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"Etteilla" (ca. 1790)

An eighteenth-century student of the tarot. By profession he was a hairdresser, his true name being Alliette, but on entering upon his occult studies he changed his name to read backward: "Etteilla." He had little education and was ill-acquainted with the philosophy of the initiates. Nevertheless, he possessed a profound intuition, and according to the famous occultist Éliphas Lévi, he came very near to unveiling the secrets of the tarot. Lévi stated that his writings, however, were "obscure, wearisome, and in style barbarous." Etteilla claimed to have revised the Book of Thoth (i.e., the tarot) but in reality obscured its meaning by regarding as blunders certain cards whose meaning he had failed to grasp.

It is commonly admitted that he failed in his attempt to elucidate the tarot and ended by transposing the keys, thus destroying the correspondence between the numbers and the signs. It is also said that he degraded the science of the tarot into mere fortune-telling by cards for credulous people. The publications of Etteilla include Manière de se récréer le jeu de cartes nommés Tarots (4 pts., 1783-85), Philosophie des hautes sciences (1785), and Science, Leçons Théoriques et pratiques du livre de Thot (1787).