The Egyptian Tarot, Debunked and Indestructible

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

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