Egyptian Tarot archetypes

[Bring4th_Austin]

Where did L/L and subsequently the Church of Light get these images from? If I’m not mistaken, HP Blavatsky wrote about them in one of her books? That’s what I really want to know: where did these images come from? Where were they preserved? And how do we have them now? The original images or “concept complexes,” which form the basis of the Tarot as we know it now. I heard they were pictured on the walls of pyramids, but I can’t confirm that.

The best that I can tell is that, once Don asked Ra about the tarot and Ra explained that they gave it to the ancient Egyptians, Don, Carla, and Jim found a correlation to the Egyptian history and the claims of Brotherhood of Light. They then used the Brotherhood of Light deck when questioning Ra (per Ra's approval). Don was maybe already familiar with the BoL specifically, and they have a very in-depth system of study for the tarot. Being unable to obtain permission to print the BoL deck in the books, Jim found a book in the public domain with very similar images (George Fathman's Royal Road), so those are what are printed in the book. They also commissioned an artist to redraw the first seven based on Ra's recommendations. There are some sweet higher quality versions in The Ra Contact "The Major Arcana" (Volume 2).

The best I can tell is that the images supposedly given by Ra enter our historical record as the Tarot of Marseilles, popping up around 1500 in France according to this Wikipedia page. Don asked Ra about these images being copied from the walls of the Great Pyramid and Ra seem's to confirm. For whatever it's worth, I found no indication that this has been verified by any archaeologists who have studied and explored the pyramid. In fact, it seems as though the walls in the Great Pyramid are abnormally sparse. Not sure where Don's information was from or if there is a way to cleanly reconcile Ra's statements with traditional Egyptologists' claims.

I wrote to the Church of Light several years ago to see what they had to say about the tarot's origins and got back this very interesting and informative reply. Not sure how reliable this account is, but it does trace things back in a way that could correlate with Ra's narrative:

The folkloric history of the tarot can sometimes be vague, referring to “the knowledge of the ancients,” or “remote antiquity.” The oral tarot tradition may not always be able to cite dates or authors, but provides a wealth of esoteric ideas that may later be proven true as new discoveries are made by future researchers on the topic. The Brotherhood of Light tarot tradition relies heavily on this oral tradition as well as what little tarot scholarship was available in the first half of the 20th century when C. C. Zain wrote and rewrote The Sacred Tarot. At the time of Zain’s writing, French authors such as Antoine Court de Gébelin, The Comte de Mellet (Louis Raphaël Lucrèce de Fayolle), Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette), Paul Christian (Jean Baptiste Pitois), and Eliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant), publishing in the 17th and 18th centuries, were the only scholarly works available on the tarot. Zain would be dependent on English translations of these works, which were not widespread.

Court de Gébelin was the first author to assert the Egyptian origins of the tarot. He believed that in time of remote antiquity, Egyptian sages had secreted their knowledge away in the images of the tarot. These allegorical images had survived because they were not recognized as anything more than an innocuous game. In 1781 he wrote “That originally the twenty-two figures of the atouts or emblem parts of the tarot were painted on the walls of the temples. A fashion inherited from biblical times, to enable the worshippers to recognize the sciences, arts or conditions represented by the figures and their attributes when it was wished to consult them.” In Le Monde primitive Vol. 5, Court de Gébelin describes the tarot as: “Game of cards well known in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. It is an Egyptian game, as we shall demonstrate one day; its name is composed of two oriental words, Tar and Rha, Rho, which means Royal Road.” Court de Gébelin was considered an erudite scholar, and as one of the few intellectuals writing on tarot, his writings would impact later authors such as Paul Christian and C. C. Zain.

Around the same time that Court de Gébelin was asserting the Egyptian origins of the tarot, a couple of esoteric manuscripts appeared on the European scene; Crata Repoa (1785), which described initiation into the Egyptian Mystery schools, and Egyptian Mysteries: An Account of an Initiation, attributed perhaps inaccurately to Iamblicus, a Neo-Platonist of the 4th Century.  Egyptian Mysteries describes the process of initiation and subsequent esoteric training centered on the images of the Major Arcanum. Curiously, even though the initiation is set in ancient Egypt, the descriptions of the initiatory symbols most closely match the imagery of the tarot of Marseilles. Later artists would design Egyptian-styled tarot cards based on the influence of this document. Egyptian Mysteries is seminal to The Brotherhood of Light oral tradition, for it was on a translation of this manuscript, believed to be quite ancient, that C. C. Zain based The Ritual of Egyptian Initiation, The Sacred Tarot, and the organization and structure of The Brotherhood of Light Lessons.

As the first lesson in the series of 210 lessons, The Ritual of Egyptian Initiation forms the scaffolding on which all of The Brotherhood of Light Lessons are arranged. It also sheds light on The Sacred Tarot revealing the major Arcanum of the tarot as representing the initiatic steps of the mystery schools. In his day Paul Christian’s work would have been the most authoritative writings on the tarot. Writing in 1916, Zain states: “In this work we are fortunate in having a treatise, not entirely inaccessible to modern readers, that gives a detailed description of the Egyptian Mysteries. Iamblichus, a noted scholar and Neo-Platonist who lived in the first half of the fourth century, wrote a work upon the Egyptian Mysteries in which he portrays the principal steps and trials imposed upon the candidate during initiation. This description was translated into the French by P. Christian, and has been drawn upon freely for information by the more eminent students of the tarot, as it contains a complete description of the Egyptian tarot. In 1901 it was translated from French into English by my good friend Genevieve Stebbins, who has given me permission to make use of her translation in this chapter and in Course VI, Sacred Tarot.” The year 1901, was also the date that Edgar de Valcourt-Vermont using the pseudonym of Comte C. de Saint Germain translated and published portions of Paul Christian’s work on the tarot in the back chapters of a book titled Practical Astrology.  The Egyptian tarot images illustrating Practical Astrology are based on the Falconnier-Wegener Tarot deck, illustrated by Maurice Otto Wegener and published in 1896 by R. Falconnier as Les XXII lames hermètiques du tarot divinatoire (The XXII Hermetic Cards of the Divinatory Tarot). The first known “Egyptian” tarot, these images were based on Paul Christian’s descriptions and became the prototype for all future “Egyptian” decks. These were the tarot cards used by Brotherhood of Light and Church of Light students prior to The Brotherhood of Light deck being designed by Gloria Beresford in 1936.