religions of antiquity and the Christian faith led to a certain Masonic form of perennialism, following which the outward religious form was considered but a simulacrum; changeable, replaceable, and ultimately disposable. This notion of elective affinities between Freemasonry and the reanimated goddess, so to speak, or so-called Goddess worship, has even led some to think that the phenomenon was a conscious and deliberate one. See, for example, the decidedly unscholarly but nonetheless interesting work by William Bond, Freemasonry And The Hidden Goddess, which elaborates considerably on this point. The feminist egyptologist Florence Quentin, for her part, will state that: “In Masonry, the goddess always appears beneath the surface, as though it were impossible to get rid of the feminine from every initiation or authentic spiritual path, were they “reserved” to circles of men… […] It is difficult, as we see, in a period in which the Convention has overthrown the dominant religion, to escape symbolisation (which has been definitively shown to structure society), especially if it takes the shape of the universal Great Mother…” (Isis l’Eternelle, Albin Michel 2021, p. 189) The article by Jean-Marcel Humbert, ‘Les nouveaux mystères d’Isis, ou les avatars d’un mythe du XVIe au XXe siècle,’ (in L. Bricault ed. De Memphis à Rome, 2000, pp. 163-188) provides a thorough academic overview of the process of this “reanimation” and its various avatars.

One of the more curious features of Court’s work, which lends a certain amount of credence to the foregoing speculation, is pointed out by Edelstein: “Court’s insistence on the sun and the moon as perfect divine symbols cannot (to my knowledge) be traced back to any prior text, and is not explicitly addressed in the work itself. Their privileged status may be explained by the centrality of the sun and the moon in Masonic culture and practice.” (op. cit. p.222) Indeed, neither Macrobius, who insists on the centrality of the sun, nor Plutarch, who penned an essay entitled De Facie in Orbe Lunæ, report any such dualism.

Further considerations of this type lie beyond the scope of the present introduction, suffice to say that the use of myth, in this respect, could be examined more closely in the Sorelian perspective, to name but one, in addition to that of Lévi-Strauss.

The ultimately socio-political nature of Court de Gébelin’s enterprise is further underscored by Sophia Rosenfeld, who writes that:

“many of the initial members of the Loge des Neuf Soeurs […] manifested a profound interest in prescriptive language planning and semiotic experimentation, moving away from “usage” or “custom” toward an historic notion of “nature” or “reason” as a guideline. Furthermore, the members of this latter group tended to see their plans for improved communication as efforts on behalf of the good of the public as a whole. Indeed, some even argued that rational language reform would ultimately be instrumental in bringing about cognitive and, consequently, social and moral transformations in the future.

Especially important in this regard was the work of Antoine Court de Gébelin, whose home has become the meeting place for the lodge beginning in 1778. Throughout the decade of the 1770s, in a series of massive volumes entitled Le Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, Court de Gébelin had set about trying to rediscover and to catalogue the original, universal mother tongue, the collection of radical sounds and images he took to be given by and representative of nature – or, in Genette’s terms, “mimological” – rather than arbitrary. […] But it is important note that what drove Court de Gébelin in this quest was not simply antiquarianism or a fascination with the burgeoning field of comparative linguistics. The physiocratic philosopher believed that the discovery and reconstruction of this original idiom, or protolanguage, would allow modern men nothing less than a chance to uncover the timeless, natural laws governing human happiness, and thereby to restore peace and prosperity on earth. For Court de Gébelin insisted that this lost knowledge, both visual and aural, would provide the key to the construction of a superior, modern language, one which would aid in restoring the purity and perfection of an earlier golden age in which people communicated without impediment and easily realised their common bonds.” (Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France, Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 113-116)

Baltrušaitis’s concluding remarks are worth reproducing: Egypt, he states, “remains always a composite of singularities, of paradoxes, of rigid reasonings and of poetic falsifications… […] The legend of the Egyptian myth is not only the nostalgia of a Paradise Lost. It is also the implacable logic that rubs shoulders with unreason, and an erudition placed in the service of dreams. The whole belongs to a chapter of the history of human thought gone astray.” (op. cit., p. 321.)

These dreams, as Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre has demonstrated in her article, ‘Le Langage d’Images de Court de Gébelin’ in Politica Hermetica vol. 11, are “a dream of return to a (mythical) past which would become a reality. For Court de Gébelin, it is not only a matter of giving a reading of the symbolism and language of the ancient world, but also of reforming the modern world. … It is not a matter of doing archaeological research by deciphering symbols, but of changing the relationship of modern man to his language, and thereby to the world and to time.” (p. 53)

First published Dies Natalis Solis Invicti 2020 e.v.

Revised Imbolc 2023 e.v.

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• Read the article The Isis of the Tarot, or the Birth of a Myth.

Thomas Ligotti: The Red Tower

The Red Tower

Thomas Ligotti

“The ruined factory stood three stories high in an otherwise featureless landscape. Although somewhat imposing on its own terms, it occupied only the most unobtrusive place within the gray emptiness of its surroundings, its presence serving as a mere accent upon a desolate horizon. No road led to the factory, nor were there any traces of one that might have led to it at some time in the distant past. If there had ever been such a road it would have been rendered useless as soon as it arrived at one of the four, red-bricked sides of the factory, even in the days when the facility was in full landscape. Although somewhat imposing on its own terms, it occupied only the most unobtrusive place within the gray emptiness of its surroundings, its presence serving as a mere accent upon a desolate horizon. No road led to the factory, nor were there any traces of one that might have led to it at some time in the distant past. If there had ever been such a road it would have been rendered useless as soon as it arrived at one of the four, red-bricked sides of the factory, even in the days when the facility was in full operation. The reason for this was simple: no doors had been built into the factory; no loading docks or entranceways allowed penetration of the outer walls of the structure, which was solid brick on all four sides without even a single window below the level of the second floor. 

The phenomenon of a large factory so closed off from the outside world was a point of extreme fascination to me. It was almost with regret that I ultimately learned about the factory’s subterranean access. But of course that revelation in its turn also became a source for my truly degenerate sense of amazement, my decayed fascination.

The factory had long been in ruins, its innumerable bricks worn and crumbling, its many windows shattered. Each of the three enormous stories that stood above the ground level was vacant of all but dust and silence.”

– Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco, 2007

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Jules Bois: An Unpublished Tarot Book and Deck

Translator’s Introduction

Aside from the previous excerpts and this poem, and some casual remarks on divination scattered throughout his works, Jules Bois had in fact intended to write an entire book on the Tarot, accompanied by a full set of illustrated cards drawn by Henry de Malvost, the artist who had illustrated his Le Satanisme et la Magie (1895). This work would never be published, no trace of it is to be found in the archives of Bois’ papers to the best of our knowledge, and the sole mention of it is in an article on the history of playing cards by Raoul Deberdt, published in La Revue Universelle in 1899, and from which the illustration below was taken.

Although the footnote on page 225 of La Reine Zinzarah by “P. Christian fils” (published previously) mentions the publication of such a work, this, no more than the book on Natural and Onomantic Astrology announced in the footnote on the first page of the same book, was not published under a pseudonym, nor in instalments either as far as we have able to ascertain.

With respect to Bois’ archives, divided into two sets and donated to two different educational establishments in the United States, only the collection now housed in Georgetown, the smaller of the two, has been catalogued. One will surmise that if this unpublished book is still extant, then it will be found – one hopes – in the more extensive archives kept by Columbia. 

