It remains unclear whether the system used by Etteilla would have come from Italy to France or the other way around. From the two documents alone, either is plausible. For example, while the assonance coppe/coppi is uniquely Italian, that only shows it was an Italian who drew up the list; he might still have been inspired by Etteilla’s maison, house, and because it was in Cups, Coppe, he thought that coppi, the tiles on the roof of a house, would be nice in that spot. It could also have been the reverse, coppi migrating to France as couvertures, but since there is no assonance there, it is replaced by something that does have assonance, namely the correlative to the upright’s “repast of the full heart, continuing with the Tens what had been started with the Aces, with “repast” as a synonym for “table,” in the sense of a meal, also from the Aces.
However,
perhaps it could be shown by other means that the Bologna cartomancy document
was before 1770, the date of Etteilla’s first published work. This line has
been taken by Rita De Tata in a note to an exhibition in Bologna in 2014.
Comparing Etteilla (birth name Alliette) with the Bologna sheet she says (my
translation):
The rules for
the interpretation of the cards exhibited by Alliette in his work are very
complex and certainly cannot be compared to the summary sketch outlined in this
loose sheet, probably by the hand of Ubaldo Zanetti himself who owned it: in
this case, in fact, we are limited to attributing a meaning to certain figures
of the Italian Tarot deck; these are
quite intuitive correspondences, since, for example, journey is associated with
the figure of the chariot, while the sun symbolizes the day. However, the
testimony is interesting, as it is securely prior to 1769, the year of Zanetti’s
death, and therefore can be a confirmation of the fact that in Italy the
practice of cartomancy was already widespread at the popular level by the
release of the work of Etteilla. RDT[4]
In fact Etteilla’s
interpretations of the regular suit cards are not complex, but as
straightforward as those in the Bologna document: they are simply keywords.
Also, if cartomancy in Italy was as widespread as De Tata says, we would expect
evidence elsewhere at some point. This argument for Italian priority depends on
the “secure” claim that Zaneti owned it and the handwriting is 'probably" his. However, there is no indication from the library that it is part of the Zanetti bequest; moreover, as Pratesi observed,
many of the sheets in the same folder are dated after 1769, the year of his
death. Since she has written a book on Zanetti, who had an extensive
correspondence, she surely knows his handwriting. But here a comment by Lorenzo
Cuppi on the cartomancy sheet is relevant:
Regarding this manuscript, I would like to remark briefly that it is found among manuscripts from 1760 and that its handwriting is so modern that it may seem nineteenth-century. [5]
I would think that Cuppi, having examined many manuscripts by then, knows his handwriting styles. If it is so modern, then it would not be by Zanetti, who would have learned how to write in the early eighteenth century.
It is true that Cuppi nonetheless insisted that the information on the cartomancy sheet is from that earlier period. What we have is a copy, therefore, he reasoned. But his only basis was the presence of fantesche, which he took for granted were no longer present in the Bolognese Tarocchino after around 1730. If the female figures still continued throughout the eighteenth century, one might think instead, if it looks nineteenth-century, that the manuscript was written then or in the late eighteenth century at the earliest.
In hopes of clarification, I requested from the Bologna University Library some of the other documents in the same folder as the cartomancy document, as well as pages from different years of Zanetti’s diary, said to be an autograph.[6]
I am no
expert, but Zanetti’s handwriting (first below) does not look to me very
similar to that of the cartomancy document (Fig. 87). Even allowing for
the difference between handwriting for oneself and handwriting for others,
there are differences in the way certain letters are formed, notably d, D, g,
and B.
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Of the various documents in the same file, only one has these letter
formations of the cartomancy document, as well as a generic similarity in style: one written in Italian on
the history of Freemasonry, focusing on England and its penetration into Italy,
in the same subfolder R as our cartomancy document (the two samples immediately above).[7] The last year
indicated in this history (in the lower sample) is 1766, given as the publication date of a book the
author recommends. The label on folder R2 has the dates 1783
and 1784 in Roman numerals on the other side (first below, reversed for easier readability). Other documents
in the same file 4029 range from 1760 to 1779 (the latter second below).
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So the cartomancy document is probably between 1766 and 1779, or a few years earlier or later. It is perhaps significant that this is before the publication of Court de Gebelin's book in 1781, part of a series that had subscribers all over Europe and perhaps America. Let us recall that Jacques Saint-Sauveur would have been fifteen years old when he received the “Petit Etteilla” from its author. He would have been in Paris at the time, of course, but in that same year, his father was appointed to the French consular office in Trieste, where his family soon joined him.[8]
Jacques was groomed for a diplomatic career; no doubt he would have often gone to Venice, not far from Trieste, as the more important and dazzling of the two cities. Since he had already stated his intention to distribute the pamphlet, it is to be expected that he would have done so during the 1770s.
