What the Book of Fortune Actually Gets Right — and What It Invented Out of Thin Air

Humanity’s curiosity about the future is subtly stubborn. People have reached for cards, stars, bones, and books—anything that might provide a glimpse beyond the curtain of the present—across centuries, continents, wars, and revolutions.

The Book of Fortune raises a question that is more difficult to answer than it seems: does it matter if the stories are true as long as people find meaning in them? The Book of Fortune sits inside that long tradition, halfway between serious scholarship and lovely mythology.

The majority of practitioners are unaware of the history of the tarot, which is the foundation of much fortune-telling culture. Tarot packs were first mentioned in writing in northern Italy between 1440 and 1450. Illustrated allegorical cards were added to standard playing decks in cities like Milan and Ferrara. These were referred to as triumph packs, or carte da trionfi. They were games. Nothing more.

Around 1450, a Dominican preacher brought them up, but only to denounce them along with dice and gambling. There was no hint of prophecy, no connection to ancient Egypt, and no mystical intent. Perhaps deeper interpretation was always inevitable due to the imagery’s sheer decorative drama. However, it didn’t for almost 400 years.

This was altered in 1781 when Antoine Court de Rébelin, a French clergyman, sat down and observed some women playing cards. One of the most significant imaginative leaps in European cultural history ensued. Based mostly on instinct and passion, Court de Ábelin concluded that the cards were not a game at all but rather a disguised ancient Egyptian text, a remnant of the pharaohs’ wisdom.

Le Monde primitif, a multi-volume work, is where he published this theory. It was dramatic, captivating, and nearly totally made up. His assertions were not supported by anything discovered in the Egyptian language by later Egyptologists. Nevertheless, for more than 200 years, scholarship has been unable to break free from the theory’s hold.

The public’s acceptance of Court de Rébelin’s ideas has been described by historians as possibly the most successful propaganda campaign in Western occultism’s history—a whole false history that was created and then consumed whole.

It’s difficult to ignore how eager people are to accept a lovely origin story, particularly one that promises hidden knowledge and age-old wisdom. It seems impossible to resist the allure of depth and mystery with roots deeper than memory.

Under the alias Etteilla, Jean-Baptiste Alliette transformed de Rébelin’s fantasy into a system. Working in the 1780s, he established the first tarot cartomancy society in 1788 and was the first to formally assign divinatory meanings to individual tarot cards. He asserted that the cards were replicated from gold leaves, that they held Hermes Trismegistus’s own wisdom, and that his own deck fixed historical mistakes.

Etteilla raised concerns about the boundary between confident invention and occult tradition because he was more of a showman than a scholar. However, his framework persisted, influencing behaviors that millions of people still adhere to today.

Celebrity was added by Marie Anne Lenormand. She asserted personal ties to both Napoleon and Empress Josephine during the height of Napoleonic France, placing cartomancy at the epicenter of social and political power. The aura those claims created was more important than whether they held up to scrutiny.

Her influence continued long after her death in 1843, as several decks were released under her name. She seemed to have realized something that contemporary personal branding has only lately rediscovered: once a reputation is sufficiently established, it outlives the individual.

Éliphas Lévi, a philosopher and magician, stretched the boundaries of tarot interpretation’s intellectual potential. He connected the cards to the Tree of Life, ancient astrology, and the Hebrew Kabbalah. He claimed that if someone was imprisoned with nothing but a tarot deck, they could gain universal knowledge if they really understood it. It was a remarkable—and strangely poignant—claim.

The notion that everything worth knowing could be contained in a small deck of illustrated cards has a profoundly human quality. In the late 1880s, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed its own complex tarot system based on Lévi’s concepts. This led to the creation of the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, which is still the most well-known tarot deck in existence today.

Whether in its sections on tarot or its more general examination of divination techniques, the Book of Fortune does not truly document a history of prophecy. It is a history of interpretation, of people examining unclear symbols and discovering precisely what they were looking for.

The cards remain the same. Over the course of centuries, their assigned meanings have been created, debated, revised, and reinvented. That is not a systemic weakness. Perhaps that’s the point.

It’s similar to watching a photograph slowly take shape in a darkroom when you read about this history; you can see how shapes transform from nothing to something recognizable. The occult sciences did not originate from divine revelation or ancient Egypt.

They were put together piece by piece by actual people, including clergy, gamblers, soldiers, mystics, con artists, and sincere seekers, each of whom added a layer of significance to pictures that started out as playing cards in a city in northern Italy. It’s unclear if the Book of Fortune holds secrets about the past, present, or future. It seems almost certain that it reveals something true about human nature.