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Tarot cards have been associated with Egypt ever since their “Egyptian” ori- gins were discovered by Antoine Court de Gébelin (¡728-¡784). Court de Gébe- lin was a Protestant minister, a member of the Freemasons and the occult group Les Neuf Soeurs, and the founder of his own such group, the Societe Apolloni- enne. “De Gébelin” was an a›ectation adopted upon his return to France from Switzerland where his family had gone to escape religious persecution. In ¡772, he proposed to write a multi-volumed work titled Monde primitif in which the golden age of a unified civilization long since vanished was to be reconstructed through etymology and the allegorical interpretation of myth.17_{Volume VIII of} this work, published in ¡78¡, contains the first known essay on Tarot and it is here that Court de Gébelin explains how he recognized the Egyptian content of Tarot cards while watching others play the game: the eighteenth century fascination with Egypt and with hieroglyphic picture writing may well have had much to do with his revelation.

Court de Gébelin theorized that Tarot is a book containing the wisdom of ancient Egyptian priests in disguised form, so successfully disguised that it escaped destruction, and recognition, spreading from Egypt to Rome and from Rome throughout Europe, until he rediscovered it. He also associated Egyptian deities with the various cards and noted that the “Trumps” in the Tarot and the letters in the Hebrew alphabet both number 22.

Many later artists followed this precedent for redesigning Tarot. The central Egyptian myth represented is that of Osiris (Fig. 27), Isis (Fig. 28), Horus (Fig.

Opposite page: (top left) Figure 27. Deck Type D¡. Tarot of Transition [©¡983]. Turnhout,

Belgium: Carta Mundi. 6.¡ ×× ¡¡.2 cm. (Top right) Figure 28. C.C. Zain. The Brotherhood of

Light Egyptian Tarot Cards. Stamfrod, CT: U.S. Games Systems, ¡964(?). 6.2 ×× ¡0.6 cm. (Bot- tom left) Figure 29. Deck Type D¡. Josef Machynka. Ibis Tarot [©¡99¡]. AGM AGMüller. 6.¡ ×× ¡2 cm. Illustration reproduced by permission of AGM AGMüller, CH 82¡2 Neuhausen,

Switzerland. ©AGM, Switzerland www.tarotworld.com. Further reproduction is prohibited.

(Bottom right) Figure 30. Deck Type D¡. Silvana Alasia (artist) and M.O. Wegener. Egyptian Tarot (I Tarocchi Egiziani) [©¡996]. Lo Scarebeo. 6 ×× ¡¡.5 cm.

47), and Seth. Osiris and Isis are brother and sister, man and wife. While Osiris is away, his brother Seth plots to take his throne and does so by murdering him, cutting his body into pieces, and nailing him into a co‡n which he sets adrift on the Nile. Isis recovers the dead body and with it conceives a son, Horus, frequently symbolized in Egyptian art as an eye. With the help of Horus, Thoth (Fig. 29), and Anubis (Fig. 30), Isis also manages to put the pieces of Osiris’s body back together again and performs the first embalming, thereby making him ruler of the dead. Thoth, symbolized by the ibis, is the god who invented and presides over writing and takes records at the psychostasis or the ritual weighing of the soul against the feather of Ma’at after death. Because of his association with Mer- cury in western esotericism, he is considered the “divine alchemist,” and occa- sionally represented as such (Fig. 5). Anubis is the god of embalming who often presides over the psychostasis. Ma’at, the daughter of the old sun god, Ra, rep- resents the principle of truth and order (Fig. 3¡). Less frequently represented in contemporary Tarot are Nut (Fig. 37), goddess of the sky, usually shown arching her body over her brother Geb, the earth god; and Ra, the old sun god, often shown as Horus’ falcon headdress.

The earliest deck revised to incorporate Egyptian imagery throughout is one presented in designs in Edgar de Valcourt-Vermont’s book Practical Astrology (¡90¡), published under the name of Comte C. Saint-Germaine and issued, with some revisions, as the Egyptian Tarot Deck in ¡980 (Fig. 32). Among the numerous decks based on Saint-Germaine’s designs are the Brotherhood of Light Egyptian Tarot Cards by Elbert Benjamine, leader of the Brotherhood of Light, as part of his 22 vol- ume series course on occultism (¡9¡5-34) and published under the name C.C. Zain18_{(Fig. 28); the Egipcios Kier Tarot (¡984) (Fig. 3¡); Josef Machynka’s Ibis Tarot} (¡99¡) (Fig. 5), in which a figure of Thoth appears on the back of every card (Fig. 29);19 _{and M.O. Wegener and artist Silvana Alasia’s Egyptian Tarot [I Tarocchi}

Egiziani] (¡996) (Fig. 30). The debt to Saint-Germaine in these decks is obvious.

