Notable figures

Notable figures

• Antoine Court de Gébelin 1725–1784
  First occult author of the tarot

  French Protestant pastor, Freemason, and encyclopaedist whose 1781 essay in volume eight of Le Monde primitif first proposed the tarot as a survival of ancient Egyptian wisdom. The thesis is historically false but became the founding move of occult tarot; without it none of the subsequent nineteenth-century elaboration would have happened in the form it did.

• Jean-Baptiste Alliette (“Etteilla”) 1738–1791
  First commercial cartomant; first divinatory deck designer

  Parisian printer and occultist who, working under the anagram of his surname, built the first sustained commercial cartomantic practice and produced the first deck designed specifically for divination rather than play (Le Tarot à enseigner, 1789). His system attached specific divinatory meanings to upright and reversed cards in a form that has shaped commercial reading practice ever since.

• Eliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant) 1810–1875
  Founder of the Tarot–Kabbalah linkage

  French occultist whose Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56) and Histoire de la magie (1860) attached the twenty-two trumps of the tarot to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The synthesis became canonical for almost all subsequent occult tarot work and was inherited essentially intact by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

• Arthur Edward Waite 1857–1942
  Designer of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck

  English mystic, Mason, and prolific occult author. A senior figure in the later years of the original Golden Dawn and head of one of its successor branches, Waite designed the conceptual structure of the deck published by William Rider & Son in 1909. His Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) is the deck’s companion text.

• Pamela Colman Smith 1878–1951
  Illustrator of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck

  English-American artist, theatrical designer, and Golden Dawn initiate who painted the seventy-eight-card Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Her fully illustrated Minor Arcana — the first such treatment in any English-language deck — established the visual conventions that have dominated twentieth- and twenty-first-century tarot. Long under-credited; her authorship of the imagery is now widely acknowledged.

• Aleister Crowley 1875–1947
  Designer of the Thoth Tarot

  English occultist who conceived and wrote the Thelemic recasting of Golden Dawn tarot published as the Thoth Tarot (painted 1938–43, deck published 1969) with companion text The Book of Thoth (1944). The deck preserves the Golden Dawn correspondences while substantially reworking the iconography in line with Thelemic doctrine.

• Lady Frieda Harris 1877–1962
  Painter of the Thoth Tarot

  English artist who painted the Thoth deck over five years of close collaboration with Crowley. Her contribution was substantial enough — both artistic and conceptual — that the deck is now commonly cited as a Crowley-Harris collaboration rather than as Crowley’s alone.