Christine Payne Towler – The Continental Tarots

Christine Payne Towler – The Continental Tarots

In the essay titled “The Major Arcana” I empha- size that “something happened” to the Tarot in

the late 1600s, when a new trend emerged in the images of the Major Arcana. I point to the Marseilles family of decks and the Etteilla Tarots to illustrate my point. The images shown by Antoine Court de Gebelin in his book Le Monde Primitif further validates this idea. The remainder of this essay is about exploring “what happened.” Let’s review the situation of Tarot in the first half of the 1600s. Since the early 1400s, both handmade and woodblock Tarots