Henry Colas de Malvost – the aristocratic surname perhaps being a pseudonym – was a friend and collaborator of Jules Bois, and who illustrated works by the latter, such as Le satanisme et la magie. Biographical details on this artist are lacking; no dates of birth or death are known. One reference in a work by Bois, dated 1903, provides a terminus ante quem for his death. Aside from his association with Bois, the few details and illustrations such as we have been able to glean are presented below. Says Bois: “Mr Henry de Malvost evokes the devil himself with his pencil.”

Effectively, de Malvost’s illustrations were singled out in practically every review of the book, and have exerted a certain influence on later depictions of so-called satanic rituals and witchcraft. Furthermore, illustrations taken from Bois’ book would be reused by the Surrealists, including one chosen to accompany a text by André Breton in the journal Minotaure (no. 3-4, 1933).

Illustrations from Jules Bois Le Satanisme et la Magie

Elsewhere, Bois would write:

“Painters, ordinarily so material, have applied themselves to reproducing miracles. … Mr. Henry de Malvost, who illustrated my Satanism and Magic (he is no longer with us, alas!), resurrected the Devil with his pencil.” (Le Monde invisible, p. 316, 1903.)

“The strangest of these innovators was Henry Colas de Malvost, who interpreted with a vigorous inspiration my “Noces de Sathan” and who illustrated my study on Satanism and Magic. His example serves as a link between the aesthetic of the Spirits and that of the Symbolists, for that complex artist, he too, was a medium, in his spare time. (Le Miracle Moderne, p. 163, 1907.)

In effect, de Malvost had provided the décor and costumes for Bois’ play, as well as the frontispiece to the published version.

Les Noces de Sathan, frontispiece by Henry de Malvost. (source)

In addition to book illustrations, de Malvost’s literary activities appear to have been primarily critiques of theatre and classical music, published in the same journals Bois contributed to, as well as a book of verse, Au gré du vent, Vanier, 1888. He also set poetry to music.

The Two Lovers, art by Henry Colas (source)

 

De Malvost’s illustration of Marlowe’s Faust for the Théâtre d’art, 1891-1892. (source)

Aside from the illustrations to Bois’ books, the only substantial mention of Colas de Malvost’s work is to be found in connection to his friendship with the artist Georges (i.e. Marie-Mathilde) de Peyrebrune. Indeed, some of his paintings depicting de Peyrebrune are preserved in the museum of art & archaeology of Périgueux.

The relevant passages from the article on the history of playing cards and the Tarot by Raoul Deberdt, published in La Revue Universelle in 1899, is translated and reproduced below, along with an image of the Tarot card drawn by Henry de Malvost, the sole traces of either this deck or Bois’ Tarot book we have been able to discover:

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“The old Tarot of the philosophers was crying out to be entirely renewed: in its deepest symbols, of an incomparable moral beauty, artist-thinkers will find the raw material upon which to exercise their genius. Already now, the warm feminist apostle and occultist, Mr Jules Bois, aided by the subtle artist H. De Malvost, will publish an excellent illustrated commentary on the Tarot, of which we have the good fortune to be able to reproduce an as-yet unpublished engraving. Mr Bois’ work will be a very reliable guide for those artists who would wish to penetrate the arcana of the antique mystery in order to find therein the fertile formulas of scientific mysticism. The austere Tarot may be gentrified and gallantified to infinity, and what more proof do we need than the charming Balsamo deck (pub. Wattillaux, publisher-cardmaker), whose plates date from the 18th century, and in which all the allegories of the ancient deck of the Persian or Chaldean mages will be found translated into delectable scenes of gallantry after the style of Lawrence, Baudouin, or Fragonard.”

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Six of Cups, from the Tarot deck drawn by Henry de Malvost

Note:

The so-called Balsamo deck, published by the cardmaker Wattillaux, refers to Giuseppe Balsamo, the Italian adventurer who styled himself Count Cagliostro and who developed the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry. Presumably “Balsamo” (i.e. Cagliostro) is being used here as a general term for the various “Egyptian” Tarots, pointing to the heavily Egyptianized “Jeu de la Princesse“ Tarot that first appeared in an 1843 work by Johannès Trismégiste (aka Lorambert). Wattillaux acquired the rights to this deck a few years later and continued printing it for the remainder of the 1800s. The mention of the plates dating to the 18^th century also presumably refers back to Etteilla, given that, technically, the “Jeu de la Princesse” Tarot is a type of Grand Etteilla deck. (Thanks to J.C.)

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Iwan Gilkin: Golden Stanzas

Introduction

The overlapping circles between the arts and the occult find themselves becoming almost concentric diagrams among the so-called Decadent writers of the French persuasion in the late 19th century, emphasising the elective affinities between these two domains. While authors such as J.-K. Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Barbey d’Aurevilly remain well known, there are others who have undeservedly fallen into the oblivion of neglect with the passage of time.

One such artist is the Belgian Symbolist poet Iwan Gilkin (1858-1924). During his lifetime, Gilkin was fêted as the Belgian Baudelaire, due to his ability to weld a dark sensibility to precise formal structures and a concern for elegant poetic expression. His chief works include the poetry anthologies La Nuit (Night), Les ténèbres (The Darkness) and a number of plays.

A contemporary critic of his depicts the character as follows:

Iwan GILKIN

“A dark Raphael, it has been said. No one has better incarnated the struggle of good and evil, or darkness and light, of ugliness and beauty than he. The poet of sorrow, the cross-bearer of an ageing, accursed world. The brain of a mathematician and the soul of a prophet. Deep down, a rebellious believer and a terrible justicier.” – Valère Gille, 1894.

Closer to our concerns, however, is Gilkin’s early and scarce booklet, Stances dorées. Commentaire sacerdotal du Tarot. Paris, Chamuel ; Bruxelles, Lacomblez, 1893 – the Golden Stanzas: a Sacerdotal Commentary on the Tarot, published in Paris & Brussells in 1893. This booklet was never republished during the poet’s lifetime nor compiled in the various anthologies of Gilkin’s work. A small-press French republication was issued in 2018, courtesy of Éther & Égrégore Éditions, but this edition is no longer available.

By all accounts, Gilkin’s interest in the occult was no affectation, and his private library contained a great many works of the last rarity, making him, after a fashion, the Belgian counterpart of Stanislas de Guaita. While de Guaita’s occult works have eclipsed his poetry, Gilkin is considered as a poet with an interest in the occult rather than an occultist poetaster.

A reviewer of the time, presumably Paul Chacornac, wrote:

Mr Iwan Gilkin has written a rhyming paraphrase of the Initiatory Tarot. The work is as simple and great as it is useful. The author, following each card in turn, each of the twenty-two major arcana, translates the esoteric teachings into quatrains. It is a pure joy to add to the literature of modern esotericism.

Gilkin’s stanzas are occasionally mentioned in the occult and Tarot literature of the time, for instance, in Bourgeat’s oft-reprinted classic, Le Tarot. More recently, the only mention of this rare little booklet is to be found in a Russian work, by one Shmakov, presumably following Bourgeat, and by extension, in Dummett, Decker & Depaulis’ Wicked Pack of Cards (1996), which provides an overview of the spread of these ideas and influences.

