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The Thoth tarot deck connects to exactly one study in this atlas, and it is the study that dismantles the eighteenth century claim the deck's own name still carries.

A Claim With No Document Behind It

Antoine Court de Gebelin announced in 1781 that the trumps of the tarot preserved a book of Egyptian priestly wisdom carried west after the burning of the library at Alexandria. He offered no document for the claim and could not read hieroglyphs, which nobody could until Champollion decades later. The assertion nonetheless became the founding story of the occult tarot and was still being repeated when the Thoth deck, painted by Lady Frieda Harris to Aleister Crowley's direction between 1938 and 1943 and first published in 1969, was named for the Egyptian god on the strength of it.

Where the Cards Actually Come From

The Documentary History of the Tarot Pack approaches the question the way a historian of games would, by asking where the physical packs came from and who was recorded playing with them. The trumps enter the record in Milan, Ferrara and Bologna in the fifteenth century, in the accounts of courts that paid painters to make them, for a game still played today. The investigation settles only where the cards came from; it takes no position on what a reader finds in them and did not test whether they work. On the narrow question of origin, there is now an answer, and it is not Egypt.

Where To Read More

• ThothThe deck named for an Egyptian god on the strength of a claim this atlas's only connected study disposes of
• The Documentary History of the Tarot PackThe study itself, tracing the trumps to fifteenth century Italian courts rather than ancient Egypt