For example, the Magician is shown in Saint-Germaine’s Tarot, the Brotherhood of

Light Egyptian Tarot, the Egipcios Kier Tarot, the Ibis Tarot, and the Egyptian Tarot, in

profile, wearing Egyptian dress and holding a scepter before a simple altar with an ibis on the side. The scepter represents the suit of Wands, and the symbols of the other three suits: the Cup, Sword, and Pentacle, rest on the altar. All of these decks also show the Hebrew letter aleph on the card and some also include astro- logical symbols. The embellishments on Saint-Germaine’s designs in the later decks consist of elaborations of dress and the addition of color and border sym- bols. Readings o›ered for the Magician card in the various pamphlets accompa- nying these decks suggest mastery of craft, willpower, dexterity, and creativity.

The Golden Dawn supported the association of Tarot with both mysticism and Egypt and later Tarot writers and artists sometimes revised both imagery and card identifications to reference Egyptian mythological characters. Among the most popular of the Egyptian decks associated with that organization is Crowley’s

Book of Thoth, a deck whose design di›ers drastically from that of the Rider-Waite

deck, the cards being extremely dynamic and packed with symbols. Crowley’s deck and guidebook reasserts the Egyptian origins of Tarot wisdom, as well as various correspondences to the Hebrew alphabet and Jewish Kabbala, but relatively few Egyptian references are obvious to the uninitiated. The Magician (Fig. 33), pro- duced in several versions, is one of the cards explained with reference to Egypt-

ian culture and mythology. Crowley sug- gests that the suits controlled by the Magician represent much more than social classes: the Wands symbolize cre- ation, Cups preservation, Swords destruction, and Coins redemption. The Magician himself is associated with the Juggler, the “creative and dualistic” character of the Hebrew letter Beth (rather than aleph), the male creative power of Osiris,20_{Mercury and}

Top left: Figure 3¡. Deck Type D¡. Egipcios Kier Tarot. ¡970s; Stamford, CT: U.S. Games

Systems, ¡984. 6.8 ×× ¡2.9 cm. Top right: Fig- ure 32. Deck Type D¡. Egyptian Tarot Deck [deck ©¡978 based on illustrations from Comte de Saint-Germain’s Practical Astrol-

ogy. ¡90¡]. Stamford, CT: U.S. Games Sys-

tems. 6.¡ ×× ¡¡ cm. Bottom right: Figure 33. Deck Type A2. Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris (artist). The Book of Thoth. ¡944; New York: U.S. Games Systems, ¡978. 9.5 ×× ¡4 cm.

action in all forms and phases. He is the fluidic basis of all transmission of activ- ity; and, on the dynamic theory of the Universe, he is himself the substance thereof…

Logically also, being the Word, he is the law of reason or of necessity or chance, which is the secret meaning of the Word, which is the essence of the Word, and the condition of its utterance. This being so, and especially because he is duality, he represents both truth and falsehood, wisdom and folly. Being the unexpected, he unsettles any established idea, and therefore appears tricky. He has no con- science, being creative. If he cannot attain his ends by fair means, he does it by foul. The legends of the youthful Mercury are therefore legends of cunning. He cannot be understood, because he is the Unconscious Will.21

Although Egyptian Tarot decks have prototypes other than the Rider-Waite deck, the manner in which Egyptian imagery and associations are integrated into them can be identified in much the same way as other cultural decks: by the revi- sion of one or a few major arcana cards, as in James Wanless and artist Ken Knut- son’s Voyager Tarot (¡985) Chariot (Plate 7.4), which shows an Egyptian relief of a charioteer, along with a falcon, a moon vehicle, a surfer, a balloon, and the head of a Greek statue; by the complete revision of the deck, as occurs in the discur- sive type one decks already considered; or by the revision of one of the suits, as in some discursive type two decks considered later, to show Egypt as contributing to a pluralistic contemporary world culture or mythology.

Clive Barrett’s Ancient Egyptian Tarot (¡994) is another example of a discur- sive type one deck which, as he explains, is intended to demonstrate the arche- typal nature of Tarot by showing how each card may be articulated according to specific aspects of Egyptian culture and myth. In the guidebook, Barrett includes a variety of charts showing co-relations between Egyptian and Arthurian mytho- logical traditions. The card figures are in Egyptian dress surrounded by Egypt- ian-style furniture, architecture, and other symbolic elements. In spite of the unfamiliar look of the deck in this cultural refitting, all the cards remain identifiable with easily recognized Tarot references and almost all traditional labels.

All of the cards in this deck symbolically evoke the power of writing in that all have a border of hieroglyphic symbols which Barrett tells us are taken from

The Egyptian Book of the Dead,22_{a contemporary name given to a vast collection of} ancient Egyptian writings associated with funerary contexts. Writing is further emphasized by the revision of the Magician card as Thoth (Fig. 34), whom Bar- rett represents, as he is in ancient Egyptian art, wearing an ibis headdress and carrying symbols of upper and lower Egypt, the lotus and papyrus.