The Petit Etteilla

Before Etteilla rebuilt the tarot he taught Paris to read the piquet deck, and the Petit Etteilla is that method turned into a product. Thirty-two ordinary playing cards, seven through ace in the four French suits, each set in a printed frame of instructions: the card's name above, its number and upright meaning, the reversed meaning below, and cross-references to the partner cards that change its sense. A thirty-third card carries no picture at all, only the name ETTEILLA and directions; it stands for the reader, laid down to anchor the spread. The deck teaches its own system, no book required, which is why it stayed in print from the 1770s into the twentieth century.

The system is recognizably the one his Livre de Thot tarot would scale up: numbered cards, upright and reversed readings, a significator, meanings fixed by print instead of tradition. This edition, a wood-engraved Paris printing of about 1860, adds three unnumbered extras, Venus, Mars and the Ecclesiastic, sweetening the pack with a lover, a soldier and a priest.

Blond and brun court cards, the city and the country house, the letter, the money: the vocabulary the Petit Oracle des Dames and the sibylles ran with for a century is already complete here, in the cheapest possible package.