A review of the 2018 edition of Gilkin’s poems reads as follows:

Small in size but great in terms of the originality of its composition, this book by Iwan GILKIN, accompanied by 22 engravings bears the following title, evocative with poetry: Golden Stanzas. Inspired by the “Divinatory Tarot” of Papus on the one hand, and by “The Tarot, the Hebrew Alphabet and Numbers” by Marc Haven, on the other, the author, a Belgian poet and playwright, journalist and literary critic, has illustrated the 22 major arcana of the Tarot by quatrains (of pure classical poetry and respecting the strict rules of French prosody). And this is no simple game of wits, for these quatrains contain hermetic, magical or alchemical references, which evoke the secret world of the initiatory tradition.

To qualify these stanzas as “golden” inevitably evokes the “Golden Verses” of Pythagoras, another high point of sacred knowledge. And this parallel by Iwan GILKIN cannot be the sole fruit of random chance…

These stanzas, which apply successively to the mysterious arcana of the Tarot, should be recited in a low voice so that each word may be impressed upon the heart of the seeker, who has the graphical representation of each arcana beneath his eyes, facing the stanza it has inspired.

– Yves-Fred Boisset, L’Initiation, n 4, 2018.

One will note how the reviewer has identified two of Gilkin’s ‘sources of inspiration,’ namely, the works by Papus and Marc Haven, the former of which is available in English translation. Yet there are others, and a future instalment will consider another highly obscure work of Tarological philosophy which also served as the basis for some of Gilkin’s ideas.

Curiously, an English translation of some of these poems appeared in 2006, courtesy of the renowned poet-translator James Kirkup (1918-2009). In effect, Kirkup produced a limited edition chapbook containing a selection of Gilkin’s poems, including some of the Golden Stanzas, A pilgrimage in hell : a selection of poems by Iwan Gilkin, translated by James Kirkup, Hub Editions, 2006. This edition, like the original, is now extremely rare.

James Kirkup

Kirkup’s “qualifications” for translating such a work are unusual. If, in effect, he translated a significant amount of French poetry in his voluminous body of work, it is worth mentioning that he also translated the now classic work of Tarot pseudo-history, Paul Christian’s History and Practice of Magic, Citadel Press, 1969. The attentive reader will by now know that Christian’s chief source in this respect was his own fictional account of the Egyptian genesis of the Tarot as given in his novel, L’Homme Rouge des Tuileries, alongside his fabricated reference to a non-existent passage in Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis. A comprehensive obituary and biography of Kirkup may be read here.

As with a number of older Tarot-related booklets, pamphlets and journals, once again, our experience shows that works of this size are often to be found bound in with others, and often incorrectly or incompletely catalogued, rendering discovery difficult.

One will note the use of the Conver deck as the basis for the accompanying illustrations (see the VT inscription on the shield on the Chariot VII). One will also note the presence of letters of the Hebrew alphabet (top and top right hand corner) and astrological glyphs (bottom right hand corner). Indeed, Gilkin’s Tarot images seem to be copied directly from Papus’ Le Tarot des Bohémiens. In the original 1889 edition, Papus includes pictures of Oswald Wirth’s Tarot and what appears to be a Camoin edition of Nicolas Conver’s Tarot with Hebrew letters and astrological symbols added to some, but not all, of the cards. Papus’ correspondences (and thus Gilkin’s) conform to Eliphas Lévi’s second system (first described in 1861).

The original French booklet may be downloaded here as a PDF file. stances dorees

View this document on Scribd

We present here four of Gilkin’s twenty-two stanzas followed by their English translations by Kirkup.

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Golden Stanzas

Iwan Gilkin

English translation by James Kirkup

 

2018 edition

I
LE BATELEUR

Un principe, une loi: sache que l’Être est l’Être.

Le Supérieur est comme l’Inférieur.

Sois toi-même et toi seul. Apprends à te connaître.

Reflet du Tout-Puissant, reflète sa splendeur.

I
EQUILIBRIST

One principle, one law: know that Being is Being.

Superior stands with Inferior.

Be thyself, thyself alone. By thyself learn the truth.

Mirror of the All-Powerful, reflect his splendeur.

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XII

LE PENDU

Tu mourras pour la foi dont tu prêches le règne.

Veux-tu vivre, tais-toi! Si tu parles, péris!

Mets le feu dans la terre, et que la terre craigne

Le Grand-Oeuvre est Phénix: il naît de ses débris.

XII

THE HANGED MAN

Thou shalt die for the faith whose reign thou shalt establish.

If thou wouldst live, hold thy peace. Shouldst thou speak, perish!

Set fire to the earth, that the earth may quake with fear!

The Great Work – Phoenix: it rises from its ashes.

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XV


LE DIABLE

Si ton dieu n’est pas Dieu, tu ne sers que le diable.

Tout désordre est Satan; c’est le feu dévorant.

N’affronte point sa foudre ou sois invulnérable,

Mais le mal n’est que l’ombre où dort le Dieu vivant.

XV

THE DEVIL

If thy god is not God, thou but servest the devil.

Thy disorders are Satan; the devouring fire.

Be invulnerable, or confront not his lightnings.

Evil is but the shadow where the living God sleeps.

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XXII

LE MONDE

Au cœur du monde gît la couronne des Mages.

C’est l’éternel repos de l’éternel souhait.

Du centre du Soleil, délivré des nuages,

Le Mage parfait sait, ose, veut et se tait.

XXII

THE WORLD

At the world’s heart there lies the crown of the Magi.

The eternal refuge of the eternal vow.

From the heart of the Sun, delivered from the clouds,

The perfect Magus knows, dares, desires, is silent.

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Antoine Faivre: Preface to Tarots, engravings by Yves Jobert and Arcanes, a poem by Jean Pothier

Translator’s Introduction

The name of Antoine Faivre (1934-2021) may not be unfamiliar to readers of these pages, now that many of the works of the eminent French scholar of esotericism are available in English. A lengthy overview of Faivre’s life and work by Wouter J. Hanegraaff may be read here. Faivre did not write about the Tarot in any great detail, with the notable exception of a brief essay – perhaps the outline for a longer planned work – “Reflections on the Various Uses of Tarot” in: Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Georgiana D. Hedesan, Tim Rudbøg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 – and the following piece.

In effect, given that the first anniversary of Faivre’s death has just passed, it is not without interest to consider one of his few writings on the Tarot, his preface to an artistic portfolio containing copperplate engravings of Tarot images by Yves Jobert (b.1930) accompanied by a series of poems by Jean Pothier, entitled “Arcanes”. This work, “Tarots”, was produced in 1973 by Alain Weil as a large format portfolio of prints, in an edition of 50 copies, plus 12 copies hors commerce.

Thanks to Bill Wolf

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Preface to Tarots, engravings by Yves Jobert and Arcanes, a poem by Jean Pothier

Antoine Faivre

 

The spectator-reader would be highly mistaken in considering the book by Yves Jobert as being a mere variation on a known theme. First of all, the Tarot is not a theme, a formal code with mathematically limited operative possibilities, a game of the seven families or of twenty-two pieces, or of capricious ludions, enclosed within on itself, referring but to itself. Its signification, immense but justified by Tradition – and by experience – raises it up to the status of speculum universi: there is but astrology to claim, on the same basis, to encompass the entire universe, beginning with the one which abides within man, so much so is it true that within and without constitute but the same reality. It is therefore not a mathematical exercise but rather one of style, if we understand this to mean the ultimate harmonic, the goal of our quest, there where the platonic spheres play the harmony of the world around a ring which is perhaps that of this book: a book eternally open to the eyes of the man of desire who will find there, if he so wishes, the golden chain of Homer, or Jacob’s ladder, its dynamic representation, the length of which he shall ascend – but descend too, in an alternating rhythm from Above to Below and from Below to Above, a polar rhythm which underpins that of all true life, which is that of the angels.

