Antoine Court de Gebelin was born around 1725 in Nimes or Geneva, son of Antoine Court, the pastor who rebuilt French Protestantism in the desert years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The son carried the family cause to Paris as an advocate for Huguenot civil rights, and built alongside it a career as one of the great system building savants of the late Enlightenment. His life's work, Le Monde primitif, the Primitive World, ran to nine quarto volumes between 1773 and 1782 and attempted nothing less than the reconstruction of the original civilization of mankind, its language, grammar, calendar, myths and monuments, from the comparative study of everything: etymologies, allegories, coats of arms, agricultural festivals. Subscribers included the king, and Gebelin was a fixture of enlightened Paris, an active Freemason of the Nine Sisters lodge in the company of Voltaire and Franklin, and late in life a defender of Mesmer's animal magnetism.
The eighth volume, published in 1781, contained a short essay that outlived the rest of the enterprise combined. In it Gebelin recorded seeing the game of tarot played in a salon, recognized at a glance, he wrote, that the trumps were no game but the leaves of an ancient Egyptian book, the Book of Thoth, saved by its disguise as a trifle, and decoded the cards accordingly. A companion essay by the Comte de Mellet added the correspondence to the Hebrew letters and described a method of divination.