My year-long adventure with the Tarot de Marseille has been a bit rocky. There have been lots of stops and starts, as I’ve tried one thing, realized it wasn’t working for me, gone back to my starting point, tried something new, encountered another obstacle, and started over again. And again. I’m really trying to feel out a personal relationship with the Tarot that doesn’t draw uncritically on things I’d learned about Tarot in the past, rebuilding my understanding of the deck from the ground up in ways that might leave out cornerstones of established Tarot tradition.*

Now, eleven months into a year-long journey, I’m finally starting to feel like I’m hitting my stride with the TdM. I can pull cards and have a good sense of what they’re communicating, although I still struggle to drill down into specifics (more on that later). My understanding of the deck and my interpretive process takes a few core principles—some of which go back to my earlier exploration of the deck at the start of the year, and some of which I picked up in later attempts as I explored other avenues. I thought it would be nice to bring all of those together here, in one relatively concise post on “Jack’s method for reading the Tarot de Marseille”.

Significance of the Suits

I’ve ended up falling back on the basic division of the suits that I used at the start of this project:

• Bâtons represent action
• Coupes represent welfare
• Deniers represent resources
• Épées represent strife

I really, really like this interpretation of the suits, and I’ve been getting good results with using it in readings. It also helps to set the tone for a reading right away: A reading dominated by Coupes is going to have a positive tone overall, while a reading with a preponderance of Bâtons is going to demand that the querent get off their ass and do something about the situation in question.

Significance of the Numbers

This was one of my early tangles. Initially, I wanted to have a set meaning (or range of meanings) for each card, so I tried to derive numerological values for each of the pips and then combine those values with suit meanings to get card-specific interpretations. This ended up being a dead end. It felt too procedural, too rote and mechanical, and I found I wasn’t really interested in using the meanings I had produced. It was, perhaps, and interesting intellectual exercise, but not all that useful for actually reading the cards.

Increasingly, my approach to the numbers is one described by Camelia Elias: Rather than having fixed numerological meanings, the pips are read as relative quantities judged by other numbers in the reading. Low numbers mean a little bit of something, high numbers mean a lot of something. Going from a lower number to a higher number (e.g. in reading from left to right) means increasing or intensifying, while going from a higher number to a lower one means decreasing or diluting.

In this way, the Seven of Épées has no definite meaning of its own (other than Épées signifying conflict or strife). Its meaning is context-dependent and relative to other cards in the spread. If it shows up next to the Four of Épées, it means that a problem is getting worse; if, on the other hand, it shows up next to the Ten, then the problem is reducing and getting better.

This approach is intuitively easy to grasp and straightforward to apply in a reading. It even works well with mixed suits; the Seven of Épées alongside the Six of Bâtons says that the querent is taking action, but isn’t doing quite enough to overcome the obstacles they face. I’ve found this the most direct and least complicated way to approach reading the suits when using TdM.

The Face Cards

After a lot of testing and tinkering, my approach to the face cards is once again more or less what I started out with. I think that the face cards represent people, and their involvement in a situation is largely determined by their rank and their suit. As far as rank goes:

• Rois are authorities and people in power
• Reines are unseen influences
• Cavaliers are directly involved
• Valets are subordinates or messengers

For suit, it’s more or less the same as the significance of the suits generally. Coupes are working in the querent’s favor, while Épées are working against it. Both Bâtons and Deniers are neither positive nor negative, but depend on the context. Deniers act out of a sense of quid pro quo, and Bâtons have their own agenda that’s unrelated to the querent but may still affect the querent’s goals.

Again, this feels like a pretty broad, intuitive, bird’s-eye view of the face cards. Reading them in this way answers three basic questions: Are other people involved in this situation? How directly do their actions affect the outcome? And how do their goals align with the querent’s?

Cards Are Never Read in Isolation

One of my biggest takeaways here is that no card can be read on its own, because cards really don’t have standalone meanings; they have contextual meanings affected by other cards in a spread. Because of this, something like a one-card daily draw simply does not work for TdM readings (at least not the way I’ve been doing them). I need at a minimum three cards to get a sense of a reading, and often I’ll do five instead.

Freeform(ish) Spreads

Because cards don’t have individual meanings, it doesn’t make sense to assign specific meanings to card positions in a spread. A spread like the Celtic Cross assigns a unique meaning to each position in the layout, but if you can’t read cards in isolation, that doesn’t work very well.

That said, I’m not one to just throw down a dozen cards and mix and match them at random. I do like some general structural principles for Tarot reading. These are principles I’ve used for a long time, and I actually talk about them in Tarot for Real Life, but I’ve found that they work really well for TdM reading, so I keep them on. There are three basic axes of interpretation: Left to right, top to bottom, and center to periphery.

• Left to Right: This is, broadly speaking, a temporal flow of past to future. I tend to see temporal development happening in a line from left to right, so that things further to the left are more in the past and things closer to the right are more in the future.
• Top to Bottom: This is a measure of depth. Things closer to the bottom of a spread visually are likely to represent root causes, while things on the top are the most visible and obvious analysis of a situation.
• Center to Periphery: This is, well, a measure of centrality. Or importance, if you prefer. Things closest to the center physically are also likely to be more central thematically, while cards on the periphery are less key in understanding what’s going on in a reading.

