Court de Gébelin

The teaching

Taught from Le Monde primitif (1773 to 1782), above all its essay on the tarot of 1781.

The primitive world

Court de Gébelin teaches that mankind once lived in a first age of order and plenty, the primitive world of his title. Its people tilled the earth under the order of nature, worshipped one God, kept one calendar and spoke one language, and everything later peoples have, their speech and writing, their laws, their feasts and their myths, descends from it. That world was broken and scattered, but it was not lost: its traces lie in every nation's words and customs, and by comparing them a patient student can recover it, as a ruined building is recovered from the stones that lie about the field.

One language behind all languages

Speech, he holds, is natural and not arbitrary. The first words were drawn from nature itself, imitating the things they named or springing from the natural movements of the voice, and every language keeps the roots of that first tongue beneath its changes. Set Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Celtic and the tongues of modern Europe side by side, and the same roots appear with the same senses. Writing began the same way, with pictures of things, and the letters of the alphabets are those pictures worn down: each letter was once an image with a meaning.

The myths as the farmer's year

The myths of the ancients are allegories, and their subject is the first life of mankind, the tilling of the earth and the order of the year. Saturn, who reigned in the golden age, is the god of farming and of time; the twelve labours of Hercules are the twelve months of the farmer's year and the Sun's course through the twelve signs; the deeds of the gods are the calendar, the seasons and the works of the fields told as the deeds of persons. To read a myth rightly is to find the work of the year beneath it.

The tarot as the book of Thoth

In the tarot he believed he had found a book of that first world, saved by the priests of Egypt in the form of a game. Its twenty-two trumps and four suits of fourteen cards are the pages of the Book of Thoth, and its name, he says, is Egyptian: tar, a road, and ro or rog, royal, the royal road of life. The four suits are the four estates of Egypt: swords the king and the warrior nobility, cups the priesthood, batons the farmers, and coins the merchants.

He reads the trumps as Egyptian figures. The Pope and the Popess are the high priest and the high priestess; the Chariot is Osiris triumphant; the Star is Sirius, the Dog Star, whose rising told Egypt that the Nile would flood; the Devil is Typhon; the card of the Last Judgement is the creation; and the Fool, numbered nothing, stands apart from the rest. The Hanged Man, he says, is Prudence printed upside down by card makers who did not understand it: set on his feet, he stands on one foot and holds the other raised, considering where to put it down, and with Justice, Temperance and Strength he makes up the four cardinal virtues.

His collaborator the Comte de Mellet, in a second essay, set the trumps against the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, counting backward from the World, and divided them into three sevens, the ages of gold, silver and iron. The whole reading is theirs and not the cards': the tarot is an Italian game, and nothing Egyptian is in it.