Mysticism [edit] By the early 18th century Masonic authors and Protestant clerics had actually established the tarot trumps as reliable sources of ancient hermetic wisdom and Christian gnosis, and as revelatory tools of magnificent cartomantic inspiration, however they did not stop there. In 1870 Jean-Baptiste Pitois (better called Paul Christian) composed a book entitled Historie de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalit travers les temps et le peuples.
Christian provides a prolonged analysis of ancient Egyptian initiation rites that involves Pyramids, 78 steps, and the initiatory discovery of tricks. Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett compose: At one stage in the initiation procedure, Christian tells postulant climbs down an iron ladder, with seventy-eight rungs, and gets in a hall on either side of which are twelve statues, and, in between each set of statues, a painting.
Each represents a "letter of the sacred language" and to a number, and each reveals a reality of the divine world, a reality of the intellectual world and a reality of the physical world. The secret meanings of these twenty-two Arcana are then stated to him. Christian's efforts to give authority to his analysis by wrongly associating an account of ancient Egyptian initiation rites to Iamblichus, but it is clear that if there is any initiatory relevance to the tarot defeats it is Christian who is the source of that info.
Papus (a. k.a. Dr. Grard Encausse). Subsequent to this activity the initiatory importance of the tarot was securely established in the minds of occult practitioners. The introduction of the tarot as an initiatory masterpiece was coincident with, and healthy perfectly into, the flowering of initiatory mystical orders and secret brotherhoods throughout the middle of the 19th century.
g. Dr Papus, Franois-Charles Barlet, and Josphin Pladin). These orders positioned excellent emphasis on tricks, advancing through the grades, and initiatory tests therefore it is not surprising that, currently having the tarot to hand, they read into the tarot initiatory significance. Doing so not only provided an air of divine, mystical, and ancient authority to their practices but allowed them to continue to state on the wonderful, magical, significance of the most likely ancient and hermetic tarot.
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