Etteilla

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.

Etteilla is credited with founding one of the earliest organized tarot societies in France, giving cartomancy an institutional home decades before the better-known nineteenth-century occult revival built around figures such as Eliphas Levi. His deck and his written system marked a durable shift in how tarot was primarily used and discussed: after Etteilla, divinatory reading, rather than trick-taking card play, increasingly became tarot's dominant public association in esoteric circles, a shift the later Golden Dawn tradition and its many twentieth-century successors inherited and built further upon.

Modern tarot historians treat Etteilla's specific card meanings and his Egyptian-origin claims as historically unsupported rather than as recovered ancient knowledge, while still crediting him as the practical founder of tarot as a purpose-built divinatory tool, a distinction the atlas preserves by recording both his historical role and the scholarly assessment of his claims.