Eliphas Lvi and the French Revivalists

Eliphas Lvi (born Alphonse Louis Constant, February 8, 1810 - May 31,
1875) was a 19th Century French occult author and magician. He is credited for
reviving interest in magic in the 19th century and his influence on the Tarot
was pivotal. Other figures in the French revival movement were Court de Gebelin,
Etteilla, Oswald Wirth and Papus.
Born in Paris, Constant was the son of a shoemaker. He showed intelligence
and was educated at the church of St. Sulpice. As a young boy he quickly became
intrigued with magic and the occult. Also encouraging this curiosity was his
head master's concept of animal magnetism, in which the man claimed that the
vital energy of the body was controlled by the Devil. Nonetheless, Constant
pursued the ecclesiastical studies and became a priest.
His career in the priesthood was
short lived because of his left-winged
political writings and he found it impossible to keep his vow of chastity. For
his writings he served three short jail
sentences.
Levi's first treatise on magic
appeared in 1854 under the title Dogme et
Rituel de la Haute Magie, and was
translated into English by Arthur Edward
Waite as Transcendental Magic, its
Doctrine and Ritual. Levi "believed in the
existence of a universal 'secret doctrine'
of magic throughout history, everywhere in
the world."
In The Dogma and Ritual of High
Magic, Levi devoted 22 chapters to the 22
trump cards, or Major Arcana, of the
tarot. He linked each to the letters of
the Hebrew alphabet, and to aspects of
God.
In 1861, he published a sequel, La
Clef des Grands Mystres (The Key to the
Great Mysteries). Further magical works by
Lvi include Fables et Symboles (Stories
and Images), 1862, and La Science des
Esprits (The Science of Spirits), 1865. In
1868, he wrote Le Grand Arcane, ou
l'Occultisme Dvoil (The Great Secret, or
Occultism Unveiled); this, however, was
only published posthumously in 1898.
* Des Moeurs et des Doctrines du Rationalisme en France (Of the Moral
Customs and Doctrines of Rationalism in France), 1839
* La Mre de Dieu (The Mother of God), 1844
* L'Evangile du Peuple (The Gospel of the People) 1840
* Le Testament de la Libert (The Testament of Liberty), 1848
* Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, (Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and
Ritual), 1855
* La Clef des Grands Mystres (The Key to the Great Mysteries), 1861
* Fables et Symboles (Stories and Images), 1862
* La Science des Esprits (The Science of Spirits), 1865
* Le Grand Arcane, ou l'Occultisme Dvoil (The Great Secret, or Occultism
Unveiled), 1868
* Magical Rituals of the Sanctum Regnum, 1970

