Tarot de Marseille: definition

The Marseille Tarot is the traditional form of Western tarot, based on a specific iconography and a long French and European history. It is one of the great references of symbolic tarot.

It designates a set of decks related by their structure and imagery, rather than a single fixed model: different cardmakers produced versions that share the same visual language.

Its origin goes back to the European tarots of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries; the Marseille name became established because of the importance of the Marseille cardmaking workshops in its diffusion.

It is characterised by a sober, stable iconography, especially in the minor arcana, not illustrated with scenes as in the Rider-Waite-Smith, which favours a more structural and symbolic reading.

In Tarot Nova, the Marseille Tarot serves as the main framework, especially through the twenty-two major arcana and the structured reading methods.

Studying it gives access to a rich tradition and to a particular way of reading the cards: attentive to the image, the structure and the symbol, rather than to the narrative illustration of each situation.

Today it coexists with other great families, like the Rider-Waite-Smith and the Thoth, but it keeps a central place for its sobriety, its long history and its value as a base for the symbolic study of tarot.