Major Arcana

[2] The occult significance began to emerge in the 18th century, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, published two essays on Tarot in his Le Monde Primitif (The Primeval World),[3] a never-completed encyclopedia.

The earliest, pre-cartomantic, decks bore unnamed and unnumbered pictures on their trionfi or trumps (probably because a great many of the people using them at the time were illiterate), and the order of cards was not standardized.

[2] The trend was started by prominent Freemason and Protestant cleric Antoine Court de Gébelin who suggested that the tarot had an ancient Egyptian origin, and mystic divine and kabbalistic significance.

The fact that we question the Tarot as to whether it be a method or a doctrine shows the limitation of our 'three dimensional mind', which is unable to rise above the world of form and contra-positions or to free itself from thesis and antithesis!

There is a line of development of the cartomantic tarot that occurred in parallel with the imposition of hermetic mysteries on the formerly mundane pack of cards that can usefully be distinguished.

In 1783, two years after Antoine Court de Gébelin published Le Monde Primitif, he turned to the development of a cartomantic method using the standard (i.e. Marseilles) tarot deck.

The society subsequently published Dictionnaire synonimique du livre de Thot, a book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed.

She was so popular, and cartomancy with tarot became so well established in France following her work, that a special deck entitled the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand was released in her name two years after her death.

[clarification needed] By the early 19th century Masonic writers and Protestant clerics had established claims that the tarot trumps were authoritative sources of ancient hermetic wisdom, of Christian gnosis and revelatory tools of divine cartomantic inspiration.

In that book, Christian identifies the tarot trumps as representing the "principle scenes"[dubious – discuss] of ancient Egyptian initiatory "tests".

[2] Christian provides an extended analysis of ancient Egyptian initiation rites that involves Pyramids, 78 steps, and the initiatory revelation of secrets.

For example, Marquis Stanislas de Guaita founded the Cabalistic Order of the Rosy Cross in 1888 along with several key commentators on the initiatory tarot, e.g. Papus, François-Charles Barlet, and Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918).