The French School

In the first few centuries following the appearance of the Tarot cards, their symbolic significance did not receive much attention. There are two treatises from 16th-century Italy giving a moralistic interpretation to the Tarot, but clearly their impact was marginal and short-lived. Besides these two documents, written records about the Tarot from this period refer only to gaming or card production.

A significant turning point in the history of Tarot interpretation occurs in 1781 when a French scholar and mystic named Antoine Court de Gebelin published the eighth volume in a huge treatise, mostly fictional, titled “The Primeval World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World”. Among a range of other things, De Gebelin’s treatise contained a detailed discussion of the Tarot. This volume was the first written record of Tarot cards’ being used for popular fortune-telling as well as for gaming. But in his view, people using the Tarot just for gaming or for fortune-telling were missing its full potential. In fact, he claimed, they were unknowingly holding in their hands the secret key to an ancient repository of knowledge which, once decyphered, could give us mysterious powers and a deeper understanding of the universe.

In de Gebelin’s view, Tarot cards were a sophisticated device created by the ancient Egyptian sages, experts in magic and the occult. In order to preserve their secret knowledge for later generations they translated it into a language of symbolic illustrations. To hide the powerful knowledge from unworthy eyes in the most effective way they decided to put it in plain sight, but under the guise of a seemingly-innocuous game of chance. This way people would propagate the illustrations from one generation to another, without being aware of their deep significance.

De Gebelin’s speculations about ancient Egypt are not taken seriusly today. But at the time, his ideas were very influential. Fortune-telling with cards became fashionable in Parisian salons and  even reached the imperial court of Napoleon. There were numerous fortune-tellers using ordinary playing cards. But some of the more sophisticated among them, inspired by the supposed connection with sublime Egyptian mysteries, adopted the Tarot.

The use of Tarot cards for fortune-telling continued to gain popularity in the first half of the 19th century, but de Gebelin’s ideas about the deeper significance of the card symbols were mostly ignored. Too many people were interested just in having their fortunes told. New Tarot decks were printed for this purpose, with simple and straighforward illustrations replacing the traditional design. Gradually, the whole matter came to be regarded as something between supposedly-supernatural divination and an amusing social pastime.

Towards the middle of the century, a group of French mystics started to develop de Gebelin’s ideas in a more serious direction. Although they had no direct connection to Judaism, these mystics were interested in the Jewish mystical tradition called the Cabbala. They believed that the Tarot and Cabbala both originated in ancient Egypt, as two different but parallel representations of the same secret knowledge.

The most influential among the French Tarot mystics was Alphonse-Louis Constant who, inspired by his interest in Cabbala, adopted the pseudo-Hebrew name Eliphas Levy. Levy believed that behind the methods of practical mysticism, such as fortunetelling or magic and sorcery, there were hidden laws and forces comparable to those of modern science. He also believed that these laws were known to the ancient Egyptian sages, and that the Cabbala and the Tarot were two representations of them. Thus, in his view, it should be possible to create a sort of dictionary in which each Tarot card would correspond to a Cabbalistic symbol. By using such a dictionary, he thought that one could reach a better understanding of the laws of magic by relying on both the Cabbalistic texts as well as the Tarot structure.

In the system Levy outlined, the 22 cards of the major suit corresponded to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, to which ancient Cabbalistic texts ascribed mystical meanings and magical powers. The four minor suits corresponded to the four letters of the tetragrammaton, God’s name in Hebrew which is so magically powerful that it is never to be pronounced. Levy further linked ten cards of each minor suit (the aces and the numbers) to a famous Cabbalistic scheme called “the Sefirot Tree”, which describes ten different aspects of the divine essence. Using these correspondences as cornerstones, he outlined a whole theory of mysticism and magical forces, in which the Tarot cards played a central role.

Eliphas Levy’s ideas initiated what we can call the French school of Tarot. His writings gained popularity in France during the second half of the 19th century, and eventually gave rise to a whole tradition of interpreting the Tarot in mystical and Cabbalistic terms. Many Tarot readers, especially in France, are still inspired by it today. In the French school of Tarot the card illustrations are usually traditional (with a few exceptions of newly-designed decks), and the use of correspondences is according to Levi’s scheme. On the other hand, in English-speaking countries Tarot became popular through the influence of another school, which changed both the correspondences and the card illustrations.