I continue my series of notes on the history of the Egyptian Tarot as a current in the esoteric Tarot. Here are links to the previous notes:
The Beginning of the Egyptian Tarot Myth, Part 1
“Egyptian Tarot” or “Book of Thoth” decks: the Etteilla tradition
Eliphas Levi and the Egyptian Tarot
The fourth founding father of the esoteric Tarot was Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810–1875), better known as Eliphas Levi Zahed, or simply Eliphas Levi. It was he who completed the work begun in the Renaissance of uniting the various branches of the Western esoteric tradition into a single whole, and the Tarot cards were given an important role in this whole. In his most famous work, Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic (Dogme et Rituel de la haute magie, 1856), Levi writes of
the marvellous Tarot book, which
is of all books the most primitive, the key of prophecies and dogmas, in a
word, the inspiration of inspired works, a fact which has remained unperceived
equally by the science of Court de Gebelin and by the extraordinary intuitions
of Eteilla or Alliette.
Elsewhere
he states that
the Tarot is the primeval book and the keystone of
the occult sciences; it must be Hermetic, because it is kabbalistic, magical,
and theosophical.
Eliphas Levi agreed with Court de Gébelin and count de Mellet that the Tarot contained the wisdom of ancient Egypt and deserved the name “Book of Thoth.” But he was much more fascinated by the idea (first expressed by the same two authors) of the correspondence of the twenty-two trumps of the Tarot (Levi called them “keys”) to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
In his History of Magic (Histoire de la magie, 1860), Levi
writes:
This hieroglyphic alphabet
which Moses made the great secret of his Kabbalah and which he took back from
the Egyptians; for, according to the Sepher Jezirah, it came from Abraham: this
alphabet, we say, is the famous book of Thot [livre de Thauth]
which, as Court de Gébelin suspected, had been preserved
to our days in the form of this deck of bizarre cards called the
tarot…
Later, however, he clarifies:
The alphabet of Thot [Thauth] is the
original of our Tarot only in a roundabout way. The Tarot that we have is of
Jewish origin…
And he further
explains:
We are told by Moses that
the Israelites carried away the sacred vessels of the
Egyptians when they came out of the land of bondage. The account is
allegorical, for the great prophet would scarcely have encouraged his people in
an act of theft ; the sacred vessels in question were the mysteries of Egyptian
knowledge, acquired by Moses himself at the court of
Pharaoh.
In the same book, on plate V, Levi places the illustration
with
the caption “Yinx Pantomorphe.
The twenty-first
Key of the primitive Egyptian Tarot.”
The picture seems
to be taken from the book titled
Egyptian Pantheon, collection of mythological
characters of Ancient Egypt
(Panthéon Égyptien, collection des personnages mythologiques de l’Ancienne Égypte. Paris, 1823)
According to the text of the book written by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), the famous founder of Egyptology, the picture portrays “one of the forms of Hathor, the Egyptian Venus.”
Left: Levi’s
illustration from The History of
Magic. Right: illustration from Egyptian Pantheon
Note that Levi’s capture contains the term “Egyptian Tarot,” which he did not normally use. The second and last time we see it in Levi’s works is in the capture to table XV in the The History of Magic: “Primitive Egyptian Tarot. The two and ace of coups.”
Rónán Ó Fearġaıl recently kindly informed me that the upper image (“two of cups”) was borrowed from the second volume of the work by Anne Claude de Caylus, titled Collection of Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman antiquities (Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines) and published in Paris. This volume was issued in 1756.
I found that the lower image (two variants of the “ace of cups”) is borrowed from Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac’s book Ancient Egypt (Égypte ancienne) published in Paris in 1839.
Left: Eliphas Levi (1860). Right: de Caylus (1756)
Left: Eliphas Levi (1860). Right: Champollion-Figeac (1839)
In the later work The Science of Spirits (La science des esprits, 1865) Levi expressed a somewhat different view:
It is true that pagan,
Egyptian, etc. figures do not belong to Orthodox Judaism. The Tarot existed in
India, Egypt, and even China, at the same time as among the Hebrews. The one
that has come down to us is the Samaritan Tarot. The ideas are Jewish, but the
symbols are profane and are very close to the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the
mysticism of India.
This “Samaritan
Tarot” may had been borrowed from L’Homme rouge des Tuileries by Paul
Christian, whom I call the fifth founding father of the esoteric Tarot. He was
a very important figure in the Egyptian Tarot myth, and my next note will be
dedicated to him. But for
now, let’s finish with Eliphas Levi.
Following
de Gébelin, de Mellet and Etteilla, he recognized the ancient Egyptian origin
of the Tarot, but believed that the original Egyptian symbols had been greatly
modified by the Jews and European peoples.
Levi’s books and manuscripts contain a number of Tarot trumps drawn by
him. Thanks to Marco Cesare Benedetti, all the Tarot cards drawn or
completed by him have recently been published.
In my humble opinion, something Egyptian can only be discerned in his Chariot of Hermes and the Wheel of Fortune: these are sphinxes in nemeses and a winged disk.
The most “Egyptian” Tarot
images drawn by Eliphas Levi
To sum up: Eliphas
Levi did not do much to develop the Egyptian form of Tarot, but he integrated
Tarot into the Western esoteric tradition and thus ensured the enduring
interest in the subject of the “Book of Thoth.”
