Antoine Court de Gébelin

Antoine Court de Gébelin (c. 1725-1784) was a French scholar and Protestant pastor who, in 1781, in the eighth volume of his Monde primitif, presented the tarot as a book of wisdom inherited from ancient Egypt, the Book of Thoth. History refutes this theory, placing the origin of the tarot in fifteenth-century Italy, but it launched the esoteric reading of the tarot in France and inspired every occultist who came after.