Professor Sir Michael Dummett

Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett was born on June 27 1925, and has died at age 86. "He was among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." And in his spare time, "he argued that in the Middle Ages the Tarot was used as a set of playing cards and that it only acquired its association with the occult in the 18th century."

For that latter bit we may add to his titles, Troublemaker.

A sober appraisal of Lévi's works on magic could characterise them only as the product of an advanced state of intellectual deliquescence. Nevertheless, he initiated a boom in occultist writing, and almost all his successors acknowledged their debt to him, and may be said to have belonged to his school.
(Dummett, The Game of Tarot, 120.

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Quotes:
[...] the most interesting fact about the Tarot pack, namely that it is the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched: not by a long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed.
(A Wicked Pack of Cards, p.27.)

It is from Lévi's work, above all from the Dogme et rituel, that the whole of the modern occultist movement stems. At first glance, Lévi's success is bewildering: his style is bombastic, the intellectual content is thin, the factual information is inaccurate, and the claims advanced range from the unintelligible through the obscure to the frankly puerile. [...]
It may well be wondered how such preposterous nonsense ever attracted attention at all.
(The Game of Tarot, p.114.)