The kingdom of heaven is within us. But in order to enter into it, we must first rid ourselves of our logical tics, of the solar imperialism of a schizomorphic culture from which the symbol has been evacuated with loss and destruction, or flattened by the iconoclastic steamroller. We must allow these images to vibrate within us, watch them organise themselves into constellations of meaning, listen to them call to each other and answer each other in the space that is their own and which is reducible to no other. We shall then see that they express the syntax of our psyche, reply to our most arduous questions for they present themselves, in the end, akin to a technique of illumination capable of melting all the blockages which poison the channels joining the conscious to the unconscious, the body to the mind, the will to action, desire to reality.

Modern art, all too often, merely trots after the steeds of intellectual and spiritual debacle, whether emasculated, it contents itself with anaemically abstract forms, or whether neurotic, it contemplates its sterile poverty in the narcissistic basin of its existentialist obsessions. The intermediary or royal way is abandoned, for along with the requirement of talent we could add that of modesty. Yves Jobert has undertaken this path in the certainty that faithfulness to Tradition is no arbitrary limitation, but a springboard for all genuine art which consists less in finding than in rediscovering what has been submerged by individual and cosmic cataclysms, less in imposing discoveries than in colouring with one’s own vision what, without the artist’s gaze, would remain opaque. If man is not a solitary animal devoid of meaning, we would expect images he projects and in which he finds himself, that they reflect an order, that of the great archetypes, the primordial myths, the mundus imaginalis. The builders of the cathedrals left the specific mark of their own genius in stone, but they all referred to the same message. Yves Jobert, with this book, has done no differently, and I wager that this work will largely tower above the stagnant level of the innumerable little broken mirrors in which only the anti-image is reflected, that of fragmentation or of powerlessness.

The poem by Jean Pothier chants this symbolic spiral: it embraces its contours, follows or precedes its movement, after the fashion of an alchemical music, that is, like Hippomenes in pursuit of a fleeing Atalanta. Jean Pothier, through his verses, breathes a mercurial principle into the Sulphur of the work: it remains for the reader to spot the invisible Salt born of this union, by looking at the three golden apples of Hippomenes roll; in so doing, they will have thereby raised a corner of the veil, for they are those of the gardens of the Hesperides.

– Antoine Faivre

***

Alexandro Jodorowsky: The Esotericism of Alexandro Jodorowsky

Translator’s Introduction

It may well be superfluous to attempt to introduce Alejandro Jodorowsky to readers of this blog, given the tremendous influence he has exerted on the study and practice of the Tarot for the past five decades. Although the fruits of his studies were synthesised and published as The Way of Tarot, his earlier tarological experiments are not without interest. These are to be found in a number of articles and interviews published in French magazines during the 1970s. By way of example, we present here one such piece, which gives some insight into the man and his method of working with the Tarot. This article was first published in L’Inconnu, no. 33, 1978.

***

The Esotericism of Alexandro Jodorowsky

To see and clearly interpret the life of an individual using the sole means of a deck of Tarot cards is no easy task. But to do so over the telephone is a sign of mastery!

Yet that is what Alexandre Jodorowsky managed to do last August, over the airwaves of France-Inter. For over an hour, he was in telephone contact with the listeners, and gave them some readings gripping with truth.

The magazine L’Inconnu has wished, for its readers, to know more about a man capable of such a feat, and a team of journalists went to meet Alexandre Jodorowsky, that is to say, in his apartment, very close to the Bois de Vincennes.

Upon our arrival at his home, Alexandre Jodorowsky invites us to remove our shoes, and to sit next to him on the floor. Clearly, this man lives in the Oriental style; there are indeed a couple of chairs in the room, but one feels that they are there only for those who could not do without.

Immediately, we attempt to get a feel for the character:

“Who are you, Mr Jodorowsky?”

A.J.: “I am a man of the cinema. I directed, some years ago, the films “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain.” These films were an alchemical quest, but above all, an essay on the Tarot… At that time, I explained the Tarot, but I was not the Tarot. I mean to say that I had not yet fully understood it. Today, ten years have since passed. Ten years of studying the Tarot, which have enabled me to find myself. I am Chilian in origin, but I have left my country for many years now.”

Suddenly, simply by glancing around the room, something becomes very clear: our questions are useless… All their answers are visible in this room. On the wall, Tarot cards form a strange drawing (a mandala?), on the coffee table, the Zohar sits alongside Paul Marteau’s excellent work on the Tarot. From where we are seated, we can glimpse some of the books contained on Alexandro Jodorowsky’s bookshelves. Everything is there. A maximum of fundamental works devoted to the world of the occult and spirituality. Everything is there: Tao, Zen, alchemy, magic. All these works are arranged and each shelf holds one book dealing with the Tarot, as though to indicate the relation between it and the entirety of occult and spiritual philosophy. All this seems to be due to neither random chance nor to a concern with artistic fantasy. This classification, this decoration, all this is ritual, meaningful… Our questions, prepared in advance, no longer seem suited to the occasion. So, we wait.

“To complete my answer, continues Alexandre Jodorowsky, I could tell you, I am a little of this, I have done a little of that, but the only way to truly define myself today is to say that I am akin to a deck of Tarot cards.”

Alexandre Jodorowsky tells us all this naturally, without a hint of irony. Then, he immediately continues and explains what he means by these words. As he speaks, we discover a true philosopher of the occult, a man who does not content himself with studying the occult. A man who understands it, thinks it, practices it, lives it… In a word, a “master” or at least, someone who has found the path of a certain mastery… And he speaks. He speaks of the Tarot, of man, and the occult world, of the world of magic, and the veil of the mysteries is raised a little.

The Path according to Jodorowsky

For you, dear readers, we have gathered the teachings of Alexandre Jodorowsky. We hope to not betray this teaching by condensing it in order to transmit it.

“The Tarot, continues A. Jodorowsky, is everything and nothing. The Tarot is man: it is the man who has memorised and understood the meaning of the 78 arcana. Unfortunately, very few are those who have managed to do so. In the Tarot, there is nothing and there is everything. It is the Spanish Inn in which there is yourself and all that you have been able to bring along with you.

That is why, the majority of those who have written about the Tarot have in reality only written about themselves. All those who have drawn a Tarot deck have projected their personality onto the 78 cards. The Tarot is the man who drew it, for he alone can memorise and understand the meaning of the 78 cards that he has created.

Consider an example:

You know what a mantra is. Certain Asians will repeat them up to 100,000 times in a row. But, in reality, what are they repeating? Words considered since forever as being “sacred.” But these words have no concrete meaning for the man who uses them. Let us take one of these men and teach him a mantra elaborated from his own name. That man will quickly notice that his name is, for him, the very best of all mantras that he might recite. In effect, our name signifies something very powerful in our life, in our unconscious universe. Sometimes, through ignorance of this law, it happens that there are beings who do not like their name; it is then not unusual to find these beings depressed without obvious cause.

