Antoine Court de Gébelin

Career

Court de Gébelin supported American Independence and contributed to the periodical Affaires de l'Angleterre et de l'Amérique, as well as to new economic theories and Mesmer's animal magnetism. In a letter from the Reverend James Madison to James Madison dated 15 June 1782, he was described as having a very great reputation. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1781, and in 1783 became a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

His great project aimed to reconstruct a high primeval civilization, reinterpreting Classical and Renaissance evocations of a Golden Age. He asserted that the primitive worldwide civilization had been advanced and enlightened, and his work focused on universal origins of languages and the hermeneutics of symbolism. His views on hermeneutics and religion were largely conservative, but his original ideas on language origin place him among pioneers of linguistics.

He presented dictionaries of etymology, a universal grammar, and discourses on language origins, and republished his popular volumes separately as Histoire naturelle de la parole, ou Précis de l'Origine du Langage & de la Grammaire Universelle in Paris in 1776. He also discussed the origins of allegory in antiquity and recreated a history of the calendar from civil, religious, and mythological perspectives.

The tarot

Court de Gébelin wrote an essay on the Tarot included in his Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, volume viii, 1781. The Tarot chapter was a single section in his vast compendium published in series from 1773 to a distinguished list of subscribers headed by King Louis XVI. Upon first seeing the Tarot deck, he perceived that it held the secrets of the Egyptians. Without the benefit of Champollion's deciphering of Egyptian, he developed a reconstruction of Tarot history without historical evidence: Egyptian priests had distilled the ancient Book of Thoth into the images, brought them to Rome, where they were secretly known to the popes, who brought them to Avignon in the 14th century, whence they entered France.

An essay by the Comte de Mellet included in Court de Gébelin's Monde primitif is responsible for the mystical connection of the Tarot's 21 trumps and the fool with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. An appended essay gave suggestions for cartomancy; within two years the fortune-teller Etteilla published a technique for reading the tarot, and the practice of tarot reading was born.

Did You Know?

• He adopted the surname of his grandmother.
• He was initiated into Freemasonry at the lodge Les Amis Réunis in 1771, and later moved to the lodge Les Neuf Sœurs where he welcomed Benjamin Franklin as a lodge-brother.
• He was ordained a pastor in 1754 before departing from Switzerland.