Book of Thoth

The legend

In Greek-Egyptian Hellenistic tradition (period of cultural blending, 300 BC - 300 AD), Thoth was attributed authorship of fundamental magical-spiritual books — including "the Book of Thoth": complete repository of magical, divinatory and metaphysical Egyptian wisdom. According to the legend (recorded in some pseudo-Egyptian texts of the era), the original book was hidden by Thoth in a sealed box deep in the Nile, protected by serpents and dangers. Whoever could find and read it would possess unimaginable power.

In 1781, the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published in his Le Monde Primitif a revolutionary essay where he argued that the Marseille tarot was actually fragmentary remainder of the Book of Thoth. According to him, the Egyptian priests, knowing the impending destruction of their religion in the early Christian era, hid the symbolic essence of their wisdom in a popular game of cards — that, surviving as triviality, would actually conceal the deepest sacred. Etteilla shortly after (1788) propagated the same theory in his cartomantic manuals.

Egyptian theory and historical reality

The Egyptianising theory of Court de Gébelin had enormous influence: throughout the 19th century, the European esoterists (Eliphas Levi, Papus, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) seriously developed the "Egyptian Tarot" theory. They created tarot decks with explicit Egyptian iconography (the famous Egyptian Tarot), wrote treatises about correspondence between the 22 major arcana and the supposed 22 chapters of the original Book of Thoth, established codified relations between Hebrew letters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, alchemical correspondences and major arcana.

But academic Egyptology developed in parallel — especially after Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822 — and completely dismantled the historical premise: the actual ancient Egypt did not have a "Book of Thoth" similar to the tarot. There are real ancient Egyptian magical-religious books (the Book of the Dead, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns), but they have nothing structurally like the tarot. The tarot is verifiable European invention of the 15th century (with the Italian tarocchi); has Renaissance Italian iconography, not Egyptian. Court de Gébelin was wrong.

Symbolic value beyond literal historicity

However, the symbolic-spiritual value of the "Book of Thoth" theory does not depend on its literal historicity. Whether or not historically there was such book, the archetypal-symbolic suggestion is rich: the tarot can be read as condensation of universal magical wisdom — call it "Egyptian", or "Hermetic", or "Western archetypal" — that survives in the form of cards through ages and cultures. Many modern tarot decks (the most famous being the Thoth Tarot of Crowley, designed precisely as "modern reconstruction of the Book of Thoth") work consciously with this symbolic suggestion. Recognising the historical fiction while honouring the symbolic depth is balanced approach.