The Oswald Wirth Tarot

    In 1889, Oswald Wirth created the first public Tarot deck that explicitly employed Hebrew letter correspondences. Although the Order of the Golden Dawn in England created a deck a few years earlier that was based on the Hebrew alphabet, theirs was private and exclusively reserved for the use of initiates into the order. Wirth only completed the Major Arcana cards, which initially appeared in Le Tarot des Bohemiens by his friend Gerard Encausse. The Hebrew letters were originally assigned using Eliphas Levi's system of correspondences. I've changed the lettering on the cards shown here. By using Paint Shop Pro, I rearranged the Hebrew letters to fit with the better known (though not necessarily superior) Golden Dawn correspondences. The numbering of some of the cards has also been switched to match the Golden Dawn model.