Etteilla’s Tarot Deck
See all the cards
The October 22, 2022 issue of Public Domain Review1 features Etteilla’s Livre de Thot Tarot (ca. 1789) by Kevin Dunn.
Etteilla was the first to give divinatory meanings to cards and spreads. And some historians consider him the first person to earn a living as a professional tarot reader.2
Source. 3
Also, interested in Indie Tarot cards? MIT has many.
The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
As our name suggests, the focus is on works now fallen into the public domain, that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction. Our aim is to promote and celebrate the public domain in all its abundance and diversity, and help our readers explore its rich terrain – like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance to an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond.
With a focus on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of content which truly celebrates the breadth and diversity of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it.
Dunn, Kevin (2022). Etteilla’s Livre de Thot Tarot (ca. 1789)
His pseudonym, Etteilla, was simply the reverse of his surname, Jean-Baptiste Alliette. Clever lad.
After each of your columns I must consciously choose which memories to discard in order to make room for the new ones. This one took away my ability to recite the Greek alphabet backwards, a skill required of pledges for my fraternity for reasons no one knows.
Personally, I prefer goat entrails.