Each being must be capable of giving a spiritual significance to his own name. This could be done by directing the name, by seeking out what sacred word might be composed from the letters of one’s own name, by reworking this name in every possible way to articulate one’s “own mantra.” When this has been achieved, the unconscious perception becomes powerful with positive vibrations.

Our name is a raw matter comparable to the raw alchemical matter. This raw material is not perceived by our conscious being. By working on our anagram, we can discover the secret of our name.

This is no vain work, for the unconscious only uses symbols. Thus, by discovering the secret of one’s own name, man becomes the creator of his name, and his name takes on a sacred significance. In the same way, the one who works with the Tarot cards discovers himself with them for the Tarot is a mirror.

The man who works with the Tarot gives a meaning to each card. A meaning which is the reflection of an aspect of his personality. Then, he memorises the image and the meaning of each card, and winds up by finding himself through the meaning he has given to the 78 arcana. In this way, he creates the Tarot, or rather, his own Tarot, just as the person we mentioned earlier has created his own name from a handful of “symbol syllables.”

The Holy Mountain

We listen, highly interested. Jodorowsky now explains his path. He shows all of its aspects by a series of snapshots. We do not interrupt him, except to ask him to specify an idea, or to interpret what he has said.

“My film, “The Holy Mountain,” wished to retrace a Zen itinerary, and what is Zen? The one who follows the way of archery practices Zen. The Japanese art of flower arrangement, that is Zen. The tea ceremony, that is Zen. Master Deshimaru teaches Zen meditation in Paris, and that is Zen. At his request, I myself, in 1977, in a Japanese restaurant, taught a Zen monk the use of the Tarot. That monk found a deep resemblance between the symbolism of the Tarot and Buddhist symbolism. In the end, reading the Tarot, which is a very French thing, since the oldest known Tarot decks were discovered in France (Tarot of Marseilles), is perhaps Zen… In the end, every spiritual quest is a quest for centralisation. To be able to centre oneself around an essential emptiness which is not empty but constant action…the quest for the spiritual centre of the being. This is by no means original, but originality is no criterion of truth. For my part, I think that when a person pursues a spiritual path, they know that they are on the right path when they have lost all originality, when they say what everyone says… So, today, in this superficial path that is the artistic path, the more the work is original, the more we consider that it is close to genius… Yet one must not forget that the artists of ancient Egypt spent an enormous quantity of centuries doing the same thing as each other. So, an artist became an accomplished artist only when he managed to be exactly the same as everyone else… Why? Because the art of ancient Egypt aimed at an essential truth, one that was thereby immutable.

Immutable like the Tarot itself, this Tarot which is the point of departure of the spiritual path of Alexandre Jodorowsky…

“It is the Tarot itself which brought me to the Tarot. One day, I found myself in front of a deck of Tarot cards, and I began my quest. It was not a Tarot of Marseilles, moreover, it was the Tarot of Waite, which is the best-known deck in America and the Anglo-Saxon countries. I then passed through a few other decks before adopting the classic model of the Tarot of Marseilles.

The Tarot of Marseilles is, in my opinion, the best one can find; but we are here dealing with one of the strangest points of the history of the Tarot.”

200 Years of Errors

You know, for the past 200 years, the history of the tarot is the history of an error… An error which begins with the person who first denied the esotericism of the Tarot of Marseilles, and claimed that it was an esoteric Tarot. Then, some men, famous occultists, set out to create their own Tarot decks. These Tarot decks are bearers of a certain intellectual knowledge, of a certain application of knowledge, but they are not magical. At least, they are not magical in the good sense of the term. Therefore, if you memorise the Tarot decks of the Golden Dawn or of Crowley, you are integrating into the egregore of the Golden Dawn or of Crowley. You become Crowley, for these Tarot cards are the bearers of his ego. You are adding yourself into the egregore of Crowley, and are absorbed by it. On the contrary, if you work with the Tarot of Marseilles, you will become yourself, because this Tarot deck is deliberately anonymous. All traces of its creators were deliberately erased. No one will ever know who created it, nor where it comes from… We will never know any of this for it is essential that the one who works with the Tarot does not become fixated on the personality of another being or even on that of a civilisation.

Given that no one knows the origin of the Tarot of Marseilles, no one can situate it in time or place. We can attribute it to whosoever we wish… The Jews, the Arabs, the Mayas, or even the aliens or the Chinese. It is completely international.”

Alexandre Jodorowsky is silent… Clearly, he is searching through his memories. After a short silence, he continues:

“You know, there are many legends as to the origin of the Tarot cards; and all of them translate what I have just told you. One of the most beautiful and most explicit ones was related by Éliphas Lévi, and I would like to tell it to you.”

… The sages of ancient Egypt knew that their civilisation was bound to disappear imminently, and feared that their wonderful knowledge would be lost to humanity. They then sought out  means to transmit it to future humanity… These sages gathered one day in the crypt of a temple and together sought the best means to transmit this knowledge. After lengthy reflection, they reached the conclusion that the best way of guaranteeing the transmission of the book which contained their secrets was to appeal to the man’s baser instincts. One of these instincts is called gambling. “Let us create a game, they said, and our book shall spread out through thousands of copies. It will be transmitted from generation to generation, even if the men who hold it do not understand its value…” And so, the sages of ancient Egypt created the 78 arcana of the Tarot deck. But this is but one legend among others. It matters little to whom we attribute the Tarot. The main thing is that this attribution always be symbolic, that all traces of the creators be erased, so that each and everyone might, by memorising the arcana, discover his own personality.

A. Jodorowsky is silent. A slight smile floats on his lips. Once again, he preempts our question: “You are no doubt wondering what could be done with the Tarot?… Well then, I shall tell you: you can make a lot of money with it!”

A joke, to be sure, it is but a joke that allows A. Jodorowsky to tell us about how a lady he knows makes a lot of money with conveyor-belt Tarot consultations… But this joke feels like a test. A. Jodorowsky wishes to know, before continuing to reveal himself, how we would react… No doubt our absence of reaction satisfies him, because he continues to explain what the tarot enables him to discover.

Divination and Other Things

“The Tarot is a means of divination. It enables one to know the past and the present of an individual, and, in consequence, to give him extremely precise advice for his future. One could tell him this, for instance: if you do this, that will happen to you. So the Tarot enables us to gain an insight into the possibilities offered by the future, and even, sometimes a prediction, for the study of the Tarot develops the “sight” [Fr. voyance] and many other things…

Clearly, for Alexandre Jodorowsky, the Tarot is much more than an instrument of divination. It is the point of departure of a path, or rather, it is itself a path. It is work undertaken on man himself. It modifies man’s intellectual faculties, and enables him to perceive different relations between beings and things… Man then comes into close contact with nature.

Alexandre Jodorowsky says: “All magical realisation is regaining contact with nature. The Tarot is one of the instruments which enable us to make this contact once more.”

So, he strives to share this contact with us, this particular gaze he holds on the things of life; he supplements the deficiencies of language by adopting a poetic tone:

“I have a violet carpet, a violet tablecloth, thanks to the Tarot. I have an azurite stone thanks to the Tarot. I have red, yellow and orange flowers thanks to the Tarot. I have green candles thanks to the Tarot. It is also thanks to the Tarot that I have friends who are doctors of phytotherapy. The more one understands the Tarot, the more esotericism opens up. You begin to understand the language of nature, of colours, you reach a great intimacy with the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms…”

In his enthusiasm, in his desire to transmit a truth, Alexandre Jodorowsky abandons formal speech: “You understand, we cannot tell fortunes or do magic if we do not have a stone, a plant, an animal and some music at home…

I am saying this so that you can feel to what extent our current urban life is a lie. Because in the cities of today, we are completely outside of the truth since we no longer have any contact with nature. We know nothing. Not even what an equinox really is, or that the cathedral of Notre Dame is oriented according to the solar movement. Much less do we know that it points towards Jerusalem.

