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Etteilla
Etteilla was the professional name of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791), a Parisian who earned his living as a card reader, teacher, astrologer and dealer in prints. The name is his surname spelt backwards. He was the first person known to have made a career of reading the tarot, the first to teach it, and the first to publish a tarot deck designed for divination rather than for play. Much of what people still mean when they say a card is "good news" or "a warning" goes back, through many hands, to him.
Before the tarot
Alliette began by reading an ordinary pack of thirty-two cards. His first book, published in 1770 and named after himself — Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes — sets out a method of fortune-telling with that pack. It also mentions the tarot in passing among the tools of divination, which shows that reading tarot cards was known in Paris before the theories that later made it famous.
The Egyptian story
In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published, in the eighth volume of his vast Le Monde primitif, an essay claiming that the tarot was an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom that had survived disguised as a game. A second essay in the same volume, by the comte de Mellet, linked the trumps to the Hebrew alphabet and spoke of their use in divination. Etteilla took up the Egyptian theory at once and said he had known it for years. In a book on the tarot, published in parts in the mid-1780s, he declared that the cards were the Book of Thoth, engraved on leaves of gold by seventeen magi under Hermes Trismegistus, and that the familiar deck was a corrupted copy.
The story is a legend. Tarot first appears in fifteenth-century Italy, as a card game with allegorical trumps of plainly Renaissance European design; no Egyptian source mentions anything like it, and when Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in the 1820s they gave no support to the idea. But the legend proved extraordinarily durable, and Etteilla did more than anyone to spread it.
His deck of 1789
Believing the deck had been corrupted, Etteilla commissioned a "restored" one, published in 1789 and now called the Grand Etteilla; he seems to have called it the Book of Thoth. It is the first tarot made primarily for divination. Its trumps are reordered to follow the Hermetic account of creation and drawn in an eighteenth-century idea of Egyptian style; the first twelve carry the signs of the zodiac in order; The Hanged Man becomes Prudence, a woman lifting her skirt to step clear of a snake; and The Fool moves to the end. All seventy-eight cards are numbered in one sequence, and two of them stand for the person consulting the cards, one for a man and one for a woman — an early form of the significator. Each card carries short divinatory words for the upright and the reversed position, so that its meaning could be read from the card itself.
He gathered pupils into a society of interpreters of the Book of Thoth, and his followers carried his method on after his death in 1791. Decks in his tradition were reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, and the Paris firm Grimaud still published a Grand Etteilla in the twentieth.
His legacy
Later occultists mostly scorned him. Éliphas Lévi dismissed him in the 1850s, and Arthur Edward Waite was patronising about him in 1910 — while the meanings Waite gave for the Minor Arcana are, as historians have shown, largely drawn from Etteilla's tradition. So the scenes that Pamela Colman Smith drew for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck often illustrate meanings that began in Etteilla's Paris.
His real contribution was practical: the idea of a fixed meaning for each card, upright and reversed; a card for the querent; laying cards out in a pattern of positions; and reading for paying clients. Readers today who follow none of his theories still work in a craft he did much to invent.