July 12

Jean-Baptiste Pitois: The Man Who Conjured the Arcana

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Picture a postulant descending an iron ladder of seventy-eight rungs, deep beneath an Egyptian pyramid, into a hall lined on either side by twelve statues and twelve paintings, each one a trial to be endured before the secret wisdom of the priesthood can be revealed. It is a magnificent piece of writing. It is also, as far as anyone has ever been able to determine, complete fiction—and the man who wrote it died on this day in 1877, having in the process handed every tarot reader alive today the two words they use every single time they pick up a deck.

Jean-Baptiste Pitois, writing under the pen name Paul Christian, coined the terms Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. Ask most tarot readers where those words come from and you will get a shrug, or a vague gesture toward antiquity—as if the terminology has simply always existed, handed down from some suitably ancient and suitably mysterious source. It has not. It came from one specific, prolific, and thoroughly unreliable nineteenth-century French journalist, and the story of how his most inventive fabrication turned into permanent vocabulary is a small masterclass in how occult tradition actually gets made.

A Journalist in Occult Clothing (Or the Other Way Around…)

Pitois was born in Remiremont, France, in 1811, groomed for the priesthood in a monastic community before deciding against it, and drifted instead toward Paris and journalism. There he fell in with Charles Nodier, one of the animating figures of French Romanticism, whose own fascination with the occult rubbed off thoroughly on his younger associate. Writing chiefly under the name Paul Christian, Pitois built a career on histories of Paris and studies of revolution before turning, later in life, toward esotericism in earnest. The book that would outlive everything else he wrote, Histoire de la Magie, du monde Surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les Temps et les Peuples, appeared in 1870, carefully pitched, by his own design, not to offend the largely Catholic readership he hoped would buy it.

The strategy worked, and the book became genuinely popular reading, surveying the whole sweep of occult practice from antiquity forward and presenting itself throughout as sober history rather than speculation. Tucked inside it was Pitois’s extended account of an ancient Egyptian initiatory rite supposedly underlying the tarot trumps—the iron ladder, the seventy-eight steps, the statues and paintings representing each stage of trial. He assigned each of the twenty-two trump cards a role in this ceremony, gave them elaborate Egyptian-flavored names and correspondences, and, crucially, needed a way to distinguish those twenty-two symbolic “initiation” cards from the fifty-six numbered suit cards that made up the rest of the deck. His solution was simple and, it turns out, permanent: the trumps became the Major Arcana, while the suits became the Minor Arcana.

However, none of it was true, and tarot historians have been quite direct about saying so ever since the discipline matured into serious scholarship. Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett—whose A Wicked Pack of Cards remains the standard scholarly account of the occult tarot’s invention—trace the entire Egyptian-initiation narrative to Pitois’s imagination, built atop groundwork already laid a century earlier by Antoine Court de Gébelin, the Swiss clergyman and Freemason who first claimed, without evidence, that tarot descended from an ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth. Pitois simply took that unfounded premise and ran considerably further with it than anyone before him, constructing fake quotations and an entirely invented initiatory ceremony to give the claim the texture of genuine historical testimony. The real, considerably less mystical origin of tarot is by now well established: playing cards for a trick-taking game called tarocchi, invented in the Italian courts of the 1440s, used for gambling and parlor games for roughly three centuries before any occultist ever proposed they held secret wisdom at all.

The fictional Egyptian backstory has largely fallen away, quietly abandoned even by tarot practitioners who lean hardest into the deck’s mystical dimensions. But the words Pitois invented specifically to support that fiction never left. Major Arcana and Minor Arcana—they appear today in academic tarot scholarship, in beginner-friendly Llewellyn manuals and decks, in the packaging of nearly every commercial deck sold—used constantly, by readers who overwhelmingly could not tell you Paul Christian’s real name, let alone that he made up the reason those words exist in the first place.

The Legacy of the Tale

There is a real lesson buried in that survival, and it is not really about Pitois at all. Occult tradition, probably more than most fields of human knowledge, is full of vocabulary and structure that arrived by exactly this route: someone with more imagination than evidence proposed a framework, the framework got used because it was useful—clarifying, evocative, easy to teach—and over enough decades the framework quietly detached itself from the fabrication that produced it (Modern Occultist has now traced that same pattern in Robert Graves’s tree calendar and in the eclectic modern dating of festivals like the Panathenaea). And yet, Pitois may be the cleanest example thus far, precisely because the invented material and the surviving material are so easy to tell apart: the pyramid, the iron ladder, the initiation trial are gone. “Major Arcana” survives every single day, in the hands of readers who have never once thought to ask where it came from.

