Etteilla

thumb|Jean-Baptiste Alliette (Etteilla) at his work table, from the Cours théorique et pratique du livre de Thot (1790). Etteilla, the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1 March 1738 – 12 December 1791), was the French occultist and tarot-researcher, who was the first to develop an interpretation concept for the tarot cards and made a significant contribution to the esoteric development of the tarot cards to a wide audience (from 1783), and therefore the first professional tarot occultist known to history who made his living by card divination. Etteilla also influenced the French divination professional Marie Anne Lenormand. From 1783 to 1785, Etteilla published his work Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots ("Way to recreate yourself with the deck of cards called tarots"), which is still considered the standard reference work of Tarot cartomancy. Etteilla published his ideas of the correspondences between the tarot, astrology, and the four classical elements and four humors, and in 1789 he published his own tarot deck, which, however, differed significantly from the classic tarots such as the Tarot de Marseille in terms of structure and card designations.

==Personal life== Aside from the birth certificate recording his birth in Paris in 1738, very little is known about Jean-Baptiste Alliette's youth. His father was a maître rôtisseur, a caterer, and his mother was a seed merchant. He married Jeanne Vattier in 1763, a marriage that lasted half a decade, during which he worked as a seed merchant, before publishing his first book, Etteilla, ou maniere de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes ("Etteilla, or way to recreate yourself with a deck of cards") in 1770. Etteilla is simply the reverse of his surname.