Etteilla: The First Deck Made to Be Read

Jean-Baptiste Alliette was born in Paris on 1 March 1738. His father was a roasting-cook, his mother sold seed, and he sold seed too before he found something better to do with his hands. Later he worked as a printseller. By 1783 he was earning his living as a card reader, teacher and author, which as far as the record goes makes him the first professional cartomancer in Europe.

He read his name backwards and signed his work Etteilla. He claimed he had been taught to read cards in 1751, at thirteen, by an Italian. There is no way to check that.

His first book came out in 1770, nineteen years before his tarot: Etteilla, ou maniere de se recreer avec un jeu de cartes. It works on a piquet deck, thirty-two ordinary playing cards, with one extra card representing the querent. That extra card matters more than it looks. It is the moment cartomancy stops being a parlour trick and acquires a person at the centre of the spread.

Every tarot deck before Etteilla was a game. The Marseille pattern, the Visconti-Sforza cards, the whole northern Italian line: those are trick-taking decks whose trumps happen to carry allegorical pictures. Readers used them, but nobody had designed one for reading.

Etteilla did, and he published it around 1 March 1789, on his fifty-first birthday. He called it the Livre de Thot. It came out as eight large sheets which the buyer could fold into a booklet or cut into a working deck, engraved by Pierre-Francois Basan. Three things on those cards had never been printed on a card before.

Keywords on the face, upright and reversed. The card tells you what it means, in both directions, so the deck teaches while you use it. Second, reversals treated as a full vocabulary rather than a negation: a reversed card in Etteilla is not the upright meaning with a minus sign, it is a different word. Third, astrological attributions printed on the majors, and a Fool numbered zero and titled Folly.

He also founded a school for it, the Societe des Interpretes du Livre de Thot, in 1788. A correspondence network of readers, a year before the deck. He was building a profession, not just a product.

Antoine Court de Gebelin had put the Egyptian origin of tarot into print in 1781, in the eighth volume of Le Monde primitif. Etteilla read it and went further, and his version is worth quoting because of how specific it is: the tarot was composed by seventeen magi, descendants of Mercury-Thoth, in the Temple of Fire near Memphis, 171 years after the Flood. His own deck, he said, restored a fragment of the lost Book of Thoth.

None of it is true, and the specificity is the tell. Real chronologies are vague at the edges. The documented trail for tarot begins in northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, with trumps added to a playing deck to make a trick-taking game, and the earliest sources that mention those cards talk about gambling and about wagers, not about initiation. No papyrus, no inscription, no temple.

What is worth noticing is that Etteilla was not lying to sell a deck he knew to be modern. He was a man of the 1780s, when Egypt was the fashionable answer to every question about origins, and he inherited the claim from a respected scholar. Read his history the way you would read a stage set: it tells you about the room he was standing in.

Three things, and beginners feel all three within a week.

The printed keyword removes the lookup. A modern learner reads a card, then reaches for a book, then loses the thread of the spread. On a Grand Etteilla the word is under your thumb, so the reading stays continuous and the meaning gets attached to the image rather than to a page number.

The reversal is a real second card. Most contemporary decks and most contemporary teaching treat the reversed position as blocked, weakened, or delayed, which is a single move applied seventy-eight times. Etteilla gave each position its own term. That doubles the vocabulary of the deck and forces you to notice orientation instead of correcting for it.

And the querent card gives the spread an anchor. You are in the layout, physically, as a card the others relate to. Try it with any deck you own: pull a significator first, place it, and read the rest around it. The spread stops being a weather report.

Follow the line that reaches English readers. Eliphas Levi in the 1850s, the Golden Dawn in the 1880s, Waite and Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, and from there almost everything printed in English in the twentieth century. Etteilla is not on that line. He predates it, he worked in French, his books were never fully translated, and the Golden Dawn built a different system of attributions that had no room for his.

So an English-speaking reader today inherits reversals as an afterthought, inherits the Fool as zero without knowing who numbered it, and has usually never heard the name. Meanwhile the Grand Etteilla stayed in print in France for two centuries and is still sold there.

That is a gap in the record rather than a verdict on the work. If you learned tarot in English, there is a whole parallel tradition sitting one language away, and it is the older one.

You do not need his deck to use his method. Four moves, in order.

Pull a card for the person first and place it face up. Everything else in the spread is read as a relation to it.

Write your own keyword on each card in your working deck, upright and reversed, in pencil on a sleeve or in a notebook keyed to the card. Choose one word, not a paragraph. The constraint is the exercise.

Give reversals their own term. Not the negation of the upright: a different word entirely, chosen by you, and then kept. Consistency is what turns vocabulary into language.

Read in the order the cards were laid, left to right, and say the words out loud in sequence before you interpret anything. Etteilla's students were reading a sentence. Most modern spreads are read as a pile.