It is true that Etteilla’s 1770 book was already in print in that decade; anyone could have obtained a copy, with no need of Saint-Sauveur. However. we must also consider Saint-Sauveur’s enthusiasm for the task, and that the correspondences are closer to those of the “Petit Etteilla” he published later (but probably wrote earlier) than to the 1770 book.
Might the transmission have been before 1770, to Paris rather than from it? In the decade immediately preceding Saint-Sauveur, the French ambassador to Venice was Marc Antoine René de Voyer de Paulmy d’Argenson, who himself later wrote a system of cartomancy, in his Mélanges tirés d’une grande bibliothèque (Mixes drawn from a large library), vol. 2, published in 1779.[9]
It is not much like Etteilla’s or the Bologna sheet’s, offering no keywords whatever. But he was there during the 1760s, after which he returned to Paris. Despite the dissimilarity, de Paulmy could have taken a version of the cartomancy sheet to Paris, to be translated and passed on secretly to Etteilla. Or it could have been the other way around, Masonic circles in Paris sending their compilations of keywords both to Etteilla and to de Paulmy, from whom it could get to Bologna.
Another issue is that Etteilla himself reported an Italian source, a so-called “Piémontese.” The 1791 booklet signed by Etteilla has him learning about the Tarot from “un Piémontese” in 1757. This mention is in the paragraph after he talks about the Abrège; so probably he would have met this person after he wrote that summary of divination with the Piquet pack.[10] That would point to an Italian source for the Tarot meanings, but not for those of the cards of the Piquet deck. For these Etteilla was quite clear: they came from three elderly persons arrested in Paris 1751-53.
In the Second Cahier, 1785, he wrote that he learned about the Tarot “aided by the advice of a wise, very old Piedmontese,” now adding that it was “the grandson of Alexis called Piémontois.”[11] That name “Alexis Piémontois” was the pseudonym of the author of a famous book of “secrets,” really home remedies, originally published in Italian in 1555 Venice (with the first name “Alessio”), then in French translation in 1557 and reprinted many times thereafter.[12] If so, Etteilla’s Alexis, the so-called “Piémontese,” could easily have been his invention, after seeing the book – a seventeenth or eighteenth-century edition, since an author of 1555 could not have had a grandson alive two centuries later. Italian scholars since the nineteenth century, based on sixteenth-century testimony,[13]
Most authorities think that the author was Girolomo Ruscelli, who also wrote many works under his own name, including a “New Secrets” in 1567, which claimed to be a continuation of Alessio’s work, now under the author’s true name.[14] Born in Viterbo, dying in Venice, with some time in Rome and Naples, Ruscelli seems to have had no personal relationship to Piedmont.
Yet the book’s 1557 French dedication, by the publisher, was to the duke of Savoy, who also ruled Piedmont, and hails the author as Piedmontese.[15] Was the name a ploy, even in 1555, to get the duke’s sponsorship? The issue remains unresolved.
In both works where Etteilla talked about his Alexis, in 1785 and 1791, he said that he met him in 1757. By then, according to the 1791 and 1802 books, he had already worked out his system for the Piquet deck, having done so in 1753; that year is also given for the “Abrège de la Cartonomancie” in his 1785 Philosophie des Haute Sciences.[16] We must also keep in mind that Etteilla did not so much as mention Alexis until 1785, not even to Saint-Sauveur, even though in his 1770 book he did mention divination using the “Taraux,” saying only that it was done, as if he knew nothing else.[17] In short, Etteilla’s statements about Alexis do not count for much, especially in relation to the piquet deck.
Etteilla gave his 1753 sources as “three elderly persons.” But given his propensity to make things seem mysterious, Masonic contacts are a more reasonable possibility, not in 1753, when Etteilla was fifteen, but later, after becoming a seed merchant (by 1761), or after starting his print selling business (by 1768).[18] The large lots of printed material that he purchased for resale might reasonably have included the “book of secrets.” Also, among the collectors of old prints he met (or buyers of seeds), some would have been Freemasons. It is not impossible that one of them, or someone else met in business, would share in confidence a system already known in Masonic circles, so that the rest is fiction, to protect his source. We know that de Gébelin was a Mason, and probably also de Mellet, and that Etteilla was invited to a major conference of theirs. Moreover, the earliest document with anything like a keyword system, as our two systems clearly have, is that of Sketchley, already mentioned, who was another Mason.[19] A Masonic connection is also suggested by the short three-page handwritten history of Freemasonry already mentioned. It is in Italian, in handwriting that is very similar to that of our sheet. The contents emphasize England and Italy rather than France; however, another sheet in the same dossier is in French.
