Antoine Court who named himself
Antoine Court de Gébelin (ca.1719 – May 10, 1784) was the former Protestant pastor, born at Nimes (
Encyclopædia Britannica), who initiated the interpretation of the
TarotThe tarot , , is a pack of cards , used from the mid fifteenth century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Italian Tarocchini and French Tarot. The tarot has four suits corresponding to the suits of conventional playing cards...
as an arcane repository of timeless esoteric wisdom, in an essay included in his
Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne ("The Primitive World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World"), volume viii, 1781.
Antoine Court who named himself
Antoine Court de Gébelin (ca.1719 – May 10, 1784) was the former Protestant pastor, born at Nimes (
Encyclopædia Britannica), who initiated the interpretation of the
TarotThe tarot , , is a pack of cards , used from the mid fifteenth century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Italian Tarocchini and French Tarot. The tarot has four suits corresponding to the suits of conventional playing cards...
as an arcane repository of timeless esoteric wisdom, in an essay included in his
Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne ("The Primitive World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World"), volume viii, 1781. The chapter on Tarot with which his name is indelibly associated is a single section in his vast compendium that he published in series from 1773, to a distinguished list of subscribers, headed by
Louis XVILouis XVI of France ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1774 until 1791, and then as King of the French from 1791 to 1792. Suspended and arrested during the Insurrection of 10 August 1792, he was tried by the National Convention, found guilty of treason, and executed by guillotine on 21...
.
His
fatherAntoine Court was a French reformer called the "Restorer of Protestantism in France." He was born at Villeneuve de Berg, in Languedoc, March 27, 1696. His parents were peasants, adherents of the Reformed church, which was then undergoing persecution...
was a famous religious leader of the Huguenots. Court de Gebelin had been ordained a
pastorThe term pastor usually refers to an ordained person within a Christian church. In some countries the term is more usually used in traditional Protestant churches but is also used in reference to priests and bishops within the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches. The...
in 1754 before departing Switzerland and remained openly Protestant, a rational advocate for freedom of conscience in Enlightenment France. In
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, he was initiated into
FreemasonryFreemasonry is a fraternal organisation that arose from obscure origins in the late 16th to early 17th century. Freemasonry now exists in various forms all over the world, with a membership estimated at around 5 million, including just under two million in the United States and around 480,000 in...
at the lodge Les Amis Réunis, in 1771, and moved on to the lodge
Les Neuf SœursLoge Les Neuf Sœurs , established in Paris in 1776, was a prominent French Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient de France that was influential in organising French support for the American Revolution. A "Société des Neuf Sœurs," a charitable society that surveyed academic curricula, had been active at...
where he welcomed
Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, soldier, and diplomat...
as a lodge-brother. He was a supporter of American Independence who contributed to the massive
Affaires de L'Angleterre et de l'Amérique, of the new theories of economics, and of the "animal magnetism" of Mesmer (in an electrical experiment with whom he died, apparently of an electrically induced heart attack).
His great project had for its goal to set out to reconstruct the high primeval civilization. Reinterpreting Classical and Renaissance evocation of the
Golden AgeThe term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology and legend, but can also be found in other ancient cultures . It refers either to the earliest and best age in a sequence of ages, such as the Greek range of Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, or to a time in the beginnings of humanity that was...
in mankind's early history, Court de Gébelin asserted that the primitive worldwide civilization had been advanced and enlightened. He is the intellectual grandfather of much of modern occultism. His centers of focus are the familiar ones of universal origins of languages in deep time and the
hermeneuticsHermeneutics is the study of interpretation theory, and can be defined as either the art of interpretation, or the theory and practice of interpretation. Traditional hermeneutics - which includes Biblical hermeneutics - refers to the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in...
of
symbolismSymbolism is the use of symbols to represent things such as ideas and emotions. Symbolism is sometimes used to refer specifically to totemic symbols that stand on their own, as opposed to linguistic symbols....
. While his views on hermeneutics and religious matters were largely conservative, his original ideas and recearch on the origin of
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
earn him a place among pioneers of linguistics. Court de Gébelin presented dictionaries of
etymologyEtymology is the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and...
, what he called a universal grammar, and discourses on the origins of language. his volumes were so popular he republished them separately, as
Histoire naturelle de la parole, ou Précis de l'Origine du Langage & de la Grammaire Universelle ("Natural history of the Word, or a sketch of the origins of language and of universal grammar"), in Paris, 1776.
With regard to mythology and symbology, he discussed the origins of allegory in antiquity and recreated a history of the calendar from civil, religious, and mythological perspectives.
It was his immediate perception, the first time he saw the Tarot deck, that it held the secrets of the Egyptians. Writing without the benefit of Champollion's deciphering of the Egyptian language, Court de Gébellin's developed reconstruction of Tarot history, without any historical evidence produced, was that Egyptian priests had distilled the ancient "Book of Thoth" into these images, which they brought to Rome, where they were secretly known to the popes, who brought them to Avignon in the 14th century, whence they were introduced into France. An essay by The Comte de Mellet included in Court de Gebelin's Monde primitif is responsible for the mystical connection of the Tarot's 21 trumps and the fool with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. An essay appended to his gave suggestions for
cartomancyCartomancy is fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards. Forms of cartomancy appeared soon after playing cards were first introduced into Europe in the 14th century. Practitioners of cartomancy are generally known as cartomancers, card readers or, simply, readers...
; within two years the fortune-teller known as "
Etteilla"Etteilla," the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette , was the French occultist who was the first to popularise tarot divination to a wide audience, and therefore the first professional tarot occultist in recorded history...
" published a technique for reading the tarot, and the practice of tarot reading was born.
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