Preliminary Lesson

Welcome to The Original Petit Etteilla

Welcome to The Original Petit Etteilla. This is the first cartomancy course to provide the full translated text of Etteilla’s La Seule Manière de Tirer les Cartes, or The Only True Way to Draw the Cards, first published in 1773.

This course is for the cartomancy beginner who has always wanted to play Petit Etteilla. In The Original Petit Etteilla, I have striven to provide everything you will need to learn and work with the Petit Etteilla, drawing upon direct translation of Etteilla’s meanings and methods.

Even for a native French speaker, Etteilla’s book is not simple to understand. Eighteenth century French aside, by modern standards his methods are complex and long-winded. For this course I have both translated the complete text of his book and have provided clear explanations of his meanings, which are often given as just a single keyword online. The text is introduced over several lessons, so that you may come to understand the material’s application as well as its context. This is supplemented by examples of spreads and case histories to support you in learning the methods through daily practice.

Throughout his book, Etteilla demonstrates seven spreads, sequentially outlining the case of one woman for whom he reads. He invites you to lay out the cards for her, just as he has done, in order to learn his method. The original illustrations from his book are included so that you may follow along. This precise method of reading is very different from modern tarot reading, where the interpretation of a card’s image plays a much greater role. Etteilla is using a piquet or stripped deck of 32 playing cards, which includes only the 7, 8, 9, 10, Ace, Jack, Queen, and King of the 4 suits. By adding a Significator card, the modestly named Etteilla card (also refered to throughout the text as Carte Blanche, White Card), he makes a set of divination cards that have two sets of upright and reversed meanings.

While learning the meanings of cards is a typical challenge of divination, in this course you can relax, as all of the meanings you will ever need are already written upon the cards, which you yourself will create. This will allow you to read and combine them without any need for memorization. By building up your reading from simple pairing and short line spreads, you will gain confidence and will soon be able to read Petit Etteilla for yourself and others.

WHO WAS ETTEILLA?

“Etteilla” was the pseudonym of Jean Baptiste Alliette (born March 1, 1738, in Paris, died December 13, 1791). If you want to say his name, then you pronounce it “Et-TIE-ya.” Active in the French esoteric scene, Etteilla chose his pseudonym by the simple process of reversing the one he already had! In these pre-Revolutionary days, and indeed right up until the present century, French authorities took a dim view of occultists and cartomancers in general and maintained draconian laws against public displays of divination or magic. For the purposes of taxation and the census, Etteilla was registered as a professeur d’algèbre, algebra professor, in order to avoid imprisonment. As he wrote himself, “whoever publicly reads as a cartomancer risks falling into the hands of the justices.”

The assertion that Etteilla was a hairdresser or wigmaker is entirely untrue: this has arisen from a connection to his son’s address, as he resided on the third floor of a house called Maison de Perruquier (house of the wigmaker) in the Palais Royal district. Born to parents in the seed trade, Etteilla worked as a print dealer in Paris and between 1777–1785 in Strasbourg, so he certainly had a knowledge of and contacts for printing cards. He remarks that Strasbourg was where the best tarot cards were made. So while Etteilla was a print dealer, he was never a hairdresser!

Etteilla’s pre-Revolutionary upbringing made him a humanist in the French Enlightenment manner, interested in esoteric matters and arcane writings but not much enamored of the predominantly Masonic influences of the evolving French esoteric scene. He began his cartomantic career by writing the first edition of his Petit Etteilla method—the very first cartomancy method in the world—in 1770: Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes, or A way to Recreate Yourself with a Pack of Cards. There is evidence that Etteilla had both problems with the government censor and with printers during its publication and that usurers were somehow involved. On page 32 of the 1773 edition, he writes about usury and usurers, “They will not buy my book, but they won’t prevent its publication!” suggesting that he had taken a loan in order to publish the book.

The Petit Etteilla method was created in a time when cards had not yet received an injection of metaphysical influence and so, although Etteilla writes about planetary cards and has a Horoscope Spread, he doesn’t give us any esoteric meanings—and we should not try to impose any either. Petit Etteilla is an entirely cartomantic system. His Book of Thoth Tarot (now the Grand Etteilla Tarot) is the place to look for esotericism, as Etteilla refocused his divinatory outlook in order to create an esoteric tarot of his own devising. He had been inspired by the essay on the tarot in Court de Gebelin’s 1781 book, Le Monde Primitif (The Primeval World) which (erroneously) presented a possible Egyptian origin for the tarot.*

So where did Etteilla learn his cartomancy? He said he learned it from “an old Piedmontese” called Alexis, whom he met at Lamballe in Brittany. Now Piedmont is the region of Italy that immediately borders France, so it is possible that the term “Piedmontese” could have been loosely used to mean “an Italian person,” or it could have been more specific. The question is, did Italy have a cartomantic tradition in the eighteenth century?

The major influence of an ongoing cartomantic tradition that had been active at least since 1725 might have been that of the Tarocchino Bolognese—a method of cartomancy using a reduced tarot deck of 62 cards. Evidence for divination with this pack was found in 1989 by Franco Pratesi in the University of Bologna library, where he found a list of meanings that equated individual tarot cards with divinatory keywords, for example, Star means “gift,” Queen Coins means “truth” (Decker 2002, 48–49). These same meanings are still in use today (Vitali 2005). Having made a study of Tarocchino Bolognese, I can assert that most of the meanings are not those followed by Etteilla, except in a few respects.

Tarot’s Batons are equivalent to the playing card Diamonds, while tarot’s Swords are Spades, from the Latin spatha, for “sword.” Tarot’s Cups are equivalent to playing card Hearts, and Coins are equivalent to Clubs, from the trefoils that emblazon many of the Coin cards. It seems clear that Etteilla created his own meanings and methods, as these differ from all other cartomantic methods.

Etteilla’s cartomancy was well under way in 1781 when the Swiss esotericist Antoine Court de Gébelin published his study Monde primitif, (The Primeval World). This and the writings of Gébelin’s disciple Comte de Mellet went on to have an immense influence upon Etteilla. In the eighth volume of this work, Gébelin claimed an Egyptian origin for the tarot—this was the original source of a long-held misassumption that still bedevils tarot to this day, since all tarot derives from fifteenth century Italy. Within two years of Monde primitif ’s publication, Etteilla had published his Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées Tarots, (A Way to Entertain Yourself with a Pack of Cards Called Tarots). He had in fact mentioned tarot as a method of divination in his two editions of the Petit Etteilla method, but there he called it “taraux,” as if he had never seen it written before but only heard it. It was from this time onward that tarot-reading acquired its esoteric focus, while it was from Etteilla’s Petit Etteilla that most of modern cartomancy derives.

In 1788 Etteilla founded a group called Société des Interprètes du Livre de Thot, or Society for the Interpreters of the Book of Thoth. This society may have been subscription-based, with the aim of raising enough money to print the tarot, which Etteilla had been unable to fund independently due to the expense of printing 78 cards. For this tarot, Etteilla rearranged his Petit Etteilla keywords into an entirely new pattern and, at the same time, changed his suit arrangements to follow the Comte de Mellet’s writings. They were finally printed and engraved to Etteilla’s designs; Eliphas Levi’s copy had a card (28, or 8 Batons) that included an advert for Etteilla’s location at 48 rue l’Oseille in Paris (Decker 2002, 90–91).