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Posts tagged ‘Tarot de Marseille’

Mar 25

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Chosson and Madenié Tarot de Marseille Facsimiles

U.S. Games, Inc. has just made it easier for North Americans to purchase the exquisite Chosson and Madenié Tarot de Marseille decks produced in France by Yves Reynaud and Wilfried Houdouin. The duo obtained access to decks that have been hidden away in European museums for two and a half centuries, and created 3,000 facsimile copies of two very significant TdMs. U.S. Games has acquired 1,000 copies of each deck to resell. If these decks are supported by the tarot community, they plan to produce several more.

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Mar 12

Heron Tarot de marseille booklet
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The Wacky World of the Heron LWB

The other day, I read the booklet that comes with the Tarot de Marseille published in France by Heron hoping to find some traditional card interpretations. Instead, I found myself in a topsy-turvy world where the Star card means death, the Death card indicates marriage, and Temperance can predict disasters of a sexual or marital nature. (Temperance with the Ace of Batons means an illegitimate child, and reversed Temperance means a man will kidnap a married woman.)

The card meanings are evidently derived from a traditional cartomancy system where fortune tellers aren’t squeamish about predicting death (Star and Ace of Cups). According to the LWB, if the Five of Swords with reversed Emperor turns up in your spread, a relative will drown. The Star next to the Ace of Batons means the death of a child, and the Star and World together predict the death of a beloved pet. Read more

Mar 5

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Franco Pratesi’s Collected Articles

Tarocchi, trionfi and carte, oh, my! Playing card historian Franco Pratesi has put up a chronological list of links to all 313 of his articles on tarot and playing card history. The only other way to get access to these articles, written between 1986 and 2013, is to subscribe to several rather obscure journals.

Of special interest to my fellow tarot history nerds: Read more

Feb 25

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Tarot: The Open Reading by Yoav Ben-Dov

For years, English-speaking Tarot de Marseille readers have been complaining about the lack of books in English. Well, the book we’ve all been waiting for has arrived! Ben-Dov’s book has everything one could ask for in a comprehensive how-to manual: history, card meanings, symbolism, tips for conducting a reading session, and examples of spread interpretations. Read more

Feb 21

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Reading the Tarot de Marseilles Suit Cards

One of the biggest hurdles for students of the Tarot de Marseilles is learning to read the suit cards fluently without memorizing a bunch of keywords. I’ve come up with some techniques that ensure you get lots of suit cards to practice with. In fact, I enjoy these techniques so much, they’ve become my favorite spreads.

In my reading style, the suits are the meat and potatoes of the reading. They tell you what’s going to happen, how it’s going to feel, and who’s involved. The trump card derived from the sum of the suit cards is the background situation, the underlying tone of the spread, the lesson, or the archetypal energy working behind the scenes. Read more

Oct 13

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Reading a Trump-Suit Combo with the Tarot de Marseilles

My favorite card-of-the-day draw involves shuffling the trumps and suit cards separately, then pulling a card at random from each stack. I like to flip the two cards over simultaneously so they hit my retina at the same time, setting up resonance between them.

Suit cards describe the details and address specifics. The trumps are like a color filter or a pinch of herbs – they bring out certain qualities of the suit card without altering its core meaning. Here’s an example from my tarot journal of several entries for one suit card in combination with different trumps. Read more

Oct 10

Card of the Day Practice

The best way to develop a personal relationship with a deck is to give yourself a short reading every day and record it in a tarot journal.

I like to do my reading first thing in the morning using two or three cards. I jot down a few notes in my journal about the cards’ meaning and how it relates to my life. Then in the evening, I review the spread to see how it actually played out during my day. Sometimes I’m surprised at how well the cards described an incident that happened.

A while back I pulled the 7 of Swords on the day of a dental appointment. I couldn’t help but see the vertical sword as a drill! Read more

Oct 10

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Setting up a Tarot Journal

My journal is a three-ring binder with a page for each card. Sometimes I wish I’d started my journal on a computer so I could do searches, but my mind works better when I’m holding a pen; and after more than a decade, I’m stuck with my current system. The advantage to organizing your journal by cards rather than chronologically is being able to see clusters of associations around each card. Sometimes a card will give you surprising insights, and sometimes the patterns that emerge over time will validate what you thought the card meant all along. Read more

Oct 3

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Tarot Waiting to Happen

We know the Tarot de Marseilles is established in the English-speaking world when North Americans start doing send-ups of the deck. Andrew McGregor’s sly and witty Tarot Waiting to Happen shows us what the figures in the twenty-two trumps were doing just before they were frozen in time as tarot images.

I laughed the most at the sight of the Emperor in his bedroom putting on his robe and crown. Unfortunately, I identified the most with the Devil tethered between a tray of cocktails and a huge cake. The cake appeared again as bait in the Hanged Man’s snare. Then there’s the Lover, slumped on a bar stool, a mug of beer at his elbow.

The black and white line drawings are spontaneous and lively. Titles are in French with Justice and Strength switched back to their original TdM positions.

The cards are 2.5 x 4.0 inches, lightly laminated, and packaged in a sturdy cotton twill pouch. The cost is $40 including shipping in the US and Canada. There are only 200 copies, so this deck is going to be a collector’s item.

See the entire deck and get purchasing information at TheHermit’s Lamp

 

Sep 15

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The Way of Tarot by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa

This is one of the most significant books in English on the Tarot de Marseilles. Jodorowsky is a Chilean surrealist filmmaker, therapist and tarot reader based in Paris who uses the Tarot de Marseilles exclusively. His background and tarot experience couldn’t be more different from mine, but I feel he’s a kindred spirit. Jodorowsky’s approach to tarot, which I heartily endorse, rests on the following principles:

  •  He does not apply external systems like Kabbalah or astrology to tarot. He uses the structure of the deck itself to discover its meaning. (He mentions Kabbalistic correspondences in some of  his card descriptions, but they don’t have much influence on his card meanings).
  • He uses tarot for counseling and psychological healing; does not use tarot to predict the future.
  • He does not confine the cards to fixed meanings, but reads intuitively by closely examining the card images and their interactions while in a trance-like state. Read more
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