https://aeon.co/essays/tarot-cards-a-tool-of-cold-tricksters-or-wise-therapists

“Another prominent Parisian Freemason – as well as scholar and Protestant pastor – was Antoine Court de Gébelin. In 1781, he published the eighth volume of his Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, in which he unwearyingly sought etymological and allegorical correspondences through history. At one much-cited moment he lurches into anecdote. He visited a ‘Madame la C d’H’, he says, and found her playing cards with other ladies. Court de Gébelin was seized by an overwhelming conviction. Imagine, he suggests:

If I was to announce that an ancient Egyptian work still exists today, a book that escaped the flames which devoured their superb libraries, and that contained the purest teaching on the most interesting of subjects … If I added that this book was widespread across much of Europe, and that for several centuries it had been in all our hands … that the fruit of such an exquisite wisdom was looked upon as a heap of extravagant figures that signified nothing other than themselves … would you not think that I was amusing myself by playing with the credulity of my readers?

Au contraire, Court de Gébelin insisted, this matter was ‘très-vrai’. Tarot cards amounted to a secret book of 78 pages – the remnant of the ‘lost’, magical Book of Thoth. It had never been noticed before because the cards had been so ‘little dignified by attention’.”