Among my tarot decks, one deserves exactly that kind of special attention: Pitua’s Egyptian Tarot.
My copy is a Lo Scarabeo edition—full-color, richly saturated, genuinely captivating to the eye. But the original—the one everything comes from—is black and white. And that isn’t just a technical detail. Black and white has a different kind of power: it supports concentration. It draws attention to the symbol, the gesture, the line.
Pitua’s Egyptian Tarot isn’t just “another deck.” It is the inspiration and prototype of what may be the most famous tarot deck in the world today—the Rider–Waite. And there’s something especially pleasant here for anyone who has already worked with Rider–Waite: if you know that system, you’ll have no trouble at all working with Pitua’s Egyptian Tarot.
And then, naturally, the question arises:
But what—or more precisely, who—is Pitua?
Who Was Pitua?
Pitua was in fact Jean-Baptiste Pitois (1811–1877)—a French tarot reader, occultist, and librarian. Even that combination of roles sounds like the beginning of a novel: someone who works among books, archives, and manuscripts, while searching for the invisible laws behind the visible world. He traveled widely and is also known for writing under the pen name Paul Christian.
And if we imagine nineteenth-century Paris—salons, intellectual circles, philosophical debates, religious and anti-religious currents, and that particular hunger for “secret knowledge” that periodically swept across Europe—Pitois stands right in the middle of it. And he was not alone.
He was a student of Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–1875), better known as Éliphas Lévi (or Éliphas Lévi Zahed). That detail matters, because Lévi was one of the figures who helped turn occultism into a system, rather than just a loose set of legends and practices. In that sense, Pitois inherited a school that valued structure, symbolism, and inner logic.
The History of Magic and the Egyptian Thread
One of Pitois’s books that I consider a classic is The History of Magic (1870). It consists of seven volumes, examining magical traditions across different peoples, along with the author’s own concepts and reflections on the nature of magic.
I mention this book for another reason as well.
In a separate volume titled The Mystery of the Pyramids, we find the information about tarot cards. Pitois connected tarot to ancient Egyptian initiation rituals. Imagine the idea: tarot is not only “cards for divination,” but a coded language—a series of symbolic doors, depicted as scenes, that lead a person through inner transformation. And it was precisely this vision that inspired Pitois to create his Egyptian Tarot.
The Arcana and the Names: The Foundation of Modern Tarot
Jean-Baptiste Pitois was the first to introduce the concept of the “arcana.” And that’s no small thing—words shape how we experience what they name.
Thanks to him, each card received its own distinct title. And here we begin to see just how decisive his role was: Pitois’s work on the Egyptian Tarot laid much of the foundation for the modern decks tarot readers use today. That’s why his deck is of enormous importance.
There is another reason as well: his occult writings were of such high quality that they influenced even the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—an organization that played a major role in the Western esoteric tradition.
Publication, Artists, and a Mystery
Pitua’s Egyptian Tarot consists of 78 cards. Originally, as I mentioned, they were black and white.
They were first published in 1896 in a book by Robert Falconnier, The XXII Hermetic Leaves of the Divinatory Tarot. The artist credited for the black-and-white cards is Maurice Otto Wegener.
Later, the same cards were also published by the American occultist Edgar de Valcourt-Vermont in his book Practical Astrology, under the pen name “Comte de Saint-Germain.” Once again, Wegener is listed as the artist.
But here the story takes that turn that always makes me smile—because esoteric traditions rarely reach us in straight lines.
The Numbering and “The Crocodile”
Edgar de Valcourt-Vermont allowed himself certain changes. In Pitois’s book The Red Man of the Tuileries (1863), the arcana are numbered from I to LXXVII, with “The Crocodile” assigned 0 and placed between XX and XXI.
In the Saint-Germain version, the numbering is different: it runs from I to LXXVIII, and “The Crocodile” is marked as XXII.
At first glance, this may seem like a purely “technical” difference. But in practice, for tarot readers, changes like these often create a different rhythm in the work and different emphases in interpretation. Sometimes a single ordering can reshape the way you “read” the entire story of the arcana.
The Red Man of the Tuileries and the Magical Alphabet
Pitois’s book The Red Man of the Tuileries (1863) also deserves attention in its own right. It tells the story of a Benedictine monk in a red cassock—hence the unusual title. The monk possessed a manuscript outlining the laws of occultism, tarot, and a magical alphabet, and the book retells them.
It is especially striking that Pitois departs from the fashion of his era, which favored using the Hebrew alphabet. He does not follow the well-worn path—he does not simply adopt ready-made correspondences—but instead carves out his own route in magical practice. The letters in his alphabet are 22, but they are not Hebrew.
In this book, the cards of Pitua’s Egyptian Tarot are described as 78 keys. And here another intrigue appears:
The text says that the creator of the tarot drawings was also a magician—Edmond Billaudot (1829–1881). This inevitably raises the question of whether Wegener was truly the artist of the Egyptian Tarot, or whether we are dealing with overlapping names and versions, as so often happens in occult history.
Magus Edmond, Etteilla, and the Adoption of Pitois’s System
“Magus Edmond,” as he liked to style himself, initially worked with another tarot deck—known as the Etteilla Tarot, created by the French occultist and tarot reader Jean-Baptiste Alliette.
Later, however, Magus Edmond adopted Pitois’s system entirely. And here you can almost imagine the process as a personal transformation: someone begins in one school, then discovers another symbolic ordering that “speaks” more directly—and commits to it fully. Quiet transitions like this often stand behind the “official” versions of traditions.
How Did This Deck Reach Us?
Pitua’s Egyptian Tarot reached us in part thanks to its preservation by the fortune-teller Marcel Belline and the printing company Grimaud. They published it, but also allowed themselves to change the author and promote it as the “Grand Tarot of Belline.”
And there it is—another “historical smile”: the deck travels through time and through people, changes names, swaps labels, gets “claimed” by one person and revived by another… and yet, despite everything, it remains alive.
I recommend Pitois’s work—along with his Egyptian Tarot—to all lovers of the classics in the magical genre. This is a deck that isn’t merely looked at; it is read like an old text, layer upon layer of meaning. And if Rider–Waite is the book everyone has opened at least once, then Pitois is that earlier manuscript at the root of the plot—stricter, more hidden, and in a sense… more primordial.
Author: Morgan Shade
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