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Petit Etteilla: Cartomancy, Divination and Dreams
I like to spend a portion of my annual tax return on frivolities: it’s how my Saturn-ruled fifth house partakes in Venusian delights. I don’t blow it all in one place, but this Mercury-in-the-eighth-house-Libra-Rising does enjoy splurging on pretty little occult expenditures from time to time.
My most recent purchases included a new Tarot deck slated for debut on Instagram should it ever arrive via post, and as a Petit Etteilla deck, which I have long been keen to learn more about. The prospect of divination through playing cards has long fascinated me. I’m loosely aware of the correspondence between the Tarot and the various suits in a deck of cards — a psychic I used to drive four hours each way to see employed standard-issue Bicycle brand decks to predict the future — but I never made an effort to go beyond the system with which I am most comfortable. In fact, there is still so much I don’t know about Tarot, the layers of meaning to the cards, and the nuances of various spreads, that I could easily spend a lifetime improving upon that craft alone. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help myself, having long resisted the siren song of yet another deck for my growing collection.
In his book Cartomancy with the Lenormand and the Tarot: Create Meaning and Gain Insight from the Cards, Patrick Dunn writes that the eighteenth century produced two…
