May 15

The Birth of Jean-Baptiste Pitois, the Man Who Named the Arcana

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

On May 15, 1811, in the small town of Remiremont in the Vosges region of northeastern France, Jean-Baptiste Pitois was born. He never founded a magical order, never claimed initiation into an ancient mystery school, and never practiced magic. He was a journalist, and his 1870 treatise, Histoire de la Magie, du monde Surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les Temps et les Peuples, introduced the terms “Major Arcana” and “Minor Arcana” to all generations of occultists to follow…

The Arsenal and Its Ghosts

The trajectory of Pitois’s life was shaped, more than anything else, by his early association with Charles Nodier—one of the most influential and least remembered figures in nineteenth-century French letters. Nodier was, by the time the young Pitois encountered him in Paris, the director of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and the unofficial godfather of French Romanticism. The Arsenal was not merely a library; it was a salon, a laboratory, a clearinghouse for the most exciting literary and intellectual energies in France. Nodier’s drawing room at the Arsenal drew together the young men who would define the century: Victor Hugo came there, and Alfred de Musset, and Sainte-Beuve, and Dumas. Nodier was twenty years older than all of them, and he introduced his younger colleagues to the conte fantastique—the fantastic tale, the ghost story, the vampire narrative—as well as to Gothic literature, to the importance of dreams as creative raw material, and to a serious engagement with the occult traditions that the Enlightenment had tried to bury.

Pitois arrived in this world already primed for it. His family, devout and socially ambitious, had raised him in a monastic community with the intention that he become a priest. He declined the vocation but kept the formation, and when he reached Paris and fell into Nodier’s orbit, the combination of religious education, literary ambition, and access to one of the great uncatalogued collections of rare and unusual books in France produced something that neither the monastery nor the salon could have generated alone: a man with the scholarly habits of a seminarian, the anticlerical convictions of a Romantic, and a growing obsession with everything the Church had spent centuries trying to suppress.

The collaboration with Nodier produced Pitois’ first book—Historic Paris: Walks in the Streets of Paris, published between 1837 and 1840—and secured him an appointment as librarian of the Ministry of Public Education in 1839. The position gave him access to more uncatalogued material, more rare texts, more of the buried literature of the Western esoteric tradition. A hint of where this was leading appeared in 1844 with his Stories of the Marvelous from All Times and Lands, a collection that reads less like a scholarly work than like a man testing the water, seeing how a mainstream audience responded to the strange and the supernatural organized into narrative form. The response was warm enough to encourage him. But the major work was still a quarter-century away.

A Soldier Among the Manuscripts

The intervening years between Pitois’s early Parisian work and his great occult synthesis were filled with the kind of productive detours that a certain kind of nineteenth-century intellectual life made available. He served in the French army in Algeria from 1843 to 1844—a colonial campaign of considerable brutality that he seems to have experienced primarily as a source of historical material. He produced serious historical work: History of the Terrors in 1853, a study of the Revolutionary period; the multi-volume Heroes of Christianity between 1853 and 1857. These were not occult texts, but they were texts by a man training himself in the management of large quantities of historical material, in the construction of sweeping historical narratives, in the particular challenge of making the distant past feel immediate and consequential to a contemporary reader.

Throughout this period, Eastern texts were arriving in French translation in increasing volume. The works of Emanuel Swedenborg—the Swedish mystic whose elaborate visions of the angelic and demonic worlds had already influenced Blake and Balzac and would eventually reach Baudelaire—had been rendered into French and were circulating among the literary intelligentsia. Hindu and Buddhist texts were appearing in scholarly editions. The French fascination with Egypt, ignited by Napoleon’s expedition and never entirely extinguished, kept producing new translations and interpretations of ancient material. And Pitois, sitting in his Ministry library with his anticlerical convictions and his monastic training and his journalist’s sense of what an audience would actually read, began assembling what would become his monument.

He began writing Histoire de la Magie in 1859. It took him eleven years. It was published in 1870, the year the Franco-Prussian War began—a coincidence that might have buried a lesser work, since France was about to undergo the twin catastrophes of military defeat and the siege of Paris. Instead, the book was received, in the words of one contemporary account, as a “standard reference work,” immediately cited favorably by Madame Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine and taken up by the occultist community that was then organizing itself in Paris and London into the forms that would define Western esotericism for the next century.

The Histoire de la Magie is, in the frank assessment of most scholars who have worked through it, a sprawling, poorly organized, and often historically unreliable book. Pitois invented sources, presented fictional reconstructions as factual accounts, and organized his material according to thematic obsession rather than scholarly rigor. None of this diminished its influence. The book surveyed the whole of the Western occult tradition—ancient Egypt, Persia, India, the classical world, the medieval grimoire tradition, the Renaissance magi, Freemasonry, Cagliostro, divination, witchcraft, spells, the properties of gems, the nature of the soul—and presented all of it in the confident, accessible prose of a journalist who had decided that the general educated reader deserved to know what the Church had been trying to keep from them.

