French Tarot after Lévi

[Saloni Sharma]

Occultists, magicians, and magi all the way down to the 21st century have cited Lévi as a defining influence. Among the first to seemingly adopt Lévi's ideas was Jean-Baptiste Pitois. Pitois wrote two books under the name Paul Christian that referenced the tarot, L'Homme rouge des Tuileries (1863), and later Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples (1870). In them, Pitois repeated and extended the mythology of the tarot and changed the names for the trumps and the suits (see table below for a list of Pitois's modifications to the trumps). Batons (wands) become Scepters, Swords become Blades, and Coins become Shekels.

However, it wasn't until the late 1880s that Lévi's vision of the occult tarot truly began to bear fruit, as his ideas on the occult began to be propounded by various French and English occultists. In France, secret societies such as the French Theosophical Society (1884) and the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (1888) served as the seeds for further developments in the occult tarot in France.

The French occultist Papus was one of the most prominent members of these societies, joining the Isis lodge of the French Theosophical Society in 1887 and becoming a founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross the next year. Among his 260 publications are two treatises on the use of tarot cards, Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), which attempted to formalize the method of using tarot cards in ceremonial magic first proposed by Lévi in his Clef des grands mysteries (1861), and Le Tarot divinatoire (1909), which focused on simpler divinatory uses of the cards.

Another founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, met the amateur artist Oswald Wirth in 1887 and subsequently sponsored a production of Lévi's intended deck. Guided entirely by de Guaita, Wirth designed the first neo-occultist cartomantic deck (and first cartomantic deck not derived from Etteilla's Egyptian deck). Released in 1889 as Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique, it consisted of only the twenty-two major arcana and was revised under the title of Le Tarot des imagers du moyen âge in 1926. Wirth also released a book about his revised cards which contained his own theories of the occult tarot under the same title the year following.

Outside of the Kabbalistic Order, in 1888, French magus Ély Star published Les mystères de l'horoscope which mostly repeats Christian's modifications. Its primary contribution was the introduction of the terms 'Major arcana' and 'Minor arcana', and the numbering of the Crocodile (the Fool) XXII instead of 0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_card_reading

[Joan Marie]

Hi,
While this is interesting information and I appreciate that you cited the source, I don't quite understand the point of just copy/pasting things from wiki or any other website.

What would be interesting and a contribution to the forum is if you had something of your own to bring, Share your thoughts or ideas or questions about the tarot.

If you are a beginner and just learning, I would suggest you hold back a bit on posting until you get a feel for how conversations about tarot go.

[TheLoracular]

To build on what Joan Marie is saying and provide some example, I am going to tackle what you posted. I try to offer at least some of my own thoughts even when I've linking to an article I've read (or sometimes written) so that I'm starting a discussion with my own thoughts not just throwing out a prompt for others. That's important here and on other similar tarot forums: To ask questions or express insights, not just give prompts to have others do the same. I hope this is helpful in seeing the difference.

This -is- a really good article for collaborative conversation. I don't have time today to tackle all of it but I will comment on the first couple of paragraphs to show what I'm talking about as offering commentary even when being the first person to post something.

Occultists, magicians, and magi all the way down to the 21st century have cited as a defining influence. Among the first to seemingly adopt Lévi's ideas was Jean-Baptiste Pitois. Pitois wrote two books under the name Paul Christian that referenced the tarot, L'Homme rouge des Tuileries (1863), and later Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples (1870). In them, Pitois repeated and extended the mythology of the tarot and changed the names for the trumps and the suits (see table below for a list of Pitois's modifications to the trumps). Batons (wands) become Scepters, Swords become Blades, and Coins become Shekels.

I am only just now learning French or Continental tarot. I'm American and often call myself an "Ignorant American" playfully because I only know a smattering of Biblical Hebrew, Greek, Latin and my French is terrible. I feel like even if I'm in my early 50s now, I should change that because the French tradition is fascinating. We are blessed with a website called Traditional Tarot who's author translates important pieces of the French tarot literature into English and is a genuine scholar into all of this.

However, it wasn't until the late 1880s that Lévi's vision of the occult tarot truly began to bear fruit, as his ideas on the occult began to be propounded by various French and English occultists. In France, secret societies such as the French Theosophical Society (1884) and the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (1888) served as the seeds for further developments in the occult tarot in France.

Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (English: Dogma and Ritual of High Magic) was published in France by Éliphas Lévi two parts, two years apart in 1854 and 1856. I don't yet know anything about the French Theosophical Society of that era in specific though I have more knowledge about Theosophy than I can read French, lol. What I do know about the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross is that it is considered the oldest of this type of magickal lodge in France and that it was founded by the poet-novelist Stanislas De Guaita and Joséphin Péladan. The latter threw a number of lavish salons and in my limited knowledge, really helped make tarot/occultism "trendy" in Paris among the "artistic elite" in the 1890s the way the Golden Dawn was doing in England across the channel.

It was partially because of De Guaita/Péladan's influence that the 1890s saw Lévi's work get so much attention. The other was because Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie was translated into English by AE Waite as Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual in 1896.  This was during what I would call a  "good era" for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which was founded in 1887.

I started tarot very young, in my mid teens in the early 1980s. Even back then, with a library card, it wasn't hard to get your hand on tarot books written by Papus, Wirth, A.E. Waite or even works by Lévi. However, it was very difficult to get any assistance in understanding what the heck any of them were actually talking about. All of these works are in the public domain and only a google search away in getting PDFs of. But they are the products of a very different mindset and language than we currently use and hard to read. Not for the faint of heart.

They are the worst way in my opinion to learn how to read tarot. They are also a terrible way of learning the Western occult tradition or Qabalistic Tarot, which is basically the infused system of astrology, alchemy, Westernized Kabbalah and tarot that began with Lévi and has gone from there. I say this as someone who did learn what she learned "The Hard Way" and would never wish that on people falling in love with tarot and occult philosophy now, the way I did then.

I'm attempting (too soon to tell if it will work or not) to write about and teach these things from a 2020+ perspective. So I appreciate you posting this to start a conversation and hope you will join in yourself with your own thoughts, knowledge, questions, etc.,.

[Saloni Sharma]

Okay I get it. Thank you. Yes I am a beginner and under learning process.

[Nemia]

Dear Saloni Sharma, do you know we have a special thread for our personal tarot stories? how we got into tarot, what interests and fascinates us...

viewtopic.php?f=155&t=51&start=300

It's always intriguing to see what brings people to tarot, including you!