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Here is your Tarocks Update.We started e-mailing out a newsletter, which eventually was named the Tarocks Tribune. These newsletters were extensive from the beginning, so we decided to make them more accessibly by sharing them here. This is our fifth. To read them all, click on the Tribune category near the top of our blog page.  Greetings! We are happy to present you with the February newsletter of 2019 in which we will offer to you our latest findings and inspiring topics. First of all, we want to thank you for visiting our website and signing up for our newsletter. We truly hope that you will enjoy the images and the descriptions of the decks shown on Tarocks. If, while reading this newsletter, you think of someone in your life who loves cards as much as we do, feel free to forward them this e-mail or share this link with them so they can sign up. 
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Oswald Wirth was born on august 5, 1860 in Brienz, Switzerland. Around 1880 he went to Paris where he joined the army. After his military service, he worked both as an artist and accountant and got interested in the occult. He befriended the famous Italian artist and occultist Stanislas de Guaita. This friendship ultimately resulted in 1889 in the publication of the tarot deck Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot du Tarot dessinés a l’usage des initiés sur les indications de Stanislas de Guaita. (published by Georges Poirel). This was a limited edition of ca. 100 beautifully hand colored copies and is very rare. The exact quantity of this edition is somewhat unclear. It is interesting that another famous occultist from Fin de Siècle Paris, Papus, in the same period published (other)images of the cards of the major arcana of the tarot in his famous work Le Tarot des Bohémiens.  Etteilla, The Wigmaker Etteilla (1738-1791) born Aillette, was a barber by profession, who changed his name into Etteilla (spelled backwards, after the Hebrew tradition), when he became involved in occult thinking and, according to many, became a full-time fortuneteller.  Being a barber and a skillful wigmaker, he had little further education and not much experience with the philosophies of the more initiated. Nevertheless, he was gifted with a profound intuition (and a convincing fantasy). Contemporaries like Eliphas Levi, even believed that he came very near unveiling ‘The Real Secrets behind the Tarot’, but Levi also stated that his thoughts, when put into writing, were ‘obscure, wearisome, and in style even barbarous’.
Etteila was probably influenced by Comte Court de Gebelin (1728-1784), who led many occultists of those days to believe in the possible Egyptian roots of the Tarot. Papus is a pseudonym for Dr. Gérard Analect Vincent Encausse (GE), born on July 13, 1865 in Coruña (Spain) and deceased in 1916 in Paris on October 25 (Tubercolosis).  He was a significant French occultist and one of the founders of the French Theosophical Society (TS) that he parted from in 1890. Papus then founded another group, a sort of anti-TS, the ‘Groupe indépendant d’étude ésotériques’ based on pure esoteric values.
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