Etteilla
People · 3 min read · updated
Etteilla was the pen name of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791), a Paris card reader who was the first person known to make a living telling fortunes with tarot. He published the first books on tarot divination from 1783, designed the first deck made only for reading, and gave every card a written meaning upright and reversed. Modern fortune-telling with tarot, more than any occult system, comes from him.
- Real name
- Jean-Baptiste Alliette
- Pen name
- Alliette spelled backwards
- First book
- On fortune-telling with playing cards, 1770
- Tarot books
- From 1783
- Deck
- Grand Etteilla, or Book of Thoth, about 1789
- Lasting idea
Who was Etteilla?
Alliette was born in Paris and worked as a seed merchant and a dealer in prints before he found his trade. In 1770 he published a short book on how to tell fortunes with a 32-card piquet pack plus one extra card, the Etteilla, which stood for the person asking. It is one of the earliest printed guides to , fortune-telling with cards, and it sold well.[1]
Eleven years later Antoine Court de Gébelin announced that tarot was an ancient Egyptian book. Etteilla saw his opening. He claimed to have known this for years, switched to tarot, and between 1783 and 1785 brought out a series of booklets on reading it, presenting himself as the restorer of the Book of Thoth.
What did Etteilla do with tarot?
He treated the ordinary tarot of his day as a corrupted copy of the Egyptian original and set out to fix it. He renumbered all 78 cards into one sequence, rewrote the order of the trumps, so that the first cards told the creation of the world. In 1788 he founded a society of 'interpreters of the Book of Thoth', and around 1789 he published his own deck, now known as the Grand Etteilla, with a meaning printed at the top and bottom of each card.[1]
- Meanings on the card. Each card carries a keyword, and a second one upside down for when it is drawn reversed.
- A card for the querent. Card 1 stood for the person asking. It works much like the of later spreads.
- Astrology and the elements. The first cards show the creation and the zodiac, decades before the occultists made astrology a tarot subject.
Why do reversed cards come from Etteilla?
Reading a card differently when it falls upside down was already part of fortune-telling with playing cards. Etteilla wrote it down for tarot, card by card, and printed it on the cards themselves. French cartomancers followed him through the 19th century, and when A. E. Waite wrote his meanings in 1910 he drew on that French tradition, so the English upright and reversed meanings most readers learn trace back, through several hands, to Etteilla's lists.[2] See Reversed tarot cards.
Why do occultists dislike him?
The 19th-century magicians wanted tarot to be a sacred book, not a parlour trade. Éliphas Lévi mocked Etteilla for spoiling the images, and later writers called him an ignorant wig-maker, a story no record supports. Etteilla's real fault, for them, was that he read cards for money and for ordinary questions about love and luck. Historians now see him as the founder of tarot reading as most people practise it.[1]
Is the Etteilla deck still used?
Yes. Versions of the Grand Etteilla have been printed in France without a break since the 19th century, and it remains a standard deck among French card readers. It uses its own order and meanings, so a reader trained on the Rider–Waite–Smith or the Marseille has to relearn it. See Occult tarot for how his work fits with the systems that came after.