22. The Book Of Hermesc

Hence came those Tarots, the antiquity of which, revealed to the erudite Court de Gebelin by the science of hieroglyphs and numbers, so exercised later the doubtful perspicacity and persistent investigation of Etteilla. Court de Gebelin, in the eighth volume of his Primeval World, gives sketches of the twenty-two Keys and four aces of the Tarot, and demonstrates their perfect analogy with all symbols of the highest antiquity. He endeavours subsequently to supply their explanation and goes astray naturally, because he does not start from the universal and sacred TETRAGRAM, the IO EVOHE of the Bacchanalia, the JOD He VAU He of the sanctuary, the of the Kabalah. Etteilla or Alliette, preoccupied entirely by his system of divination and the material profit to be derived from it, Alliette, formerly barber, having never learned French or even orthography, pretended to reform and thus appropriate the Book of THOTH. In the Tarot, now become very scarce, which he engraved, we find the following naive advertisement on the twenty-eighth card - the eight of clubs: “Etteilla, professor of algebra and correctors (sic) of the modern blunders of the ancient Book of Thoth, lives in the Rue de l'Oseille, No 48, Paris.” Etteilla would have certainly done better not to have corrected the blunders of which he speaks; his books have degraded the ancient work discovered by Court de Gebelin into the domain of vulgar Magic and fortune-telling by cards. He proves nothing who tries to prove too much. Etteilla furnishes another example of this old logical axiom. At the same time, his efforts led him to a certain acquaintance with the Kabalah, as may be seen in some rare passages of his unreadable works. The true initiates who were Etteilla's contemporaries, the Rosicrucians for example and the Martinists, were in possession of the true Tarot, as a work of Saint-Martin proves, where the divisions are those of the Tarot, as also this quotation from an enemy of the Rosicrucians: “They pretend to the possession of a volume from which they can learn anything discoverable in other books which exist now or may be produced at any future period. This volume is their criterion, in which they find the prototype of everything that exists by the facility which it offers for analysing, making abstractions, forming a species of intellectual world and creating all possible things. See the philosophical, theosophical, micro-cosmic cards.” (Conspiracy Against the Catholic Religion and Sovereigns, by the author of The Veil Raised for the Curious. Paris: Crapard. 1792.) The true initiates, we repeat, who held the secret of the Tarot among their greatest mysteries, refrained carefully from protesting against the errors of Etteilla and left him to reveil instead of reveal the arcana of the true Clavicles of Solomon. Hence it is not without profound astonishment that we have discovered intact and still unknown this key of all doctrines and all philosophies of the old world. I speak of it as a key, and such it is truly, having the circle of four decades as its ring, the scale of 22 characters for its trunk or body and the three degrees of the triad for its wards. As such it was represented by Postel in his Key of Things Kept Secret from the Foundation of the World . He indicates as shown opposite the occult name of this key, which was known only to initiates. The word may read ROTA, thus signifying the wheel of Ezekiel, or TAROT, and then it is synonymous with the Azoth of Hermetic philosophers.