Using these principles, one of my favorite layouts with the TdM is a nine-card grid (although often I’ll really focus on the five cards forming the central cross, unless something in the corner cards really leaps out to me).

Putting It All Together: A Sample Reading

There you have it. That’s Jack’s quick and dirty rundown on how I’ve come to use TdM. Let’s put it into action with a sample reading. Because I am still in the process of trying to find a job, let’s do a reading about my career. What do my job prospects look like currently?

The first thing I notice is that nasty Ten of Épées that’s at the center of the top row. It’s dark and tangled, and visually dominant in the reading. This suggests some kind of conflict, struggle, or obstacle; no surprises there, as I’ve been applying to jobs for the past four months and still have not found employment. It’s a source of stress and anxiety for me. However, the second thing I notice is that this is the only Épée in the reading, and it’s up top and the surface level of things. Looking a bit deeper beneath that card, we se the Eight and Six of Coupes. These are cards of well-being and health. Individually, neither of them outweighs the anxiety of the Ten of Épées, but when we see them all stacked together in a column like that, the fourteen cups are more than enough to drown out ten swords. In short, things are anxious and feel insecure right now, but really everything is fine.

The Nine of Pentacles is a welcome sight, but because it’s on the left-hand side of the reading, it doesn’t seem to indicate a job offer in the immediate future. Likely it refers more to the existing resources I have (and have had) through my graduate institution, which have put me in a good position to tackle what comes next. However, I do notice the Valet de Deniers in the top right hand corner; I can reasonably expect that someone will contact me fairly soon with news about work. Looking a bit deeper, we see the Roi de Bâtons: This is a potential boss, someone in a position of authority who isn’t necessarily my ally, but certainly isn’t my enemy either. Looking even deeper than that, we see what the Roi’s motivation is: The Sun. He’s looking for someone who can bring clarity and illumination to his workplace, and whether I move forward with him depends on how well I can convince him that I’ll do that.

The reading doesn’t promise a job coming out of that conversation; it just promises the conversation. I’m tempted to draw more cards to try and press deeper into the future, but I get the sense that there’s a genuine point of flux around that conversation; I can’t look further ahead than that, because the outcome depends so much on choices that I make when talking to the Roi de Bâtons. Ultimately, the Sun sits at the base of my future prospects with him, and that’s what I need to focus on for the near future.

There are a couple of other things in this spread that might be potentially noteworthy (Judgment almost certainly refers to my recent dissertation defense), but for the most part I think this interpretation covers what needs to be said. Hopefully it gives you a sense of how I’ve taken to applying these basic principles of reading for my work with the TdM

Overview, Takeaways, and Next Steps

On the whole, I feel really good about how this approach to Marseille reading has been going for me. It really feels like it’s clicking, and I can look at a nine-card reading like the one above and immediately have a clear sense of what it’s trying to communicate, which pieces of information are the most important, and how they connect together.

One thing I’m not yet wholly confident with is getting concrete details out of a reading. The sample reading we did here was a lucky case, because it feels very clear who the Valet de Deniers is and how he connects to the Roi de Bâtons. Sometimes, though, I’m left in a position where I have to say something like “It’s clear that there’s a problem or obstacle here, but I have no idea what that problem is.” And that’s frustrating—especially given how extraordinarily specific I’m accustomed to being when I read with the Thoth deck. I think getting there is mostly just going to be a matter of practice and time, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

I’m still not comfortable enough with TdM that I’m willing to use it for client readings; when there’s money on the line and people are paying me for my services, I want to do what I know I’m good at so that they get the experience they’re paying for. But at least in my own divination, I’m getting more and more comfortable with TdM, and I’m finally at a place where I’m willing to reach for this deck rather than another one when I have an open question that I genuinely want answers to.

As far as my next steps go, I think really the only thing left to do is practice. And practice. And practice. You’ll probably see some of that on the blog here, but as we slide into 2024 I will officially bring the “Year of Tarot de Marseille” to a close. I’ll probably end up with another year-long project for 2024, because that’s become a habit by this point, but I don’t yet have a sense of what it will be.

Thanks for sticking with me over the course of this year. It’s been rewarding, and I’ve enjoyed being able to share it with all of you (and holding myself accountable to it). Until next time.

_______________________________________________

*The most obvious example of such a cornerstone would be the four elements. Any Tarot influenced by the Golden Dawn is going to feature the four elements, usually with the attribution of Pentacles to earth, Swords to air, Cups to water, and Wands to fire. But the explicit goal of my TdM project has been to de-Golden Dawn-ify my Tarot practice, and I’ve left the four elements by the wayside, which, frankly, I’m elated to have done. The elements don’t feature in my broader magical practice, and I’m not sorry to see them go from my divinatory practice as well; I’m increasingly convinced that they don’t add much value anyway.