Le Monde primitif, analyse et compare avec le monde moderne, Volume VIII

Antoine Court de Gebelin's Le Monde primitif, published by the author in Paris in 1781, with an essay by the Comte de Mellet in the same eighth volume, is the primary text that invented the esoteric reading of the tarot: Court de Gebelin asserts an Egyptian priestly origin for the deck, and the Comte de Mellet is the first to match its twenty-one trumps and the Fool to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Its historical importance is as the founding document of an entire later occult tradition rather than as a reliable account of the tarot's actual origin, which modern card history scholarship places in fifteenth century Italy as a playing card game with no Egyptian or Hebrew connection. Cite it for what it originated, never for what it claims about the tarot's real history.