On view at the Warburg Institute is a poster created by a devotee of de Gébelin’s, the mystic Etteilla, which lays out how the cards were supposedly once arranged in the Egyptian temple of ...

What’s more, those who employed it in fortune-telling did so on the sly. It wasn’t until 1770 that a Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Alliette—using the magical name of Etteilla (his surname ...