Etteilla and Alexis the Piedmontese
- Heather
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
Who was Etteilla's Alexis from Piedmont?
Etteilla and his Tarot Cahiers
Etteilla, the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738-1791), transformed tarot into an occult science. In the late 18th century, he published four interconnected Cahiers (notebooks) and their Supplements under the shared title Manière de se récréer avec le Jeu de Cartes nommées Tarots, works which became the foundation for modern tarot and cartomancy.
As part of my ongoing project to make Etteilla's complete bibliography accessible to English readers I am currently translating Etteilla's second tarot cahier published in 1785 which seems to have the strongest focus on alchemy out of the four.
Etteilla writes in spiraling, 18th-century French. I'm used to it by now having translated several of his works although it is definitely no simple task! His work is dense and digressive but I feel that his writing deserves meticulous attention for its historical importance and because in my experience with him, I notice that he has the tendency to drop the most profound and important information so subtly in passing and in random footnotes where if you're not paying close attention you're bound to miss these things entirely. Much like my previous blog post about the Unknown Philosopher, a simple footnote that led me down an entire rabbit hole of very important historical significance, the same is true of his footnotes on pages 136-138 in his second cahier, which I want to write about here because I think their importance to tarot history has been underexamined.
The footnotes concern a man Etteilla calls "Alexis le Piémontois." And when I placed the cahier beside a scanned copy of one of the most widely printed books in early modern Europe that goes by exactly that same name, the connections I found definitely do not appear to be subtle or just mere coincidence.
A Name in a Footnote: Alexis called the Piedmontese
Translation:
(1) I avow that it is under this division that I have, in my first studies of this Book, sought to deepen it, aided by the wise advice of a Piedmontese sage (a), very aged, & calling himself grandson of Alexis called the Piedmontese.
The footnote refers to Etteilla seeking to dive deeper into his studies of the Book of Thoth aided by someone who called themself the grandson of Alexis called the Piedmontese. The next footnote then supplies Etteilla's own account of his encounter with this person.
Translation:
(a) Being in Rouen, in 1757, I made the acquaintance of one named Lecomte, Parisian, surnamed the Voyager; & upon his seeing me occupied with French Cartonomancy, he told me that he knew a Man who did as much as I, with large Cards; & upon my testifying to him the greatest desire to see & to speak to this Man, he told me that I could perhaps find him at the Orient, where he had gone to embark. I left the same day for this City; but having looked for him there, I learned that he had gone to Lamballe, where I found him; & judging my curiosity by more than one hundred twenty leagues of road, he satisfied me as much as was in his power, giving me written Notes on the Game of Tarots, which he named Egyptian Book, Notes which are still in my hands. Finally Alexis proposed to me to take me overseas; & upon my not wishing to consent to it, we parted, after eight days of society, &c.
Everything in this passage feels specific and it reads like a memory.
Tarot historians have returned to this story repeatedly, searching for something concrete to anchor it and to identify this important historical figure who apparently taught Etteilla and supplied him with his notes. I believe we may be able to find some answers by examining the book that may be sitting behind this whole story.
The Book That Was Everywhere
In 1555, a book called De' secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese was published in Venice. It became an immediate European phenomenon. By 1557, just two years later, Christophe Plantin had published the first French edition in Antwerp: Les secrets du reverend signeur Alexis Piemontois. Within a decade, English, Latin, German, Spanish, and Polish editions appeared. It was still being reprinted well into the 1790s, continuously in print for over two hundred years, right through Etteilla's lifetime. I am working from the 1557 Plantin first French language edition, and I have been reading it beside Cahier 2.
The book opens with a long preface from "Don Alexis Piemontois", a first-person address to the reader establishing his persona with great care. He presents himself as a man of noble birth who spent forty years wandering the world, never staying more than five months in any one place, gathering secrets from scholars, craftsmen, peasants, and women alike. He was 82 years old when he finally wrote it all down in Milan. He could not in good conscience take these secrets to the grave, he says. They belong to the public.
The wandering sage. The forty years of accumulated secrets gathered from all classes of persons. The decision to share what he knows for the benefit of everyone. This all sounds so familiar because it is so similar to what Etteilla recounts about his own origin story.
"thirty years of study, and soon I could say forty.."
Etteilla, writing about himself in his book the Seven Nuances.
But who was Alexis of Piedmont?
According to the footnote in Cahier 2, the man Etteilla meets and describes as very aged calls himself the grandson of Alexis of Piedmont which means he is claiming descent from a figure who would have to have been born well over two centuries before their meeting. The original Secrets of Alexis was published in 1555. Etteilla's meeting takes place in 1757. Even the most generous genealogy will have trouble bridging that gap.
We also know that "Alexis of Piedmont" was itself a fiction. Girolamo Ruscelli, the Italian scholar who actually compiled the book, later confirmed in his own writings that it had been published "under the fictitious name of Alexis of Piedmont." The wandering 82-year-old was a literary construction. It's possible that Etteilla's Alexis at Lamballe may have been as well or if the story is true, its highly likely that the person Etteilla met with lied about who they were.