If Masons are a common association between our document and Etteilla, would one of them have invented the system in France, or would they simply have received it from various sources? De Mellet says he got his from “fortune tellers.” There are records of people in various parts of France being arrested for cartomancy, both with regular cards and Tarots.[20] Surely they would have had some system, however primitive. So we have to consider a gradual diffusion from somewhere, ending up with Masons or Etteilla. Here Italy is a possible point of origin. The Tarot deck originated in Italy, and its special cards provide a reasonable foundation for attaching allegorical meanings to cards more generally: they are eminently suited for moralizing advice, even divination of a sort, with doleful predictions for bad behavior. The court cards, with their distinctive personages, even among the same rank in different suits, could have provided a foundation for identifying particular persons in a consultant’s life. This way of looking at the court cards is one found in Inquisition records from Spain,[21] but it could have originated anywhere. Such records in Northern Italy were mostly destroyed in 1788.[22]
Moreover, some of Etteilla’s meanings look closer to the depictions of those cards in Italian suits than to what is shown on the French piquet deck for which they are designed. Their beardless Fanti, in contrast to the bearded Valets of French suits in Paris, would explain why garçon, boy, would be a meaning in addition to jeune homme, young man. Associations to bottles and tables are more likely to come from a suit of Cups than of hearts. Meanings related to the countryside relate to wooden sticks, Batons, rather than to Coureaux, Tiles. Only the French suit of Trèfle, Clover, finds an association with the most common theme of that suit, as that word was also a slang term for money. But the Italian Coins associate to money more obviously than the black clover leaf that served as the French suit sign.
Yet these “Italian suits” existed in France – in the Tarot deck – as well as in Italy. This much is grounds for saying that the system for regular cards in France developed partly in relation to the Tarot deck, but got to Etteilla in truncated piquet-deck form. The only grounds for putting Italy first is that the designs characteristic of Tarot decks originated there. But the evidence, from arrest records of the time, is from France.[23]
In favor of a less direct route from one to the other than a diplomatic pouch is the jumbled nature of the correlations between the cartomancy sheet and Etteilla: most of them are to different cards, even if in the same common set. It is true that a similar disparity exists between cartomancy meanings in Bologna itself from one time to the next. But those times are separated by fifty years or so, not two or three as we would suppose for Saint-Sauveur, or not more than thirteen between Etteilla in 1771 and the folder tab's date of 1784. Yet it may have been a willful rather than accidental transposition, for some unknown reason.
[1] Andrea Vitali and Terry Zanetti, Il Tarocchino di Bologna: Storia, Iconogafia, Divinazione dal XV al XX secolo (Bologna: Edizioni Martina, 2005), pp. 54 and 56. Another example is a deck in the British Museum which, although lacking an explicit date, is thought to have been made by a card maker who flourished ca. 1810, according to the Museum at https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1896-0501-16. This deck features the Fibbia and Bentivoglio arms. (Thanks to Steve Mangan for this link.)
[2] Pietro Alligo, Giuliano Crippa, and Alberto Milano, eds., Carte da Gioca in Emilia e Romagna Secolo XVIII e XIX (Turin: Lo Scarabeo, 2007), pp. 9 and 25: “ultima quarto XVIII sec.” and “seconda meta XVIII sec.” The first appears as part of a broadsheet produced by the Bolognese printer Luigi Guidotti, on the other side of which appears an anonymous sonnet discussed in the present volume in the essay “Tarocchi in Literature,” at the end of sec. 20.
[3] [Carlo Pisarri], Istruzioni necessarie per chi volesse imparare il giuoco dilettevole delli Tarocchini di Bologna (Bologna: Ferdinando Pisarri, 1754), in Google Books and archive.org,, p. 15; R. Bisteghi, Il Guioco Pratica (Bologna, 1753), p. 102.
[4] Rita De Tata and Patrizia Moscatelli, “Tarocchi, scacchi, enigma: passatempi cortesi e populari nei fondi della biblioteca universitaria di Bologna,” in Biancastella Antonino, Morena Poltronieri, and Ernesto Fazioli, eds., Antici Giochi e Tarocchi a Bologna (Riola, Italy: Mutus Liber, 2014), p. 77, online in Academia: “Le regole per I’interpretazione delle carte esposte da Alliette nella sua opera sono molto complesse e non si possono certo paragonare al sommario schizzo delineato in questo foglio volante probabilmente dalla mano dello stesso Ubaldo Zanetti che lo possedeva: in questo caso infatti ci si limita ad attribuire un significato a determinate figure del mazzo italiano di Tarocchi; si tratta di corrispondenze abbastanza intuitive, visto che, ad esempio, alla figura del carro viene associato il viaggio, mentre il sole simboleggia il giorno. Tuttavia la testimonianza è interessante, in quanto foglio è sicuramente anteriore al 1769, anno della morte di Zanetti, e quindi puo costituire una conferma del fatto che in Italia la pratica della cartomanzia fosse già largamente diffusa a livello popolare dell’uscita dell’opera di Etteilla. RDT.”
