The Oswald Wirth Tarot

In 1887 a young Swiss draughtsman named Oswald Wirth met Stanislas de Guaita, poet, occultist and founder of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, and became his secretary. Under Guaita's direction Wirth redrew the twenty-two trumps of the Marseille tarot, correcting each image against the doctrine of Eliphas Levi, and in 1889 published them as Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot Kabbalistique, in a small edition usually given as 350 copies. It was a tarot rebuilt to Eliphas Levi's Kabbalistic design, an instrument of occult study rather than a game, and the same year Papus reproduced the designs in his Tarot of the Bohemians.

Every card carries a Hebrew letter beside its French title, following Levi's alphabet: Aleph for the Bateleur through Tav for the World. The corrections run deeper than lettering. The Wheel of Fortune becomes Levi's own diagram, sphinx on top, Hermanubis rising, Typhon falling. The Devil is Levi's Baphomet, Coagula and Solve written on its arms. The Tower is renamed Le Feu du Ciel, the Fire of Heaven, and the Papess gains a crescent moon. Le Fou bears no number at all, only the letter Shin, and Wirth's sequence places it where Levi put it, between Judgement and the World; the cards keep that order here, so the Fool walks twenty-first of the twenty-two.

Wirth redrew and recolored the deck for his 1926 book Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Age, and that later version, with its golden backgrounds, is the one most modern reprints follow. The cards on this page are the earlier thing itself: a hand-colored copy of the 1889 edition kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with Wirth's signature and the date lettered onto Le Pendu.