How the Story Developed: 1770 to 1785
In order to get a better idea of the timeline and how this story developed I decided to take a look at Etteilla's earlier published works, particularly the one from 1770: Manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes.
What's interesting is that in the 1770 text, Etteilla casts himself in exactly the same role as the Alexis persona: a wandering seeker traveling the countryside for years, meeting all types of people, searching for hidden knowledge. He writes of traveling "four or five hundred leagues of path to see a pretended Diviner or Sorcerer," of having "proven successively all the fatigues, the humiliations, and human miseries," of being "a voyager without fortunes," walking by day "at the mercy of the intemperance of the seasons" and stopping at night "without having shelter to taste rest." He describes his younger self consuming "an innumerable Collection of Secrets, of Receipts and of thoughts that he had thoroughly reassembled," only to find in them "a confused mass of repetitions, of ineptitudes."
It is only after this long wandering that he reaches his turning point where he was counselled to seek out "purer sources (which I am not permitted to indicate)." Someone, unnameable, with no identifying details tells him: "seek the key, you will find what you desire, and you will furthermore encounter there the universal Medicine." The sources stay deliberately hidden.
Compare that to Cahier 2, fifteen years later, where he recounts a story that has more exact particulars: the year 1757, the city of Rouen, the intermediary Lecomte, the name Alexis of Piedmont, the specific town of Lamballe, the eight days together, the notes still in Etteilla's hands, the younger seeker who finds the wandering sage just in time, receives the knowledge, and carries it forward.
There is also something worth noting in that earlier phrase: "an innumerable Collection of Secrets, of Receipts and of thoughts." This refers to exactly the kind of practical compendium that the Secrets of Alexis exemplified: collections of recipes, remedies, alchemical procedures, and household arts organized under the umbrella concept of hidden knowledge made practical. To say you had read through an innumerable collection of secrets in your youth is like to say that you had read books just like the one that bore the name you would perhaps later give your mysterious teacher.
But the Connection Seems to Be Even Deeper Than the Name
If it were only the borrowed name and the echo of the narrative, this would still be interesting but would be a much smaller curiosity. What makes it harder to dismiss is that the Secrets of Alexis is not purely a book of household tips and cosmetic recipes. Book VI seems to be entirely alchemical: mercury sublimation, the separation of the pure from the impure, the same authorities Etteilla himself cites — Geber, Saint Thomas... The Book of Secrets happens to be, in its final and most ambitious section, in the same kind of alchemical world that Cahier 2 and the Seven Nuances are immersed in with a lot of the same language and references. Whether this is all just coincidence I will leave to you.
Conclusion. What I Think Is Going On
I do not think that Etteilla literally met the grandson of Alexis of Piedmont (or Girolamo Ruscelli) in Bretagne in 1757. What I think is that Etteilla was almost certainly deeply familiar with the Secrets of Alexis, as it had been in continuous print for two centuries and was still widely available in the 1770s and 80s. When he came to construct the founding origin story of his tarot system, I believe he reached for the most famous name in the tradition of popular practical wisdom and planted it at the origin of his own lineage and I feel like it was not just mere name dropping, that it's also an intellectual claim because by connecting himself to "Alexis of Piedmont," it is as though Etteilla is asserting that tarot divination/the Book of Thoth belongs to the same tradition as the Book of Secrets. Both encode knowledge of the hidden workings of nature.
Throughout Cahier 2 alchemy seems to form an important part of the theoretical framework within Etteilla's tarot system. The tarot, for Etteilla, is connected to the same hidden structure of nature that alchemists work with. The Egyptian Book and the Book of Secrets were both transmitted through wandering sages who trusted only tested experience and both deserve to be shared with ordinary people rather than kept in academies and guilds.
Ruscelli published his secrets over the objections of a tradition that kept such knowledge in learned circles, addressing himself to ordinary householders and craftsmen. Etteilla, two centuries later, published his tarot system in affordable cahiers for the same audience.
Of course there's also the possibilty that Etteilla really did meet someone who claimed to be the grandson of Alexis le Piémontois. Even if the story they told him wasn't entirely true, it recalls the tradition of the wandering sage who gathers secret knowledge and shares it, a tradition that runs from Italy in 1555 to France in 1785 in different forms but with the same conviction: that the universe contains hidden knowledge, that it can be learned, and that it is worth sharing with everyone.
It is my sincere hope that this post will inspire further discussion and research. Please comment below and let me know your thoughts! and please check out my translation of Etteilla"s Egyptian Cartonomancy First Tarot Cahier & Supplement on Amazon with Cahier 2 and the rest forthcoming!
and please come join my free Etteilla Study Group on Facebook a space to learn, research, and deepen your understanding of the grandfather of modern cartonomancy.