[5] Lorenzo Cuppi, “Tarocchino Bolognese: Due Nuovi Manoscritti Scoperti e Alcune Osservazioni - Parte II,” The Playing-Card 30, No. 4 (2003), p. 191: “Riguardo a questo manoscritto vorrei osservare brevemente che esso si trova tra manoscritti del 1760 e che la sua grafia è talmente moderna che può sembrare ottocentesca.”
[6] Albano Sorbelli, Inventari dei manoscritti delle biblioteche d’Italia, vol. 25 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1916), p. 112 (online in archive.org), regarding BUB (Biblioteca Universitaria Bologna) Ms. 3884: “autogr. di Ubaldo Zanetti.” This same source notes when a document is part of the Zanetti bequest; none of the documents in the folder containing the cartomancy document is among them.
[7] Ibid., vol. 27 (1923), p. 98, entry for BUB 4029-R: “R. Frammento di una lettera che si pretende scritta da Parigi ed inserta negli avvisi di Normandia. Significato delle carte da giuoco. Dell’ordine dei Franc Maçons.” The first of these, R1, is in a different hand than either of the other two, samples of which are reproduced here (the cartomancy document is simply “R”; the account of the Masons is labeled “R2.”
[8] Biographie universelle et portative des contemporains, ou Dictionnaire historique des hommes célèbres de toutes les nations, morts ou vivants, ec., 1826, p. 1231, in Google Books.
[9] Online at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10423710, pp. 332-33, translated by Steve Mangan at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=22197#p22197.
[10] Le Nouvel Etteilla (modern title of a text by or in association with Etteilla, 1791, discussed in section 3 of this blog, n. 9), p. 13.
[11] Etteilla [Jean-Baptiste Alliette], Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots: pour servir de deuxième cahier a cet ouvrage (Amsterdam, 1785), online in the Wellcome Library digital collection, https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b28777323, pp. 136-37: “aidé des sages avis d’un sage Piémontois (a) très-âgé, & se disant petit fils d’Alexis dit le Piémontois.”
[12] Piemontese, Alessio (pseud.?, i.e., Girolamo Ruscelli?), Les secrets de Reverend Signeur Alexis Piemontois, contenans excellens remedes contre plusieurs maladies, playes et autres accidens . . . (Antwerp: Christofle Plantin, 1557), trans. of Piemontese, Alessio (pseud.?) I Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese (Venice: Sigismondo Bordogna, 1555). The 1557 French ed. has been put online by the University and State Library Düsseldorf (search “Piémontois” there), and the 1555 Italian ed. by the Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum.
[13] Dizionario di opere anonime e pseudonime di scrittori italiani o come che sia aventi relazione all’Italia. (Milan: L. di G. Pirola, 1848), vol. 1 (A-G), p. 32, in Google Books.
[14] See a report written by John Ferguson, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow until 1915, read in 1930 to a section of the Royal Society of Medicine and published in their proceedings (Dec. 1930?), online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003591573002400256, on p. 229.
[15] Piémontois, Les Secrets (see above n. 12), second page of dedication.
[16] Etteilla, Philosophie des Hautes Sciences (Paris, 1785), p. 116. Online in archive.org.
[17] Etteilla, Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu des cartes par M*** (Amsterdam, 1770), online in Gallica and Google Books, p. 74.
[18] Ron Decker, Terry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards (London: Duckworth, 1996), p. 80.
[19] Mary K. Greer, “Origins of Divination (Playing Card Divination),” online at “Mary K. Greer’s Tarot Blog,” April 1, 2008 (https://marykgreer.com/2008/04/01/origins-of-divination-with-playing-cards/)
[20] Ross Caldwell, “A Brief History of Cartomancy,” online on academia.edu,
[21] Ibid.
[22] Luigi Fumi, “L’inquisizione romana e lo stato di Milano” (Archivio Storico Lombardo, XXXVII [1910], pp. 5-124), pp. 12-13. For the relevant paragraph, with an English translation and a link to the original at L’emeroteca Digitale, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, see Ross G. R. Caldwell at https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=13698#p13698 (2013).
[23] Caldwell, “Brief History” (see above n. 20).
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