Egyptian Tarot archetypes

[Bring4th_Austin]

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.”

Is there any historical evidence? Because there is a great gap between biblical times and first (trump) tarot cards. And where are the paintings on the walls?

My own thinking centers around the accuracy of the claim that the book Egyptian Mysteries: An Account of an Initiation 1) actually describes esoteric training based on the tarot images (I haven't read it or looked into it), and 2) if the attribution to Iamblicus is accurate. This would bridge a huge gap between biblical times and the first cards that showed up in the 1500s. There would still be lots of gaps and holes - that is still a massive gap in time between when Ra would have given the images and Iamblicus was alive, and there is still no evidence of the images being painted on any walls.

But regarding the images being painted, I just had a thought. Wherever Don got the information about the images coming from the walls of the Great Pyramid, it could be the same place where the information about them being painted comes from. So perhaps Don's question was asking if they were painted on the walls of the pyramid. Given the history of the Great Pyramid, it's completely likely that the paint didn't last very long after it stopped being maintained. And that could explain why the walls of the pyramid seems sparse - instead of physical inscriptions, the walls were flat for the paintings. In fact, Ra describing some of the original coloring of the images (describing what looked black as originally being red in 97.12) lends itself to the idea that these images were indeed paintings and not physically inscribed into the stone. (This may have been obvious to some people but was a point of mystery to me.)

But either way, like a lot of Ra's historical accounts, any belief in the information is going to come from how reliable we believe the contact was. There are plenty of things that Ra talks about that seems contradictory to the traditional historical narrative (as well as the current scientific paradigm). It's up to each seeker to determine how these things weigh against each other. Do we trust Ra's account more than modern historians/scientists because we feel the nature of the contact offers that account more veracity? Or do we feel that such a source of information can't trump our modern human efforts at discovering history and science? I think it's valid to float in between in a sort of comfortable cognitive dissonance.