ANTOINE Court de Gebelin (1725-84) was an amateur scholar with interests in many areas. In his monumental work Le Monde Primitif Analyse et Compare aver le Mond Morderne (8 volumes, Paris, 1782), he raised the supposition that the Tarot originated in Ancient Egypt. He claimed that it had escaped the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and that it contained the pure doctrine of the Ancient Egyptians. At the time he was writing this, the skill of reading hieroglyphics had been lost for almost 1200 years and there existed the widely held belief that they were magical symbols concealing the lost knowledge of antiquity. He saw the Tarot as a contemporarily available pictorial embodiment of this occult wisdom, a tangible link with the past. Some 18 years later a stone was found at Rosetta bearing a royal proclamation inscribed in three different scripts - Greek, demotic (a simplified form of hieroglyphics used mainly outside the priesthood) and hieroglyphic. Classical Greek was easily understood so, by comparing this with the hieroglyphic inscription, a translation was painstakingly pieced together. To the surprise of many, the subsequent translation of the texts of Egypt revealed little of the expected mystical knowledge, and nothing was found to resemble the Tarot in the least. But by this time the theories of de Gebelin had entered into popular occultism.,'299','420'

A French man, (erroneously believed by some to have been barber, he mearly had lodgings above a barbers shop) named Alliette, writing under the pseudonym Etteilla (his name spelled backwards), followed de Gebelin's lead and revised the Tarot to comply with his own idiosyncratic idea of Egyptian mysticism. It has to be said, his Tarot has had less influence upon subsequent designs than have his ideas. In the mid 1850s a third Frenchman, Alphonse Louis Constant (originally a deacon of the Catholic Church), began to publish occult works. For the purposes of authorship he translated his name into Hebrew and wrote under the name Eliphas Levi (he dropped the final Zahed?. His books contained Tarot references and symbolism and it was he who first established the link between the Tarot and cabala (or Qabalah).

A Tarot deck was later produced based upon Levi's ideas by Oswald Wirth. A little later, Dr. Gerard Encauss (1865-1916), writing in 1889 under the pseudonym Papus, used Wirth's cards in his book The Tarot of the Bohemians. (Papus used the word Bohemians to refer to the Gypsies, whom he also believed to be Egyptian.) About this time the impetus for the development of the Tarot moved from France to England. Here the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, imposed a number of changes which have greatly influenced Tarot design up to the present day. Realizing that the published attributions of Levi and his followers were influenced by oaths of secrecy sworn as members of French occult societies, the Golden Dawn's publications restored the correct order of the cards. The books of Levi, Wirth and Papus place the Fool (numbered O) between Judgement (20) and The World (21). Unfortunately, this deliberate concealing of the truth was not always recognized, and some later authors have been misled, which has resulted in them drawing erroneous and confusing conclusions. The Golden Dawn returned the Fool to its original position as the first card of the Major Arcana. This done, the remainder of the correspondences fell happily into place.

The Golden Dawn was made up of practical magicians dissatisfied with The Theosophical Society's limited and purely theoretical approach to the occult. One of the central aims of the Golden Dawn was to unite all the occult traditions of the world into a single working system. They drew upon the cabalistic text known as the Semper Yetzirah (the Book of Formation), which linked the elements, planets and signs of the zodiac with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and brought a further dimension to the Tarot. Although this addition to the Tarot canon did not occur until the late 1880s, the symbolism meshed perfectly with that already present within the cards. With this association in place, the Tarot was forever opened up to the influence of the world's myths and religions.

The Golden Dawn came to regard the Tarot as the central pictorial key to the whole of its rather eclectic magical system. Its members were expected to study it deeply and were actively encouraged to design (or at least copy) a Tarot deck for their own personal use. Regrettably none of the designs of the society were made publicly available at the time. However, in 1910 a deck designed by Arthur E. Waite and executed by Pamela Coleman Smith (both members of the Golden Dawn) was published. This highly influential deck, the first published deck to be fully illustrated, it is generally known as the Rider-Waite Tarot.

Other members of Golden Dawn and its later off shoots have published Tarot decks following its symbolism. Two are of more significance than others. Paul Foster Case (1884-1954), an American occultist, published his deck known as the BOTA Tarot in 1327 (after his magical order the Builders Of The Adytum). This deck is closely based on the designs of the Rider-Waite Tarot, to the extent that some cards are almost exact replicas. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) joined the Golden Dawn in 1898, and following the principles of the society he devoted his life to the unification of the world's esoteric traditions and religions. He made the fruits of his work available to all, much to the anger of those who would have had these things remain concealed. The Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot deck was painted by Lady Frieda Harris under his direction and took five years to complete. It was first seen in The Book of Thoth (1944), but was not issued as a deck of cards until 1977, some 30 years after his death. The vision and depth of insight make The Book of Thoth possibly the most original and valuable work on the Tarot ever written.

The attributions applied to or discovered within the Tarot indicate that it has always held within its structure the potential for further and continuing development and embellishment. The agreement even unto the smallest detail is so precise it suggests either that it was implicit within the concept from its first origination, or that there is a basic universal structure beneath all human philosophies. This second conclusion makes itself evident in the constant resonance between the many systems, including Jungian archetypes. Given this universal structure, there is little wonder that so many of the world's esoteric systems may be successfully applied to the Tarot.

From this brief history of the Tarot it may be seen that many strands of human knowledge have come together to make the Tarot what it is today. At present Jungian theories of archetypes are greatly influencing the exploration of the Tarot. His ideas of synchronicity provide clues to how it functions. More recently Quantum mechanics is beginning to be used as a means of explaining the deeper mechanisms, linking all things throughout the universe, with the smallest action having an influence on everything else.