“If you lie down under a tree for a while, the effect will be different according to the nature of the tree. The tree is life. By staying beneath certain trees, you may fall ill, whereas beneath others, you might gain strength. Through the Tarot, all this may be discovered.

“We know that in Ancient Greece the laurel was a symbol of soothsaying, and that before soothsaying, the ancient Greeks chewed on laurel leaves. Through the study of the Tarot, we can understand that the laurel affects mental vibrations. If we have the curiosity to place a laurel bush in our minds, we would feel a sensation of cold, but at the same time we would have the feeling of communicating with the plant…

You know, 10 years ago, everything I am telling you now would have made me laugh. 10 years ago, I would have found this extremely comical…”

Let us say that, up until here, Alexandre Jodorowsky reminds us somewhat of Montaigne, whom the historians of literature always present as a model of rationalism. A rationalist who, at the end of his life, wrote: “For a long time I pitied those who through their ignorance and superstition believed in charms and curses. Today, with experience, I pity those who do not believe…”

Like Montaigne, Alexandre Jodorowsky seems to have discovered “occult relations” between things, relations which are discovered through symbols. Relations which exist throughout the mineral, vegetable and animal and also human kingdoms.

Relations which perhaps gave birth to what the ancients called natural magic “(that of the occult properties of beings and things). All this knowledge could only be the result, the accomplishment of an inner undertaking. As Alexandre Jodorowsky says so aptly, in order to do soothsaying, one must be in communication with the three kingdoms of nature.

The Secret of Alexandro Jodorowsky

“Soothsaying”, that is exactly what we now ask him to do. We ask him to “read the Tarot” for us. Of course, we cannot repeat to you what he told us, it is obviously too personal. What we may affirm, on the other hand, is that we were surprised by his precision and accuracy.

When Alexandre Jodorowsky accepted to “read the Tarot” for us, he prepared himself right before the experience. First of all, he put on some music, then took a large brown paper envelope in his hands. Curious, we glimpsed over his shoulder and saw that he was contemplating, at that moment, a page of calligraphic drawings. We think that this page symbolically represents Alexandre Jodorowsky’s spiritual itinerary to reach a particular mental state, to “collect himself.”

It is a practice analogous to the katha performed prior to a martial arts combat.

A. Jodorowsky is ready. He carefully tidies away the drawings he has been contemplating back into their envelope and comes towards us. He sits down and clears away a vast space.

Curious. To read the Tarot, Jodorowsky draws on no known method. He shuffles the cards and throws them down on the ground, randomly.  The cards form a drawing, a drawing different for everyone. Before having turned over even a single card, he interprets the drawing the cards have formed in falling: “You see, the cards have formed a sort of tree. From the root there are four branches. The first has also been cut off… As to the fourth, it reaches the top of this figure.”

What a strange method! Up till here, it is similar to the I Ching, or the interpretation of ink stains. A. Jodorowsky sketches out the outline of his interpretation by analysing the form the cards have formed on the ground. Then, he takes a box of small dice. He asks us to choose within each of the branches the card which represents us (we can only see the backs of the cards). On each card pointed out, he places a little dice. He then asks us to place a certain number of cards which he has kept in hand in places we have chosen on the figure. Then, he turns over the cards marked with the little dice. What to say? It is astonishing in precision and truth.

We were hoping to describe the method Alexandre Jodorowsky uses to read the Tarot, but the thing is, it is indescribable because he does not have a method. Each event determines the next one. The shape drawn on the floor has determined the branch from which he asks us to draw a card which represents us. The card we have chosen determines the branch onto which he asks us to place the supplementary cards… The first card he turns over will determine the place he will turn over the next, etc…

Alexandre Jodorowsky has no method. At least no method that might be expressed. His secret is a great intimacy, a deep understanding of the Tarot. His secret is the evolution of being.

– Cécile Sandona

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Book Review: Etteilla/Hisler: Theory and Practical Instruction on the Book of Thoth

Theory and Practical Instruction on the Book of Thoth

by Etteilla, translated into German by Hisler, translated into English by K.A. Nitz

The works of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, alias Etteilla, the putative father of cartomancy in general, and of taromancy in particular, have not fared well either in terms of republication nor in terms of translation. In spite of his unchallenged reputation as the creator of the first complete and systematic methodology of fortunetelling with Tarot cards, Alliette’s actual teachings on the subject have for a long time been dismissed as a historical curiosity, known only through piecemeal, secondhand or inaccurate descriptions, often accompanied by an unflattering moral commentary, all of which serve to distort the true import of his contribution to the field.

Recent years, however, have seen the discovery and digitisation of a great many of the original documents involved, and this process is ongoing. In this way, a more complete and accurate idea of Etteilla’s works may be obtained, provided one makes the effort to understand the notoriously difficult prose of the author and piece together his scattered writings. It is therefore no small matter to note the following publication of the works of one of Etteilla’s disciples, the Prussian Hisler, a development which must be welcomed, and all the more so in that it displays a great degree of rigour and exactitude.

The work is titled and subtitled as follows:

Etteilla [Alliette, Jean-Baptiste]. Theory and Instruction in the Book of Thoth. A translation of Theoretischer und praktischer Unterricht über das Buch Thot — neue Auflage published in German 1857 (first edition 1793) in an unattributed translation with additions (possibly by Etteilla’s student Hisler) of the original French of 1790: Cours théorique et pratique du livre de Thot: pour entendre avec justesse l’art, la science et la sagesse de rendre les oracles.

That is to say that this is a translation of Johann Scheible’s 1857 reprint of Hisler’s text. This 1857 reprint seems to be the same as Hisler’s 1793 translation, aside from a few changes in German orthography. Scheible included new wood engravings of all 78 cards in the back of his book instead of issuing them as an actual deck.

• Etteilla’s original text
• M.M. d’Odoucet’s version
• Scheible‘s reprint of Hisler’s version

Hisler’s version in fact is an abridged edition with respect to the original French, for the Prussian disciple saw fit to skilfully excise those passages extraneous to divination, in order to better focus on the prime subject of the work. Furthermore, Hisler has combined the last two chapters of the French, and added an additional chapter, on dream interpretation using Etteilla’s Tarot.

It is worth noting that Etteilla’s original text included four out of six planned lessons, but he died before he could publish the final two. As a result, there is a ~50 page gap before the final section in his Cours théorique et pratique du livre de Thot. Both Hisler and d’Odoucet added the two missing lessons to their respective versions.

The appendix will also be useful for the reader who wishes to become familiar with Etteilla’s system, in that it includes correspondences for each card taken from a French work attributed to his students.

This translation by K. A. Nitz has a lot to commend itself, cross-referenced as it is against the original French. The translator’s footnotes indicate where the German departs from the French, and add useful information where apposite. Nitz has even caught Johann Scheible’s accidental transposition of Virgo and Scorpio on the cards, thereby showing the degree of care and attention that has gone into this work.

