The Images

The pictures and meanings associated with tarot decks have been embedded in the human race for thousands of years, placed there by the antediluvian prophet Enoch. His esoteric wisdom is fabled. The preservation of these meanings in pictures is testimony to his wisdom as very few teachings have survived from that ancient pre-flood world into our own.

Here is an account of the most recent re-emergence of these images and meanings into the modern world:

The drawings on the cards used on this site are from Practical Astrology (1901), a book by Edgar de Valcourt-Vermont writing under the preposterous pseudonym “Comte C. de Saint Germain” (a real person, albeit dead by 1901, with a long history of appropriation by writers and charlatans). The drawings are reworkings of the first reappearance of the Egyptian designs in an earlier book, Les XXII Lames Hermètiques du Tarot Divinatoire (1896) by R. Falconnier, the drawings there being the work of one M.O. Wegener. The Wegener drawings had been based on descriptions by Paul Christian in another occult study, Histoire de la Magie (1870). The Valcourt-Vermont designs were published as a complete deck, The Egyptian Tarot, by Müller in 1978. (Source for this recent tymology of these cards: Artist John Coulthart from his blog.)