← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 115/121
The Tarot de Marseille
The Tarot de Marseille is a pattern of tarot deck rather than a single deck: a family of closely related designs that card-makers in France, Switzerland and northern Italy printed from woodblocks for some two centuries. Its trumps and court cards are bold, simple figures in a few strong colours; its numbered cards show only their suit signs, arranged in patterns. It was the deck the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century occultists studied, one of the models for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck of 1909, and it is still the deck of choice for many readers in France and beyond.
Where it came from
Tarot began as a card game. The earliest surviving decks were painted for the courts of northern Italy in the fifteenth century, with an extra suit of picture cards — the trumps, later called the Major Arcana — added to the four ordinary suits. The pattern later called "de Marseille" probably came into France from Milan after the French took the city in 1499; tarot cards were being made in Lyon by the early sixteenth century. The oldest complete decks of the pattern that survive date from the seventeenth century, such as the deck of Jean Noblet of Paris from around 1650; Jean Dodal of Lyon printed another in the early eighteenth century, and the deck of Nicolas Conver of Marseille, from 1760, became the model for most later editions. The name describes a style, not an address: the city was simply one of the great centres of card-making, and the label became common only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — above all through the "Ancien Tarot de Marseille" that the Paris firm Grimaud issued in 1930, edited by Paul Marteau. In the 1990s Alejandro Jodorowsky and Philippe Camoin, of the family that inherited Conver's business, published a much-discussed restoration.
The game of tarot is still played in France with a different, French-suited deck. The divinatory and esoteric uses came later, from the 1780s on.
What the cards look like
The trumps carry Roman numerals and French names, several of which differ from the English names used elsewhere in this encyclopedia: le Bateleur (the street performer — The Magician), la Papesse (The High Priestess), le Pape (The Hierophant), l'Amoureux (one lover, between two women — The Lovers), la Maison Dieu (The Tower) and le Mat (The Fool), who usually carries no number at all. Card XIII has a number but, on most decks, no name; it is the card English decks call Death. Justice is VIII and Strength XI — the order that the Golden Dawn later reversed.
The suits are Bâtons (batons), Coupes (cups), Épées (swords) and Deniers (coins), the Latin suits of the old Italian and Spanish cards, and the courts are the Valet, Cavalier, Reine and Roi. The numbered cards — the pips — are where the deck differs most from the 1909 one. A Marseille Seven of Cups is seven cups among stylised flowers; the swords and batons interlace in curving bands. There is no scene to tell you what the card means.
How it is read
Marseille readers do not see that as a gap. A pip is read from its suit, its number and its arrangement: whether the pattern feels open or crowded, balanced or strained, whether the flowers grow freely or are hemmed in. The approach is closer to reading a language than to looking at a picture, and it leaves a card more room to mean different things in different spreads. Some readers also read a whole spread as one scene, following which way the figures on the trumps are looking. Marseille readers disagree among themselves about method, and about which historical deck is the truest model; an honest account has to say so.
In the tradition
When Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed in 1781 that the tarot was an ancient Egyptian book, it was a Marseille-pattern deck he was describing. That story is a legend: the trumps are Renaissance Italian images — virtues, popes, emperors, a wheel of fortune — and nothing links them to Egypt. Etteilla redesigned the deck in 1789 to "restore" its supposed Egyptian form, and Éliphas Lévi in the 1850s tied its trumps to the Hebrew letters, beginning with the Bateleur. French esoteric readers such as Papus and Oswald Wirth built on Lévi, which is why their letter and planet correspondences differ from the Golden Dawn's.