Court de Gebelin
History
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Antoine Court de Gebelin (1725-1784), who first claimed tarot had Egyptian occult origins.
Published Volume 8 of 'Le Monde Primitif' in 1781, claiming that tarot trumps were Egyptian hieroglyphs encoding ancient wisdom transmitted through Rome to Europe. His Egyptian origin theory is historically false but enormously influential — it launched the entire occult tarot tradition. Comte de Mellet's appendix to this volume contains the first published correlation of tarot trumps with Hebrew alphabet letters.
Significance
Court de Gebelin's 1781 publication is Year Zero of occult tarot. Every subsequent esoteric interpretation descends from this single, historically unfounded, extraordinarily influential claim.