Tarot of Marseille

Origin

The earliest surviving cards in the Marseille style date from the late 15th century, but the form took its definitive shape in the 17th century in workshops in Marseille, Lyon, and Avignon, as well as in Milan and Bologna. The name "Tarot of Marseille" was popularised in the 1860s by the occultist Paul Marteau, but the design existed long before. Marseille became a centre of tarot production because of its position on Mediterranean trade routes and its tradition of woodblock printing. By the early 18th century, decks bearing the Marseille pattern were exported across Catholic Europe.

The most influential single edition is the Tarot of Nicolas Conver, printed in Marseille in 1760. Conver's deck became the canonical reference for what the "Tarot of Marseille" looks like: titles in French, gothic-numeral majors (with VIII Justice and XI La Force, opposite to the later Rider-Waite ordering), block-printed line work hand-coloured through stencils. Other historically important Marseille editions include those of Jean Dodal (Lyon, c. 1701) and Jean-Baptiste Madenie (Dijon, c. 1709). Modern facsimile editions by Yves Reynaud, Camoin, and Jodorowsky-Camoin reconstruct the line and colour of these early decks.

What makes it distinctive

The Marseille deck differs from the Rider-Waite in two principal ways. First, its pip cards (Ace through Ten of each suit) bear no scenic illustration: the Five of Wands, for instance, simply shows five batons crossed in a heraldic pattern, with no human figure. The reader interprets by suit, number, and the postures and accents in the symmetrical design itself. This forces a more abstract, structural reading and rewards study of numerology and elemental theory.

Second, the Marseille Major Arcana have a different visual key. The Fool is wandering with a stick over his shoulder and his belongings in a sack, accompanied by an animal that bites his leg or torn breeches. The Lovers card depicts a young man between two women, often with a cupid above. The Hanged Man, called "Le Pendu" in Marseille, hangs by one foot from a wooden frame and his expression is calmly meditative rather than ecstatic. These differences from the modern Smith iconography matter because they are the original images and they encode meanings that pre-date 19th-century occultism.

In practice

Marseille reading is a discipline of its own, taught in modern times by figures like Alejandro Jodorowsky (whose 2004 book The Way of Tarot revived interest), Philippe Camoin, Enrique Enriquez, and Camelia Elias. Marseille readers tend to use shorter spreads, often three or five cards, and to pay close attention to the directions in which figures look, the colours of clothing and emblems, and the way figures on adjacent cards relate to each other. Court cards facing into the spread "look at" the following cards; those facing out look away.

For pip cards, Marseille readers rely on suit and number rather than memorised meanings. A Five of Swords is simply "the five of Swords" and is read as the elemental crisis of mind. This is harder to learn than Smith's scenic Minors but more flexible once mastered. Apps like Marseille Tarot Answers reproduce the deck digitally and teach its conventions. Marseille decks also work especially well for short questions and for the three-card spread.

Symbolic depth

The Tarot of Marseille is the historical anchor of every modern tarot tradition. When 19th-century French occultists such as Antoine Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, and Eliphas Levi began to construct esoteric interpretations of tarot, the Marseille was the deck they had in front of them. When the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn revised the tarot in the 1880s, they revised the Marseille. When Waite and Smith made the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1909, they were translating the Marseille into Christian-Hermetic narrative. Every later deck either reverberates with or reacts against the Marseille pattern.

The line and colour of the Marseille pattern carry their own teaching. The four traditional Marseille colours, red, blue, yellow, and flesh-pink, are arranged with chromatic logic: yellow for the divine, blue for water and feeling, red for fire and will, flesh for incarnation. The block-printed line, often slightly imperfect, gives the figures a folk-art quality that anchors them in the medieval and Renaissance Catholic imagination from which they emerged. To read the Marseille is to read tarot in its earliest extant form. Visit the glossary for individual Major Arcana entries and the tarot hub for Marseille reading tutorials.

Also known as

• Tarot de Marseille
• Marseille Pattern
• Conver Tarot
• TdM
• Classical Tarot