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Posts tagged ‘Etteilla’

Apr 9

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Etteilla: The First Modern Card Reader and His Reconstructed Decks by Marco Benedetti

Let’s celebrate Etteilla, the eighteenth-century cartomancer who laid the groundwork for our contemporary tarot reading practices. After writing numerous books on divination, seeing clients, running a school, and establishing a tarot society, he found time to design a tarot deck that has been in print, in slightly altered form, for over 200 years.  Now for the first time, thanks to Marco Benedetti’s reconstruction, Etteilla’s original tarot deck, as he conceived it, is available to the public. Before taking a close look at Etteilla’s tarot, we’ll review his amazing career.

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Sep 5

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Tarot History Rant #5: Etteilla the hairdresser

At least three times in the past few weeks I’ve heard people refer to “the hairdresser Etteilla,” mindlessly repeating disinformation that Eliphas Levi and A. E. Waite rather viciously spread about the founder of modern tarot. Etteilla-bashing hit its stride in the mid-19th century when Eliphas Levi published statements like:

Etteilla or Alliette, an illumine hairdresser, exclusively engrossed by his divinatory system, and the emolument he could derive from it, neither proficient in his own language nor even in orthography, pretended to reform, and thus attribute to himself the Book of Thoth.

This illuminated hairdresser, after working for thirty years, only succeeded in producing a bastard set, the Keys of which are transposed, so that the numbers no longer answer to the signs.

The writings of Etteilla, now very rare, are obscure, wearisome and barbarous in style.

Generations of authors have mindlessly parroted Levi without bothering to learn about the man behind the slander. Read more

Apr 28

Etteilla card 16 Opinion and Vergnano Judgment card
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Was Etteilla Influenced by Piedmont Tarot?

Etteilla, tarot super-star of mid-1700s Paris, claimed he studied tarot from 1757 to 1765 at the urging of “an aged Piedmontese”. In his memoirs, a Parisian actor who was Etteilla’s contemporary, describes visiting Italian fortune tellers in Paris. It’s not a stretch to imagine Etteilla learning card reading from one of them.

If this elderly Piemontese teacher was in his 60s in 1757, then he was born a little before 1700. He may have learned to read tarot in his youth in the 1720s from a teacher who could have learned the cards around 1680. This would make Etteilla the bridge to a very old Italian card reading tradition. Read more