The Practical Astrology Tarot

The Falconnier deck of 1896 gave the occult world twenty-two Egyptian arcana and stopped. Five years later a French emigre in Chicago finished the job. Writing as Comte C. de Saint-Germain, Edgar de Valcourt-Vermont packed his manual Practical Astrology with a complete tarot: Wegener's twenty-two temple scenes redrawn, and then, for the first time anywhere, fifty-six Egyptian minor arcana to go with them. His courts are King, Queen, Warrior and Slave; his pips arrange scepters, cups, swords and pentacles into the geometric figures of number, triangle, square and star, each corner annotated with divinatory sigils.

The cards were printed as book plates for readers to consult or cut, four to a page, and the book sold steadily in the American occult market for decades. In 1918 the Brotherhood of Light adopted the designs for its correspondence lessons, and through that channel Saint-Germain's minors became the skeleton of the Egyptian decks of the twentieth century; most descendants copy his arrangements without knowing his name.

It is a working deck, not a beautiful one: quick contour drawing, no color, sigils instead of scenery. But it closes the circle the Livre de Thot Etteilla opened in 1789, a full seventy-eight card tarot claiming Egypt on every card, and it did so from a Chicago publishing house for a dollar and a half.