"Jean-Baptiste Pitois: The Man Who Conjured the Arcana" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: Mebes' "The Minor Arcana of the Tarot"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 12 Jean-Baptiste Pitois: The Man Who Conjured 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.) 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 ...