The First Deck Built for Divination

Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a French occultist who published under his surname reversed as "Etteilla," issued in 1783 what is generally treated as the first tarot deck designed from the ground up for cartomantic reading rather than for card play. Where earlier tarot, including the Marseille pattern, existed first as a game and only later acquired divinatory use layered on top of it, Etteilla built his deck's numbering, imagery and card meanings around fortune-telling from the outset, giving the cards his own ordering and an explicit system of correspondences to astrology and the elements.

Etteilla was also an early and enthusiastic promoter of the claim that tarot descended from ancient Egyptian sources, a theory earlier floated speculatively by Antoine Court de Gebelin and one modern tarot scholarship, including Dummett's documentary histories, does not support as historically accurate. The claim nonetheless became a durable thread in later esoteric tarot writing well beyond Etteilla's own lifetime.