Antoine Court de Gbelin

Antoine Court who named himself Antoine Court de Gbelin (ca.1719 May
10, 1784) was the former Protestant pastor, born at Nimes (Encyclopdia
Britannica), who initiated the interpretation of the Tarot as an arcane
repository of timeless esoteric wisdom, in an essay included in his Le Monde
primitif, analys et compar avec le monde moderne ("The Primitive World,
Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World"), volume viii, 1781. The chapter on
Tarot with which his name is indelibly associated is a single section in his
vast compendium that he published in series from 1773, to a distinguished list
of subscribers, headed by Louis XVI.
His father was a famous religious leader of the Huguenots. Court de
Gebelin had been ordained a pastor in 1754 before departing Switzerland and
remained openly Protestant, a rational advocate for freedom of conscience in
Enlightenment France. In Paris, he was initiated into Freemasonry at the lodge
Les Amis Runis, in 1771, and moved on to the lodge Les Neuf Surs where he
welcomed Benjamin Franklin as a lodge-brother. He was a supporter of American
Independence who contributed to the massive Affaires de L'Angleterre et de
l'Amrique, of the new theories of economics, and of the "animal magnetism" of
Mesmer (in an electrical experiment with whom he died, apparently of an
electrically induced heart attack).
His great project had for its goal to set out to reconstruct the high
primeval civilization. Reinterpreting Classical and Renaissance evocation of the
Golden Age in mankind's early history, Court de Gbelin asserted that the
primitive worldwide civilization had been advanced and enlightened. He is the
intellectual grandfather of much of modern occultism. His centers of focus are
the familiar ones of universal origins of languages in deep time and the
hermeneutics of symbolism. While his views on hermeneutics and religious matters
were largely conservative, his original ideas and recearch on the origin of
language earn him a place among pioneers of linguistics. Court de Gbelin
presented dictionaries of etymology, what he called a universal grammar, and
discourses on the origins of language. his volumes were so popular he
republished them separately, as Histoire naturelle de la parole, ou Prcis de
l'Origine du Langage & de la Grammaire Universelle ("Natural history of the
Word, or a sketch of the origins of language and of universal grammar"), in
Paris, 1776.
With regard to mythology and symbology, he discussed the origins of
allegory in antiquity and recreated a history of the calendar from civil,
religious, and mythological perspectives.
It was his immediate perception, the first time he saw the Tarot deck,
that it held the secrets of the Egyptians. Writing without the benefit of
Champollion's deciphering of the Egyptian language, Court de Gbellin's
developed reconstruction of Tarot history, without any historical evidence
produced, was that Egyptian priests had distilled the ancient "Book of Thoth"
into these images, which they brought to Rome, where they were secretly known to
the popes, who brought them to Avignon in the 14th century, whence they were
introduced into France. An essay by The Comte de Mellet included in Court de
Gebelin's Monde primitif is responsible for the mystical connection of the
Tarot's 21 trumps and the fool with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. An
essay appended to his gave suggestions for cartomancy; within two years the
fortune-teller known as "Etteilla" published a technique for reading the tarot,
and the practice of tarot reading was born.

Etteilla
"Etteilla," the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738 1791), was the
French occultist who was the first to popularise tarot divination to a wide
audience, and therefore the first professional tarot occultist in recorded
history. Etteilla published his ideas of the correspondences between tarot,
astrology, and the four classical elements and four humors, and was the first to
issue a revised tarot deck specifically designed for occult purposes.
Aside from the death certificate recording that he was born in Paris in
1738, and that he was the son of a restaurateur, very little is known about him
or his youth. His father's trade was in concocting restoratifs for the
chronically ill, broths and tonic salads, "heating" and "cooling" ingredients to
correct every imbalance of the four humors; this, with an instinctive belief in
astrology and portents of his social class may have laid the foundation for his
concerns with the occult in later life. His formal education reveals itself in
the limitations of his uncritical and enthusiastic but turgid discursive subliterary writing style. He married Jeanne Vattier in 1763, a marriage that
lasted half a decade, during which he worked as a seed merchant, before
publishing his first book, Etteilla, ou manire de se rcrer avec un jeu de
cartes ("Etteilla, or a Way to Entertain Yourself With a Deck of Cards") in
1770. Etteilla is simply the reverse of his surname. This first book was a
discourse on the usage of regular playing cards (the piquet deck, a shortened
deck used in gaming, with the addition of an "Etteilla" card). Features included
the "spread", or disposition on the table, and strictly assigned meanings to
each card both in regular and in reversed positions, characteristics that are
still central to Tarot divination today. In his preface, "Etteilla" explained
that he had learned his system from an Italian; it remains unclear to what
extent his assigned symbology was his own contribution. The book was reprinted
the following year. He was working as a printseller, but from this time,
approximately, he earned his livelihood by working as a consultant, teacher and
author.
In 1781 the French Swiss Protestant clergyman and occultist Antoine Court
who named himself Court de Gbelin published in his massive work Le Monde
primitif his idea that the Tarot was actually an ancient Egyptian book of arcane
wisdom. There is no evidence to support the notion that tarot has an Egyptian
lineage, but in the credulous stir that followed, Etteilla responded with
another book, Manire de se rcrer avec le jeu de cartes nomes Tarots ("How to
Entertain Yourself With the Deck of Cards Called Tarot") in 1785. It was the
first book of methods of divination by Tarot. In it Etteilla claimed that he had
been introduced into the art of cartomancy in 1751, long before the appearance
of Court de Gebelin's work.
By 1790, he was interpreting the hermetic wisdom of the Egyptian Book of
Thoth: Cour thorique et pratique du Livre du Thot, that included his reworkings
of what would later be called the "Major" and "Minor Arcana", as well as the
introduction of the four elements and astrology. He proceeded to found a Tarot
society, the Socit des Interprtes du Livre de Thot; he produced a special
deck for divination according to his schemes, the first deck of cards
specifically designed for occult purposes, in 1791, the year that he died, at
the age of 53.
Oswald Wirth
Oswald Wirth (18601943) was a Swiss occultist, artist and author. He
studied esotericism and symbolism with Stanislaus de Guaita, and created a set
of Tarot trumps based on the Marseilles deck. His interests also included
Freemasonry and astrology.
Wirth is the artist responsible for the so-called Baphomet or Leviathan
design of a goat head inside a pentagram that was modified for use as the logo
for Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. Wirth was not a Satanist; LaVey appropriated
the illustration from a French encyclopedia of occultism by Maurice Bessey that

