The remains of an early civilization might survive in things that nobody treated as antiquities. Antoine Court de Gébelin (1725–1784) approached familiar words, customs, and stories with that possibility in mind. In his Monde primitif, he tried to reconstruct the old world from traces scattered through later life. A tradition did not need to retain its original explanation to preserve something of its earliest meaning.
Tarot cards offered his most memorable example. Their figures seemed to him to belong to the religious symbolism of Egypt, and he interpreted the pack as the survival of an Egyptian book. People had continued to handle its images at the card table while forgetting the wisdom they contained. The proposed discovery required an interpreter capable of recognizing the ancient meaning in an ordinary object.
That recognition carried more of the argument than a documented history of the cards. He had recognized Egyptian themes without establishing an Egyptian history for the cards. Gébelin’s wider search nevertheless made the identification seem plausible. Languages and customs already appeared to him as damaged inheritances, so a game could be another place where old teaching had survived unnoticed.
The interpretation changed what later readers expected to find when they looked at the pack. Once the cards had been given an Egyptian ancestry, each image invited further explanation, and the absence of an original commentary left considerable room for invention. Gébelin had offered more than one claim about the history of a game. He had given an accessible, reproducible set of pictures a reason to be studied for religious knowledge, making the search for lost wisdom possible without an ancient manuscript in hand.