The book’s most consequential section was buried in its account of ancient Egyptian initiation: a fictional passage through a temple ceremony in which a postulant encounters, in sequence, twenty-two symbolic images. These images correspond, as any reader familiar with the cards would immediately recognize, to the twenty-two trump cards of the Tarot—but Pitois described them not as playing cards but as the living curriculum of Egyptian mystery religion, as the twenty-two gates of initiation through which the ancient adept passed on his way to wisdom. He called these gates arcana—secrets—and divided the larger Tarot system into the greater secrets, the Major Arcana, and the lesser secrets, the Minor Arcana. The terms were new. No previous writer on the Tarot had used them. They stuck immediately and have never been displaced.

The attribution was, like de Gébelin’s Egyptian origin story that preceded it, entirely invented. There is no ancient Egyptian temple ceremony involving twenty-two symbolic images. The passage in Pitois’ book that describes it is a fictional reconstruction presented as a real account by the philosopher Iamblichus—who wrote no such thing. Pitois was doing what de Gébelin had done before him and what Eliphas Lévi had done slightly before him and what Papus and Waite and Crowley would do after him: he was building a mythology for the Tarot that was more interesting, more resonant, and more useful for magical purposes than the correct historical account of its Italian card-game origins. The mythology worked. It still works. The Major Arcana remain so named because a French journalist in 1870 decided that Egyptian mystery religion needed a deck of cards.

Blavatsky’s endorsement in the Secret Doctrine was decisive for the book’s reception in occultist circles, and the 1963 Citadel Press American edition—prepared with the assistance of, among others, Gerald Yorke and Lewis Spence, two men who had moved in Crowley’s orbit—ensured that the book reached the English-language audience of the mid-twentieth century occult revival in an edition that carried the imprimatur of the tradition’s inner circle. The revisions and supplementary articles added to that edition represent a kind of palimpsest: the living tradition annotating the foundational text, generation after generation, each one finding something useful in the sprawling original and adding their own layer to it.

The Illustrator and His Most Famous “Child”

Émile Bayard—the artist who provided the illustrations for the 1870 edition of Histoire de la Magie, including his dramatic rendering of the Dance of the Witches’ Sabbath that became one of the iconic images of nineteenth-century occult publishing—was a man of considerably wider cultural reach than his association with Pitois’ book might suggest. Born in 1837, Bayard had trained under the painter Léon Cogniet and worked across charcoal, watercolor, woodcut, engraving, and lithograph before finding his particular vocation as an illustrator of books and periodicals. His documentary illustrations of the Franco-Prussian War—the same war that marked the year of Histoire de la Magie’s publication—were among the most widely circulated images of that conflict.

But Bayard’s most enduring work, and the one that connects him to a rather different corner of French cultural life, was his illustration of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Among those illustrations was the iconic image of the young Cosette—the small girl with the broom, looking directly at the viewer with an expression that has traveled through a century and a half of cultural transmission to become the logo of the Cameron Mackintosh stage musical and one of the most recognized images in the history of literary illustration. The man who drew the witches dancing in Pitois’ occult compendium also drew the face that every poster for Les Misérables has used ever since. Bayard died in Cairo in 1891, at fifty-four, having illustrated Jules Verne and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Victor Hugo and the Western magical tradition with equal facility and evident pleasure.

A Legacy in Magic

Pitois died in Lyon on July 12, 1877, leaving behind an unpublished work on astrology that reportedly contains numerous allusions to contemporary events as proof of the value of horoscopes. He was sixty-six years old. He had written one great book and several decent ones, served his country in a colonial war, catalogued and worked with rare manuscripts for decades, and given the Western occult tradition its most durable organizational vocabulary. The anticlerical journalist from Remiremont who had been raised to be a priest ended up providing the framework through which millions of people would engage with a spiritual tradition that the Church he rejected had spent centuries trying to suppress.

There is something fitting about that arc. Pitois’ formation in the monastic community gave him the patience for sustained intellectual work and the categorical thinking that organizing a tradition requires. His rejection of the priesthood gave him the freedom to write about magic without the inhibitions that a practicing Catholic—writing for a Catholic audience, as he was careful to do in 1870—would otherwise have felt more acutely. His years alongside Nodier in the literary salons of Paris gave him the understanding that a book about occultism needed to read like a story, not like a treatise: that the general reader who might never have considered picking up a grimoire could be drawn into the Western esoteric tradition through narrative, through history, through the accumulated drama of centuries of forbidden knowledge.

The Histoire de la Magie is not a reliable history—but it can be taken as a mythology, assembled by a man who understood both the scholarly tradition and the popular imagination well enough to give Western occultism a story about itself that it could use. The Major Arcana exist as a named category because Pitois decided, in 1870, that they should. The Tarot’s Egyptian origin story—already constructed by de Gébelin in 1781, elaborated by Etteilla and Lévi in the intervening decades, and now given its most complete narrative form by Pitois—was waiting for exactly the vocabulary he provided. The tradition accepted it instantly and has never given it back.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist