I’m back from New York and will be starting up the Tarot posts again soon. In the meantime, here’s a link to a translation by Donald Tyson of Antoine Court de Gébelin’s essay on the Tarot that started the whole occult tarot lineage and the belief in its Egyptian origin. It is followed by an essay by Le Comte de M*** (Mellet) on reading the cards that also appeared in 1781 in Vol. 8 of de Gébelin’s encyclopedic work Le Monde Primitif. These seminal works should be read by everyone who has any interest in tarot history. Try out the first published tarot spread from Le Comte de Mellet’s essay here.
See this blog article on the marginalia of U.S. President John Adams that includes comments on three volumes of de Gébelin’s encyclopedia, including this: “What a coruscation of metaphors, fables, allegories, fictions, mysteries and whatnot!”
Read a biography of Antoine Court de Gébelin from LE TAROT Associazione Culturale.
Mary K. Greer has made tarot her life work. Check here for reports of goings-on in the world of tarot and cartomancy, articles on the history and practice of tarot, and materials on other cartomancy decks. Sorry, I no longer write reviews. Contact me
Mary K. Greer's Tarot Blog 
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June 20, 2008 at 1:05 am
Jim
“This game is based on the number seven.”
ACdG may have been completly wrong about the Egyptian origins of Tarot, but here I think he was on to something. From my experiences playing the actual game of Tarot, it appears that seven might be the favorite number of the deck’s creator. 3×7 proper trumps (fool is not really a trump) and 2×7 in each conventional suit. There are also 7 cards worth 5 points in the game. Much attention has been paid to the symbolism of the cards, but sadly little to the structure of the deck and the underlying game of Tarot. There have been studies on the Mathematics of I Ching, and I think it would be good to have a similar analysis of the mathematics behind Tarot.
June 21, 2008 at 4:44 am
marygreer
Jim – I think you are right about the importance of the number 7. I never thought about it in relationship to the tarot game. Tom Little wrote a brief essay on some of the interesting things that can be observed about the game:
http://www.tarothermit.com/play.htm
If you know of another site with similar deliberations on the game please let me know.
Mary
June 21, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Jim
You might also be interested in Alain Bougearel’s work on Neo-Pythagorism and Tarot. As a French writer, Bougearel is from a culture with TWO sets of Tarot iconography; The Tarot de Marseilles and the “Tarot a Jouer”, or “Tarockspiel”. Because of this, I think he was better able to make a study of its structure independent of any particular symbolism. His theory was a rather complex piece of work which I personally found fascinating and perhaps plausible that there may have been an influence of this kind of numerology. If such is the case, Tarot would not be the only such game. During medieval times, there was a board game played called Rhythmomachia which was a Chess-like game played by German monks and it was inspired by a similar Pythagorean mathematics. When Bougearel posted his theory on the Aeclectic forum, I felt compelled to mention this medieval boardgame to him. I was surprised to find that he formulated his Tarot theory without even knowing of this boardgame!
I wish I could still find the link to his article but here’s a link describing Rhythmomachia
http://www.jducoeur.org/game-hist/mebben.ryth.html
June 21, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Jim
Also, I find this quote from the tarothermit site to be quite interesting.
http://www.tarothermit.com/monopoly.htm
“Now imagine a future a few centuries hence. American real estate capitalism is a thing of the past. Only a few obsessive anachronistic types even have words like ‘mortgage’ in their vocabulary. But people still play Monopoly. A 23rd-century Court de Gebelin, an enthusiastic but ignorant devotee of some romanticized memory of capitalism, encounters the game and recognizes so many things that fascinate him: luxury tax! railroads! bidding! He’s in hog heaven, and happily goes off to tell his friends that the forbidden secrets of real estate trading were concealed in a board game to protect them from centuries of socialist oppression. Maybe he guesses wrong about a lot of stuff: the properties must have been in New York (the capital of capitalism), the game must date from the time of Adam Smith, the founder of capitalism…you get the picture.”
I have already read this article quite some time ago, but I do recall that one time after reading it, I’ve counted the properties on the Monopoly board and I have found that, excluding the utilities and the railroads, there are exactly 22 of them!
May 23, 2010 at 3:25 am
BOUGEAREL
Hi Mary
You may be interested by the publication by Andrea VITALI ‘s association of :
Tarot and Neo-Pythagoreanism
http://www.letarot.it/Tarot-and-Neo-Pythagoreanism_pag_pg83_eng.aspx
Sicerely your’s
Alain BOUGEAREL
June 30, 2021 at 12:20 pm
emily
Hello, I am just finding this post and the link no longer seems to work for me. I’m curious if you have an updated version? I am very curious about this thank you
June 30, 2021 at 4:03 pm
Alain Bougearel
An exhaustive explanation about the theory of a possible Neo-Pythagorean structure in the 78 cards in the classic tarot:
The Arithmological Tarot
The arithmological sequence of the pentagonal number 22 = 1 + 4 + 7 + 10
http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=603
Michael Howard has commented the Essay on
http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=608
n Appreciation of Alain Bougearel’s “1+4+7+10=22”
May 30, 2022 at 7:55 pm
Tarot Cards : A Brief History and it's Evolution over time
[…] pastor Antoine Court de Gebelin wrote an essay on tarot cards inside of his work entitled Le Monde Primitif. In his 8th volume, he alleged that the Ancient Egyptian libraries and temples that were destroyed […]