14 Tarot Card Meaning and Art: Grand Etteilla Cartomancy Tarot Deck: Queen of Tarot

14 Tarot Card Meaning and Art Grand Etteilla Cartomancy Tarot Deck

Designation

About the Deck

Grand Etteilla Cartomancy Tarot Deck

Created by the famous seer Etteilla, this deck features the tarot card meanings right on the card, which was a new innovation at the time.

Provenance

Jean Baptiste Alliette. France, 1788.

Meaning of 14 from the Grand Etteilla Cartomancy Tarot Deck

Upright

Violence

Reversed

Weakness

According to Many Schools of Thought

A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings

The Devil. In the eighteenth century this card seems to have been rather a symbol of merely animal impudicity. Except for a fantastic head-dress, the chief figure is entirely naked; it has bat-like wings, and the hands and feet are represented by the claws of a bird. In the right hand there is a sceptre terminating in a sign which has been thought to represent fire. The figure as a whole is not particularly evil; it has no tail, and the commentators who have said that the claws are those of a harpy have spoken at random. There is no better ground for the alternative suggestion that they are eagle's claws. Attached, by a cord depending from their collars, to the pedestal on which the figure is mounted, are two small demons, presumably male and female. These are tailed, but not winged. Since 1856 the influence of Eliphas Levi and his doctrine of occultism has changed the face of this card, and it now appears as a pseudo-Baphometic figure with the head of a goat and a great torch between the horns; it is seated instead of erect, and in place of the generative organs there is the Hermetic caduceus. In Le Tarot Divinatoire of Papus the small demons are replaced by naked human beings, male and female who are yoked only to each other. The author may be felicitated on this improved symbolism.