The document summarizes the history and evolution of Tarot cards from their origins in 15th century Italy to their modern occult symbolism. It discusses how Antoine Court de Gébelin mistakenly linked the cards to ancient Egyptian wisdom in 1775. Éliphas Lévi further developed occult symbolism in the 1850s by connecting the major arcana to the Hebrew alphabet and Kabbalah. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888 used Tarot in rituals for spiritual rebirth through creative visualization. Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith produced a popular deck in 1909 while Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris created an occult-focused deck in 1938-1943.

1. Data And Magick
Karen Gregory
@claudiakincaid

2. The oldest known surviving deck was created for Francesco Sforza and his
wife Bianca Visconti, who ruled Milan from 1440 to 1465.

3. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, a standardized pack of
Tarot cards and images had been established.
These types of cards are known as the Tarot of Marseille.

4. 1775
Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French Freeman and student of
mythology, archeology, and linguistics, encountered the cards (while
visiting a Swiss or German friend), the history of the cards had been all
but forgotten.
Gébelin, in a fateful mistake, mistook the cards to be an “allegory”
representing ancient wisdom forming the lost Book of Thoth.
Gébelin suggested that this book had been brought to Europe from
“the gypsies” of Egypt and that it had been translated into a card game
to protect its secrets.
Gébelin will remove the Christian symbolism.

5. Éliphas Lévi Zahed
1850s France
Coins the term “occultism,” or
occultisme, in French.
Makes the connection
between the Tarot cards and
Hebrew mysticism, or
Kabbalah.
Draws linkages between the
twenty-two Major Arcana
trumps and the Hebrew
alphabet.

6. Lévi transformed a divinatory tool into what he called a
“philosophical machine” that is “mathematics applied to the
Absolute, the alliance of the positive and the ideal, a lottery of
thoughts as exact numbers, perhaps the simplest and
grandest of conception of human genius” (Giles 1992, 30).
Lévi seems to have meant the notion of machine in a
somewhat literal sense because the Hebrew alphabet is, as
Giles writes, “not just a system of writing, but an expression of
all the fundamental facts and forces of creation—which are in
turn organized in a complex image called the ‘Tree of Life.’”

8. 1888: Golden Dawn

9. • As Drury writes, “for the Golden Dawn
magician the ultimate mythic attainment was
to come forth ritually into the Light, for this
was the essence of spiritual rebirth” (2011,
58). Here, creative visualization was the
essential vehicle by which one attained such
rebirth.

10. Arthur Edward Waite & Pamela Coleman Smith

11. Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris 1938-1943