Court de Gebelin (or Antonie Court) circa 1719- 10 May 1784, who initiated the interpretation of the Tarot as an arcane repository of timeless esoteric wisdom, in an essay included in his "Le Monde Primtif, analyse et compare avec le monde moderne" ("The Primitive World, Analysed and Compared to the Modern World"), volume viii, 1781.
It was his first immediate perception, the first time he saw the Tarot deck, that it held the secrets of the Egyptian. He developed the reconstruction of Tarot history, without any historical evidence produced, was that Egyptian priests (Hermes Trismegistus) had distrilled the ancient "Book of Thoth" into these images, which they brought to Rome, where they were secretly known to the popes, who brought them to Avignon in the 14th century, whence they were introduced to France.
De Gebelin mentioned Tarot the first time in volume v of his encyclopedia, published in 1778, in his etymological dictionary of the French language. In the dictionary, Gebelin said the word Tarot is derived from "two Oriental (Egyptian) words, 'Tar' and 'Rha' or 'Rho', which means 'Royal Road'. Of course, he was writing this before anyone in modern Europe had any accurate knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language. Until in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was discovered which contained an identical text written in Greek and Egyptian. After the French scholar Champollion made use of the stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, de Gebelin Egyptian source for word Tarot could be proved false. The French name Tarot (or originally spelled, Tarraux) is actually derived from the oldern Italian name for the deck, Tarocchi.
Gebelin's second mention for Tarot, then would be his essay appeared in volume viii, of "Le Monde Primitif" in 1781.
It is proved that de Gebelin tended not to distinguish myth from history, and relied on intuitive guesswork more than scholarship, freely making up facts to fit his theories. As a result, most of what he was written has been disproved, and his entire work would have been forgotten were it not for two short essays on the Tarot appeared in volume viii starting on page 365, toward the back of the volume. De Gebelin wrote the first essay, and the second was written by a mysterious friend called the Comte de M., believed to be the Comte de Mellet, a French cavalry officer of noble birth who became the governor of Maine and Perche and who was one of de Gebelin's subscribers.
"I respect him (Court de Gebelin) also for having had, out of previous expectation, a vision concerning the Tarot, but as he did not marry his vision to any facts on this earth, I think he has only begotten a phantom son of the fancy."- A. E. Waite
From the Introduction to the revised third edition of "The Tarot of The Bohemians By Papus".