Pitois did not live to see how thoroughly his invention would outlast his history. His health failed through the 1870s, and he died in Lyon on this day in 1877, leaving behind an unpublished manuscript on astrology reportedly full of allusions to contemporary events, offered as proof of the horoscope’s predictive value. Whatever else is owed to him, the next time you or a reader lays out the twenty-two trumps and calls them by name, it is worth remembering that the name itself is a monument to one man’s talent for saying something false, beautifully enough, that the world decided to keep the words and let the myth go.

OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW

Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s "Daily Occult Review" from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... In honor of Pitois and the real history hiding underneath his invented one...

The Minor Arcana of the Tarot: As an Initiatory Path of Ethical Hermeticism

By G.O. Mebes | Translated by Yury Pankratov | Aeon Spirit

There is something almost too fitting about closing out a piece on Jean-Baptiste Pitois with a book devoted entirely to the second half of the very division he invented. Pitois coined “Major Arcana” and “Minor Arcana” as a matter of narrative convenience, a label to distinguish the twenty-two trumps of his fictional Egyptian initiation from the fifty-six suit cards left over. More than a century and a half later, G.O. Mebes has built an entire, deeply serious volume around the half of that division popular occultism has always treated as an afterthought—and in doing so, makes an unexpectedly persuasive case that Pitois’s throwaway distinction deserved better than it got.

Mebes himself is a genuinely remarkable figure to be encountering in translation for the first time this deep into the twentieth century’s occult revival. A mathematics professor in early twentieth-century Russia, he became one of that country’s most influential esotericists through public lectures collected as A Concise Course in the Encyclopedia of Occultism, held senior positions across Russian Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and Martinism, and broke from the French Martinist order in 1912 to found an Autonomous Martinist Order of Russian Obedience. It is a career shape this column has now traced more than once this week: like Franz Bardon in communist Czechoslovakia, Mebes was persecuted by the Soviet state for the offense of teaching esoteric philosophy at all, and died in exile, his work surviving him and quietly shaping generations of occultists who came after, in Russia and abroad, largely without knowing his name. Translator Yury Pankratov, a computer scientist by training whose own path into ceremonial magic and the Golden Dawn tradition began under the influence of John Michael Greer—a name, by now, this column’s readers will recognize on sight—has done Mebes a genuine service in finally bringing this material into clear, accessible English.

Where most tarot literature treats Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles as the deck’s practical, fortune-telling half—worth learning for a reading’s specifics but offering little of the Major Arcana’s claimed spiritual weight—Mebes insists on precisely the opposite proposition: that the Minor Arcana constitutes its own complete initiatory path, structured with as much philosophic rigor as anything found in the trumps, and grounded simultaneously in Hermetic cosmology, Kabbalistic correspondence, and mystical Christian symbolism. He moves through each of the fifty-six cards, court cards included, treating each one not as a static fortune-telling symbol but as an object of sustained meditative engagement, an invitation to genuine inner work rather than a quick reference lookup. It is a return, in spirit, to exactly the kind of systematic, exercise-driven approach this column found so much to admire in Franz Bardon earlier this week—different tradition, different century, same underlying conviction that real attainment is built card by card, step by step, rather than absorbed all at once.

What makes the book worth the full review rather than a passing mention is the way it reframes the entire Pitois story this column has spent today unpacking: Pitois needed a word to separate the flashy twenty-two from the workmanlike fifty-six, and the world kept both halves of his invented vocabulary without ever quite believing the second half deserved equal attention. Mebes, writing decades later and worlds away in Imperial Russia, effectively refuses that hierarchy outright—not by attacking Pitois’s history, which he does not appear to engage with directly at all, but simply by treating the Minor Arcana with the same seriousness Pitois reserved for his invented Egyptian trial. Whether or not Mebes knew precisely whose narrative convenience he was quietly correcting, the effect is the same: a century and a half after one journalist decided fifty-six cards were the lesser half of the deck, a mathematics professor turned Martinist initiate sat down and proved him wrong, card by patient card. Our sincerest thanks to Aeon Spirit for the review copy; this is exactly the kind of serious, structurally ambitious esoteric scholarship this column loves seeing come out in fresh English translation, and we suspect it will not be leaving our own shelf anytime soon.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" 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.)

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