Tarot de Marseilles
All my life I have been told, and read here and there that the Tarot de Marseilles was the “truest” Tarot. One early teacher even went do far as to say that everything that came after was not really a Tarot but an oracle deck as you lost the original postures and meanings.
Still, I dismissed the Marseilles for flashier decks with more overtly esoteric flavor, and most especially for minor arcana cards with helpful scenes on them.
About a month ago I was telling someone that I felt like Khabbala was the worst thing ever to happen to Tarot, and that I got much more out of the cartomantic interpretations than the Levi/GD derived stuff. I decided to delve into the Tarot de Marseilles and suddenly every other deck I have seems flat by comparison. There is so much “there”, there.
If someone tells you that Tarot is for psychological analysis, contemplation, and big questions while Lenormand and playing cards are for real world stuff, don’t believe them. Those systems are great too, but Tarot does the same thing and can be read the same way.
Though I have been reading playing cards for years, it is only recently that I have been reading Tarot in the same sort of manner. Only now just learning all the little legends and that people apply: the rope around IUSTICE’s collar is the one that LE PENDV hangs by, the woman in LASTOILLE becomes the woman in LE MONDE. etc. All that is less important though than interpretting the image in front of you in a straightforward manner. What direction do they face? What is their relation to other cards? Why are the magicians feet pointing away from one another? It is a very different Tarot than the Waite and GD derived decks.
If you want to dig into Marseilles a lot of people steer you right to Jodorowsky and Yoav Ben-Dov, but thus far I have found that no one speaks more clearly on it than Camelia Elias on her blog Taroflexions. The writings of Enrique Enriquez have also been very illuminating. I am waiting for Castle of Crossed Destinies to show up in my mailbox soon to see what it unlocks, and maybe pick up some tips from translating some Colette Silvestre.