reprinted Wirth's drawing as an interior illustration and also used it as a

stamped device on the cover.
Grard Encausse Papus
Gerard Encausse (July 13, 1865 - 25 October 1916), whose esoteric pseudonym was
Papus, was the Spanish-born French physician, hypnotist, and popularizer of
occultism, who founded the modern Martinist Order.
Gerard Encausse was born at Corunna (A Corua) in Spain on July 13, 1865,
of a Spanish mother and a French father, Louis Encausse, a chemist. His family
moved to Paris when he was four years old, and he received his education there.
As a young man, Encausse spent a great deal of time at the Bibliothque
Nationale studying the Kabbalah, occult tarot, the sciences of magic and
alchemy, and the writings of Eliphas Lvi. He joined the French Theosophical
Society shortly after it was founded by Madame Blavatsky in 1884 - 1885, but he
resigned soon after joining because he disliked the Society's emphasis on
Eastern occultism. In 1888, he co-founded his own group, the Kabbalistic Order
of the Rose-Croix. That same year, he and his friend Lucien Chamuel founded the
Librarie du Merveilleux and its monthly revue L'Initiation, which remained in
publication until 1914.
Encausse was also a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light and the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn temple in Paris, as well as Memphis-Misraim
and probably other esoteric or paramasonic organizations, as well as being an
author of several occult books. Outside of his paramasonic and martinist
activities he was also a spiritual student of the French spiritualist healer,
Anthelme Nizier Philippe, "Matre Philippe de Lyon".
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was essentially the first in the
Anglophone world to venture into esoteric tarot. Francophone occultists such as
Eliphas Lvi, Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, Oswald Wirth and Papus were
influential in fashioning esoteric tarot in the French-speaking world; the
influence of these Francophone occultists has come to bear even on
interpretation of the Tarot de Marseille cards themselves. Even though the Tarot
de Marseille decks are not 'occult' "per se", the imagery of the Tarot de
Marseille decks arguably shows Hermetic influences (e.g., alchemy, astronomy,
etc.).
Referring to the Tarot of the Bohemians, Eliphas Levi declares: "This book,
which may be older than that of Enoch, has never been translated, but is still
preserved unmutilated in primeval characters, on detached leaves, like the
tablets of the ancients... It is, in truth, a monumental and extraordinary work,
strong and simple as the architecture of the pyramids, and consequently enduring
like those - a book which is the summary of all sciences, which can resolve all
problems by its infinite combinations, which speaks by evoking thought, is the
inspirer and moderator of all possible conceptions, and the masterpiece perhaps
of the human mind. It is to be counted unquestionably among the very great gifts
bequeathed to us by antiquity..."