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Learn to read the Petit Etteilla exactly how Etteilla intended. In 1770, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, writing under the pseudonym Etteilla, published a complete system of divination with playing cards. In 1773, he released an expanded edition, adding more detail and clarifying parts of his original system. Together, these two books introduced ideas that would go on to shape cartomancy and tarot as we know them today: upright and reversed card meanings, spreads, and timing methods that modern English speaking practitioners still use, often without knowing where they came from because his works have never been made available or accessible in English until now. I translated both of these books into English for the first time and created a historically accurate reproduction of Etteilla's 33-card deck. But here's the thing: translating a 250-year-old text doesn't automatically make it easy to understand. Etteilla wrote for an 18th-century French audience, in his own dense, sometimes confusing style and a direct translation, while accurate, can still be genuinely hard to follow if you're picking it up cold. That's what this course is for. I'm going to take you through the book and break the whole system down, explaining it step by step, in plain English — the vocabulary he uses, what each of the 33 cards means, how they combine, how to calculate timing his way, and exactly how he laid out and read real spreads for real clients. By the end of this course, you won't just know what the cards "mean" — you'll be able to lay out a full spread, read it the way Etteilla actually taught his own students to read it, and calculate timing the way he did, using his own numerical method. Recommended alongside this course: the English language Petit Etteilla deck and the translated book (preferably the set that also includes large format charts of all of the spreads), available in my shop. Click Enroll / Join to View the Free Overview
