They firmly believed that sometime in the past all religion had been one and the same, and they were in search of this ancient theological truth. A key piece of the puzzle was contained in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were seen as hiding the most powerful mysteries of all, those that could not be betrayed in ordinary words.
Thus, Tarot more likely belongs to the ‘Hieroglyphomania’ that characterized Renaissance scholars. Yet if some books were written to convey the hidden message of the hieroglyphs (see for instance Athanasius Kircher’s outstanding Hieroglyphica), it was more customary in the period to imitate the hieroglyphs by creating similar mysterious images (11). Thus, an entire art of emblems, painting, statues portraying enigmatic figures arose. Enigmatic images were particularly pervasive in alchemical literature and emblem books. It was in this hieroglyph-crazed environment that the Italian Tarot was either born or grew. Thus it is possible that, whether or not the original Tarot consciously hid esoteric meaning, its roots may have harkened back to a fascination for Egypt. It is furthermore possible that Court de Gebelin, glancing at the enigmatic Tarot images, may have made an intuitive connection between these and the ‘hieroglyphic’ emblems of the 1500s and 1600s centuries.
Therefore, one may conclude that even though the Tarot may not come from Egypt in a historical sense, in the esoteric imagination, it did. The survival of the esoteric Tarot practice is in this sense a proof that recorded history is not as powerful as human imagination.