Some minor quibbles might be that a slightly better translation of the title would be “Theoretical and Practical Instruction on the Book of Thoth”. One of the title pages already has “on the Book of Thoth”, but in other places, “in the Book of Thoth” is used instead. Contrary to what the blurb on the back cover states, one should note that Etteilla did not coin the term “cartomancie”, but rather, the term “cartonomancie” which eventually was corrupted into the former.

In the appendix, Nitz has placed card 0/78 (the Fool) at the front of the deck, likely due to the widespread influence of the Rider-Waite-Smith card order. Etteilla and Joubert de La Salette both place the Fool between cards #21 (the Chariot) and #22 (King of Batons). Other works belonging to Etteilla’s tradition place it at the end of the deck. Etteilla and Joubert de La Salette also number the Fool as 0. The original 1793 German deck had no numbers on the card at all. A later edition added the number 78 to the Fool.

Also in the appendix, Nitz translates the first suit as “Sceptre”, but for the Ace, changes it to “Baton”. These might be made the same for the sake of consistency. In the appendix, the Swords appear to be missing labels for the court cards (King of Swords, Queen of Swords, etc.). Similarly, card#6 (Night/Day) ought to include the label “4th Day of creation.”

The translator’s explanation for Etteilla’s “signs of death” numbers seems a little unlikely. Etteilla describes these as the “chain from birth to death”. Nitz instead explains them as the “death” of the other card indicated by the extra number. It seems to us that Mike Howard’s cyclical interpretation seems to be closer to what Etteilla intended. More can be read here. An errata will be found on the translator’s webpage, and these errors and typos are now easily fixed.

These minor issues aside, this work will prove to be a valuable resource for those who wish to more fully understand Etteilla’s system and gain a greater working knowledge of his methodology. For the historically-inclined, it will also provide a greater understanding of the transmission and development of cartomancy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Appropriately, it contains 78 pages. The publisher’s website is here, and the Errata may be read here.

Thanks to the translator for providing a review copy, and thanks to J.C. for his insights.

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Tassadit Yacine-Titouh: L’Amoureux

L’Amoureux

 

After the fashion of the Lover, in divination by means of the Tarot, who hesitates between the two terms of the alternative, the ambiguous subject is born beneath the sign of the one who advances and who retreats, who loves and who unloves. His dual identity founded on two antagonistic elements is a source of riches; but when not mastered, leads to the irremediable destruction of the subject. This embodied ambiguity is ill-perceived, for it is associated with hesitation, indecision, which are proper to women and are necessarily to be opposed to the determined and determining conduct of men of honour, who possess mastery over their destiny and thereby over the world and its meaning.

• Tassadit Yacine-Titouh, Chacal ou la ruse des dominés, Éditions La Découverte, 2010.

Image courtesy of the BNF.

Etteilla and Freemasonry (III)

The Perfect Initiates of Egypt

1821 French edition of the Crata Repoa

Previously, we have alluded to Etteilla’s links to a little-known Masonic rite of Egyptian inspiration. This rite, regime, or lodge, was known as the Perfect Initiates of Egypt – Les Parfaits Initiés d’Égypte, of which Alliette would have been no less than “Grand Mage” or founder.

Woodford’s Masonic cyclopedia contains the following entry:

Perfect Initiates, Rite of. — A name said to be given by Cagliostro at Lyons to a grade of his so-called Egyptian Rite. (p. 556.)

Mackey’s Encyclopædia of Freemasonry gives some further details:

Asia, Perfect Initiates of. A rite of very little importance, consisting of seven degrees and said to have been invented at Lyons. A very voluminous manuscript, translated from the German, was sold at Paris, in 1821, to M. Bailleul, and came into the possession of Ragon, who reduced its size, and with the assistance of Des Etangs, modified it. I have no knowledge that it was ever worked. (p. 92.)

Arthur Edward Waite, in his New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, volume 2, seeks to correct the confusion:

Perfect Initiates, Rite of. — There is an opportunity here to correct certain obvious misstatements. In the first place, even Count Cagliostro would have scarcely described a single Grade belonging to a sequence by the title of Rite. The Rite of Cagliostro was one thing and its Grades were the component parts. Secondly, and therefore he did not assign to one of them the name of Rite of Perfect Initiates of Egypt. Thirdly, he did not designate his Egyptian Masonry as the Rite of Perfect Initiates when he first started it at Lyons, though he may have regarded it unquestionably as perfect in all its parts and honourable to the builder. He called it — as we have seen previously — Egyptian Masonry, while the Lodge which he established at Lyons to work and confer its Degrees was named Wisdom Triumphant. When it is said that a Rite of Perfect Initiates of Egypt, consisting of seven Degrees, had its headquarters at Lyons, the reference is to Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite, and when compilers who make this statement distinguish the one from the other they err therein. (p. 153.)

But there is more. It is Waite who has erred in conflating both these Rites. According to the Masonic specialist Gérard Galtier, Alliette may even have headed this small order called les Parfaits Initiés d’Egypte – the Perfect Initiates of Egypt, based in Lyon – the so-called “capital of Freemasonry,” but unrelated to the lodge or rite of Cagliostro (Maçonnerie égyptienne, Rose-Croix et Néo-Chevalerie, 2017, p. 38.), founded in October of 1784. Serge Caillet’s important work on the same subject says much the same thing (Arcanes et rituels de la franc-maçonnerie égyptienne, 2017, pp. 20-21.) Roger Dachez labels it a “possibly Masonic rite,” without providing further details (Les rites maçonniques égyptiens, 2012, chapter 2). The appendix to the Acta Latomorum, vol. 1, simply lists it as: “Parfaits Initiés (Rite des) ou d’Egypte. [Perfect Initiates (Rite of) or of Egypt] – This regime consists of seven grades: it arose in Lyon.” (p. 331)

However, we find differing dates for the foundation of this lodge, with some sources saying 1785 and others 1821. These dates come from Marconis de Nègre, the schismatic head of an another Egyptian Masonic rite, that of Memphis, who, in one of his works gives a date of 1821  for the founding of this order, but elsewhere states that the order was founded in Greece in 1817. These glaring inconsistencies suggest either a certain amount of confusion or deliberate mystification, a phenomenon typical of Egyptian Masonry if we are to believe the author of Les Rites Maçonniques de Misraïm et Memphis. There also appears to be a certain amount of conflation with the African Architects, another early Egyptian rite, founded in Germany around 1767.

Like that of the African Architects, the rite of the Perfect Initiates of Egypt was supposedly based on the Crata Repoa of von Köppen and von Hymmen, published in 1770, but only published into French in 1821 by Antoine Bailleul. To complicate matters further, according to the editor of the French version, the erudite Mason J.-M. Ragon (p. 44), their edition was based on a German copy with an interlinear French translation written in, which proves that the text was known and in discreet circulation in France prior to the publication of the text in 1821.

First edition of the Crata Repoa

According to Galtier, concrete evidence of the existence of this hitherto obscure lodge was revealed with the discovery of the correspondence of its last grand master, Charles Geille de Bonrecueille, who would have become ‘Grand Mage’ on Alliette’s death in 1791. The works on Egyptian Masonry in French, whether from the 18th century or more recent times, as we have seen, merely mention this rite in passing, as a footnote, or for the sake of providing an example of a non-Cagliostran rite of Egyptian inspiration, but without examining it in any depth. It is entirely possible that this obscure organisation, if it did exist elsewhere than on paper, was an association of Masonic inspiration rather than a regular lodge, which could also explain Alliette’s denial of being a Mason.

