Grand Etteilla (Grimaud, Paris, c. 1890)
Suits
5
Cards
78
Author
Jean-Baptiste Alliette (Etteilla)
Publisher
B.-P. Grimaud
Place
Paris
Year
c. 1890
Pattern
Tarot
License
Public domain
The first tarot designed purely for divination, and still the only one where the card is its own interpretation: the upright reading is printed across its head and the reversed reading, upside down, across its foot. All seventy-eight cards are numbered in one run from 1 to 78, and the trumps are not the Marseille subjects at all but Chaos, Light, the Plants, the Sky and the other stages of creation. The deck descends from "Etteilla" — Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a seed merchant who reversed his name in the 1780s and invented this order. Printed by B.-P. Grimaud in Paris between 1875 and 1899. Scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
