From Gebelin to Dummett, How the Question Was Settled

Court de Gebelin's Egyptian assertion of 1781 was contagious because it was useful. Within two years the Parisian print seller and cartomancer Etteilla had rebuilt the pack around the claim, numbering and renaming the trumps for divination, and the nineteenth century esotericists, Eliphas Levi above all, wove the cards into the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah, a synthesis the Golden Dawn systematised and Waite and Crowley carried into the twentieth century's standard decks.

None of these authors engaged the Italian archive; each inherited the previous author's assertions and extended them. The scholarly demolition came late. Playing card historians had assembled the fifteenth century evidence by the late nineteenth century, but the decisive work was the philosopher Michael Dummett's The Game of Tarot in 1980, which reconstructed the game's rules, lineages and diffusion from hundreds of documents and demonstrated that the occult tarot was an invention of French esotericism, an argument he and his co-authors Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis extended in A Wicked Pack of Cards in 1996, tracing exactly how, when and by whom the Egyptian and kabbalistic readings were fabricated. The finding is accepted by historians of the subject without serious dissent, which gives the study its atlas status: the documentary history is attested, the esoteric origin story is debunked, and the interesting question has become why the invented history proved so much more powerful than the real one.