Page:The Illustrated Key to the Tarot.djvu/170

166 Cards were known in Europe prior to the appearance of the Egyptians. The work has a good deal of curious information and the appendices are valuable, but the Tarot occupies comparatively little of the text and the period is too early for a tangible criticism of its claims. There are excellent reproductions of early specimen designs. Those of Court de Gebelin are also given in extenso.

The author suggested that the Trumps Major and the numeral cards were once separate, but were afterwards combined. The oldest specimens of Tarot cards are not later than 1440. But the claims and value of the volume have been sufficiently described in the text.

There are some interesting illustrations of early Tarot cards, which are said to be of Oriental origin; but they are not referred to Egypt. The early gipsy connection is affirmed, but there is no evidence produced. The cards came with the gipsies from India, where they were designed to show forth the intentions of “the unknown divinity” rather than to be the servants of profane amusement.

This is the first publication of Alphonse Louis Constant on occult philosophy, and it is also his magnum opus. It is constructed in both volumes on the major Keys of the Tarot and has been therefore understood as a kind of development of their implicits, in the way that these were presented to the mind of the author. To supplement what has been said of this work in the text of the present monograph, I need only add that the section on transmutations in the second volume contains what is termed the Key of Thoth. The inner circle depicts a triple Tau with a hexagram where the bases join, and beneath is the Ace of