Jul 21
Celebrating my website’s tenth anniversary: 174 blog articles and 42 website pages on tarot history, reading with non-scenic pips, and decks of historic significance. Throughout the summer, I’m going to group the most useful articles by topic and send out links in a series of blog posts.
Today, I’m listing my reviews of the essential books on reading with the Tarot de Marseille.
Celebrating my website’s tenth anniversary: 174 blog articles and 42 website pages on tarot history, reading with non-scenic pips, and decks of historic significance. Throughout the summer, I’m going to group the most useful articles by topic and send out links in a series of blog posts.
We’ll start the series with tips to get you started reading cards with non-scenic pips.
If you’re new to reading with the Tarot de Marseille and other non-scenic pip decks (NSPs), if you feel intimidated, don’t know where to start, or would like some structure to your studies – there’s an entire section of this website just for you. Rather than spoon-feeding you card meanings, I’ve created a structured set of exercises in the Cartomancy Section to help you develop a personal relationship with the cards and devise card meanings relevant to your deck.
Below are some articles to inspire your daily tarot practice.
The Tarot: A Strange and Wondrous Thing by Annette Wakulenko will give you a solid foundation for reading cards with the Tarot de Marseille (TdM). The card meanings, spreads and exercises in this book are the result of the author’s many years of devoted study. The author’s mission is to introduce tarot readers to the TdM and show a method for interpreting the cards, especially the pips, that does not rely on the Golden Dawn system. The book is written in a conversational style that feels like receiving one-on-one mentoring from an experienced teacher. Read more
A square Tarot de Marseille with cards that can be turned in any direction! Pips arranged in triads according to a system described by the French occultist Papus. This radically unique deck will spark your intuition and give you a solid system for interpreting the pips. The sixty-page booklet that comes with the deck gives you everything you need to read with it. It’s great fun playing with the possibilities in these cards, which can only be obtained directly from the creator at http://www.ArcanaPress.net. Let’s look at each component of the deck in detail. Read more
This book is destined to become a classic, along with books on the same topic by the likes of Jodorowsky and Ben Dov (to whom the book is dedicated). Three kinds of people need this book:
At the bottom of an old carton, I recently found a file folder stuffed with divinatory meanings (DMs) for the Tarot de Marseille (TdM) pip cards. When I began reading with historic decks about 20 years ago, I bought European TdM books, snapped up English language books when they became available, and downloaded lists of card meanings online. Then I took copious notes and made charts comparing various authors’ meanings.
I pulled the 4 of Swords out of a deck at random and listed the DMs for that card given by the eleven authors in my folder: Read more
Things have certainly changed since I began reading with the TdM around the turn of the millennium. Back then there were no books in English on the subject; so I spent a fortune on shipping for a small collection of books in French. Since then there have been almost no other basic TdM books in English. I recently found three books that show the tide is turning. Read more
Lately I’ve been doing readings with just two cards. I don’t read the cards one-two, past-present, cause-effect. I read the space between them: the field of energy, the tension, the interaction. I ask what must happen for one card to turn into the other, or for one card to reach out to the other and transform it?
A few weeks ago I asked Lo Scarabeo’s Ancient Italian deck what I can do to kick off a summer of creative and artistic experimentation. I got the Star and Nine of Cups: waters of heavenly inspiration cascading through the levels of cups. But the Nine of Cups has a sterile, conformist feel, like rows of soldiers or synchronized dancers. Something stale and dry is being watered. The cards resemble the fountain in my living room where water cascades down several vertical levels of copper flowers. Read more
Here’s a technique for getting a quick answer to a question. It’s especially useful if you want to know whether the universe, or Dame Fortune, supports your plans.
Designate a significator for the question. Keep it in mind, but don’t pull it out of the deck. Shuffle the deck while focusing on your question. Look through the deck for the significator and take it out along with the cards on either side of it. Line the cards up and look at how well the flanking cards support the significator. Read more
Most of the questions we put to Tarot have the same basic structure: Subject-Object-Verb; or Querant-Question-Bridge. There’s the person asking the question, what the question is about, and what’s going on between them. We can use these three components as spread positions for a made-to-order layout that works well with the Tarot de Marseille.
For example:
Will I win the lottery next week? There’s me, the lottery, and what’s possible between us. Read more
Tarot Heritage 