Amazon.com description: Product Description: S. L. MacGregor Mathers, born as Samuel Liddell in January, 1854. He is one of the most influential figures in modern Occultism and is primarily known as one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He died in November, 1918. The idea that cards were first “invented” to amuse Charles VI of France is now exploded; and it is worthy of note in this connection that their supposititious “inventor” was Jacques Gringonneur, an Astrologer and Qabalist. Furthermore, cards were known prior to this period among the Indians and the Chinese. Etteilla, indeed, gives in one of his tracts on the Tarot a representation of the mystical arrangement of these cards in the Temple of Ptah at Memphis, and he further says: “Upon a table or altar, at the height of the breast of the Egyptian Magus (or Hierophant), were on one side a book or assemblage of cards or plates of gold (the Tarot), and on the other a vase, etc.” This idea is further dilated upon by P. Christian (the disciple of Eliphas Lévi), in his “Histoire de la Magie,” to which I shall have occasion to refer later. The great exponents of the Tarot, Court de Gèbelin, Lévi, and Etteilla, have always assigned to the Tarot a Qabalistico-Egyptian origin, and this I have found confirmed in my own researches into this subject, which have extended over several years.