Etteilla

The teaching

Taught from his own books on the cards (1770 and 1783 to 1785) and the tarot pack he designed.

A card for the one who asks

Etteilla's first book teaches fortune-telling with the ordinary piquet pack of thirty-two cards, the seven to the ace in each suit, and adds one card more, the Etteilla, which stands for the person who asks. Every card has two meanings, one when it falls upright and another when it falls reversed, so that the pack speaks with sixty-four voices and not thirty-two. The cards are shuffled, cut by the questioner and laid out, and each is read by its own meaning, by the way it falls and by the cards around it.

The book of Thoth restored

When Court de Gébelin declared the tarot the Book of Thoth, Etteilla took up the claim and went further: the pack, he taught, had come down corrupted by card makers who did not understand it, and he set out to restore its true order and its true meanings. In his order the first cards tell the creation of the world, from chaos and the first light to the rest of the seventh day; then come four virtues, Justice, Temperance, Strength and Prudence, with Prudence taking the place of the Hanged Man as Gébelin had said it should; and then the cards of human fortune, among them Marriage, Judgement, Death, Fortune and Folly.

The order and the meanings are his own work, and together they make the first full system for reading the tarot as a book of fortunes.

Meanings written on the cards

His pack, the Grand Etteilla, prints the teaching on the cards themselves. Each card is numbered in his order and carries its meanings in words, the upright meaning at one end and the reversed at the other, so that whichever way a card falls the reader sees what it says. The pack is made to be read, not played, and each of its seventy-eight cards is a sentence in a book of fate.

The small cards carry his meanings as fully as the trumps, and many of them passed into Waite's Pictorial Key of 1910. The ace of cups is the table, a feast and its plenty, and reversed a change; the ace of swords is the extreme, triumph and excess, and reversed a conception; the ace of batons is a birth, and reversed a fall; the ace of coins is perfect contentment, and reversed a sum of money.

The reader's craft

Etteilla teaches that the reader must know every meaning by heart, upright and reversed, and must read the cards together and not one by one, for a card of fortune beside a card of loss says something that neither says alone. He calls cartomancy a science with rules, to be learned and practised like any other, and he gathered his pupils into a society of interpreters to teach it.