Indeed, the chief problem of knowing about Etteilla’s Masonic affiliations is that Masonic historians have come to contradictory conclusions based on the same evidence, to wit, primarily the letters of Charles de Bonrecueille and the ritual documents held in the Masonic archives in Lyon.

Pierre Mollier (“Des Livres et des Rites… une quête maçonnique – et bibliophilie – sous l’Empire : la correspondance Thory-Geille autour du Rite Écossais Ancien et Accepté”) considers Etteilla’s association to have been non-Masonic in character, while Jean Iozia (La Franc-Maçonnerie Egyptienne au Grand Orient de France – Mythes Fondateurs, Histoire et Pratique) believes the contrary.

It is clear that, no more than the various Egyptian rites mentioned above, there has been some conflation of Etteilla’s “Société des interprètes du Livre de Thot” and the Perfect Initiates of Egypt, perhaps best explained by overlapping memberships and a certain confusion with respect to the source materials.

Second edition of the Crata Repoa

The relations between Cagliostro’s lodge and that of the Perfect Initiates of Egypt are also far from clear, with Masonic historians either conflating both, or distinguishing them entirely, or suggesting some other relation.

What is curious is the lack of consensus on the status, importance and influence of these obscure Egyptian regimes in the contemporary Egyptian rite Masonic historiography, which is quite divided on the question: some seek to claim them as worthy precursors (Roger Dachez, Les rites maçonniques égyptiens, chapters 2 and 3; Jean-Louis de Biasi, ABC de l’ésotérisme maçonnique : Secrets des rites égyptiens, chapter 2), while others seek to distance themselves from their dubious legacy. (e.g. Jean Mallinger, Les Rites dits Égyptiens de la Maçonnerie; René Witzhard [pseud. Alain Guyard], Un Siècle de Maçonnerie Egyptienne, Editions A.C.V., 2000).

As regards Cagliostro and his rite, although the first lodge of his Egyptian Masonry was founded in Lyon in late 1784, La Sagesse Triomphante – Triumphant Wisdom, the first workings of this rite took place in August of 1781 in Strasbourg, according to the diaries of Ramon de Carbonnières (cited in Cagliostro et la Franc-maçonnerie égyptienne by Denis Labouré), a fact which has generally been overlooked by the majority of Masonic historians. Incidentally, we know from the research of Thierry Depaulis that Alliette had been in Strasbourg in 1777, and it is entirely possible he had – and maintained – contact with local occultist and Masonic groups.

With one exception, we have been unable to consult the recent works on Freemasonry in Lyon, which may well shed further light on the subject, perhaps even definitively, and note these references here for the researcher who will endeavour to reach the truth of the matter, namely: Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie à Lyon, by André Combes, Editions des Traboules, 2005; Franc-maconnerie lyonnaise, les fondements du 18e siècle by Michel Chomarat, Musée Gadagne, 2004; Les loges maçonniques lyonnaises, vols. 1 and 2, by Aimé Imbert, Le Temps des Pierres, 2013/2016. On the other hand, the lengthy study by Alice Joly, Un mystique lyonnais et les secrets de la franc-maçonnerie : Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, 1730-1824, Editions Teletes, 1986, contains no mention of Etteilla at all. 

Moreover, let us note the republication of Paul Vuillaud’s Histoires et portraits de Rose-Croix, Archè Edizioni, 1987, which contains a rather unflattering portrait of Charles Geille de Bonrecueille, Alliette’s disciple and putative successor, and whose letters, incidentally, are in the archives of the Lyon city library, along with a trove of esoteric and Masonic materials, which may hold the key to the whole affair.

If we take the conflicting statements listed above at face value, then it remains to establish a coherent and plausible sequence of events, namely, to determine the dates of Alliette’s supposed entry into Freemasonry, presumably later than his 1785 denial, or to prove his ties to pseudo- or para-Masonic organisations. These contradictory indications concerning his affiliation might be easily explained by considering the man’s opportunistic career: in all likelihood, Alliette would have thought it better to join Freemasonry, or to capitalise on its perceived connection to ancient – and above all, Egyptian – wisdom, in order to expedite his reinvention and legitimacy as the father of hermetic cartomancy.

Conversely, he may have simply concocted his own rite of Masonic inspiration to that end. Pending a thorough study of the unexamined documents referred to above, and based on the principle of economy, these are what appear to us as being the most likely scenarios.

Future instalments will examine the nature of Etteilla’s society, the extant ritual documents, as well as the posterity of this organisation.

* * *

Illustrations:

• Crata Repoa, German and French editions of 1770, 1778 and 1821.

Le Tarot Perino: A Traditional Tarot of the 21st Century

Translator’s Introduction

We have previously mentioned the work of the artist-engraver Thomas Perino, detailing his meticulous and inspired engraving of a Tarot deck according to the traditional means of production, and we have also translated an insightful essay on the importance of this artistic endeavour. Now, it gives us great pleasure to announce the imminent publication of Thomas Perino’s Tarot deck, along with an accompanying book, via the medium of crowdfunding. Please support this remarkable and worthwhile project here.

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Le Tarot Perino:

A Traditional Tarot of the 21st Century

Le Feu Sacré publishers have the joy and honour of publishing a unique Tarot of Marseille deck, that of the artist-engraver Thomas Perino, drawn according to the Conver Tarot canon (1760).

Engraved on basswood woodblocks (lime/linden tree) by the craftsman, each one of the seventy-eight cards of this deck has been the object of the most minute attention, in the pure respect of the tradition of the cardmakers of yore. The blocks were then assembled and printed in a single giant block in Michael Woolworth’s workshop. The print thus obtained was painted by hand by Thomas Perino. This print, acquired in 2022 by the Musée Français de la carte à jouer (the Playing Card Museum), is the one which served as the basis for the manufacture of these cards. These cards are reproduced in their original size of 8x16cm.

This complete deck of the Tarot Perino is the link between the Ancients and the Moderns: conceived and produced over five full years, it is introduced in this edition by a new generation of writers, all tarologists and passionate about the Tarot. Resolutely oriented towards poetry, these authors consider the Tarot as a daily practice, a science for today, a way of life which blends together action, pleasure, study, work and spirituality. Only a publishing house based on literature, literature as a permanent poem, as a restorative fiction and as a philosophy of the future, could engender such a Tarot.

Thomas Perino Says a Few Words

26 August, 2022

Two years ago, in my little garret and throughout the pandemic that gave us a lot of solitude and free time, I was putting the finishing touches to my Tarot deck, which I had begun five years earlier. It was with a lot of emotion and gratitude that I discovered that this action, absurd at first glance, had been welcomed with great kindness by a great number of people. Among them, some extended the kindness and trust to propose to publish this Tarot deck.

Aurélien Lemant was the first to speak of this to me, on behalf of Le Feu Sacré publishers. Warren Lambert produced a film on the printing of the engravings by Michael Woolworth’s workshop. Finally, Pacôme Thiellement wrote a beautiful text to give an account of this work. It is therefore not insignificant that these three accomplices in addition to myself were brought together to write a book which would accompany the Tarot deck produced from these engravings. I hope that once again the magic will be effected and that there will be those among you who will wish to support this project which has accompanied me for so many years. And please do not hesitate to share this publication.

T.P.