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What do folk art, medieval Christian symbolism, and centuries of spiritual reinterpretation have in common? All of them meet in one deck: the Tarot de Marseille.
This is part two of my blog series Decks That Changed Tarot, and if you haven’t read the post on the Visconti-Sforza yet, I’d recommend starting there. The Visconti deck gives us the earliest foundations. But where that deck was lavish, courtly, and elite, the Marseille is something else entirely.
This is tarot in the hands of the people. Woodcut and stencil rather than gold leaf and portrait commissions. It’s the tarot of street corners and back rooms. Of bridge games and whispers. Of everyday Christianity, not esoteric mystery schools. And yet it’s this very ordinariness that gave it staying power.
From Cards for Play to Cards with Power
A Deck of the People
The Tarot de Marseille wasn’t designed for divination. Like the Visconti-Sforza, it started out as a game. But unlike the Visconti deck, the Marseille was mass produced, accessible, and most importantly meant to be played by regular people. It’s a deck rooted in street life, not courtly life. And that makes a huge difference.
Using woodcuts and stencils, cardmakers across France, Switzerland, and northern Italy churned out decks that could be sold in markets and played in pubs. The Marseille Tarot gets its name from the city of Marseille, a major hub for card printing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the design was shared across regions, with versions popping up in places like Lyon, Dijon, and even Geneva. The term “Marseille Tarot” is a bit of a modern umbrella. It refers more to a style than a single original deck.
Christianity in the Marseille Tarot
This wasn’t a mystical tool yet. But it wasn’t secular, either. Christianity was baked into the culture, and that shows up in the cards. The Pope and the Popess (yes, a female pope) are prominent trumps. So are the Lovers, Judgement, Temperance, and the Devil. These cards weren’t seen as spiritual portals. They were familiar, moral, symbolic.
A deck like this could be printed in the thousands and still reflect the worldview of the people who used it. And that worldview was deeply shaped by Christianity. But this was folk Christianity. It was personal, lived, and often mixed with superstition. The kind of religion where the Devil hides in your cellar and the Wheel of Fortune is less a cosmic force and more about whether you win at cards after three pints.
Standardised Structure, Enduring Influence
A Visual Language That Stuck
If you’ve ever used a tarot deck with a Fool, a Magician, and a High Priestess, you’re using a descendant of the Marseille. Even modern decks that don’t follow its exact style still borrow from its structure.
The Marseille deck cemented the 22 trumps in a clear order. It gave us the suit names that most modern tarot decks still use: Cups, Coins, Swords, and Batons. It used Roman numerals, reversible imagery, and a recognisable visual shorthand that made the cards easy to read, even when the printing was a bit wonky.
Some of the figures in the trumps have barely changed since Marseille times. Justice with her scales. The Hanged Man suspended by one foot. The Hermit with a lamp. Death with a scythe. These images aren’t just historical. They’re foundational. They shaped the tarot card meanings we work with today, from Marseille to Rider Waite Smith to modern Marseille tarot decks and beyond.
No Scenic Minors, Just Symbols
Like the Visconti-Sforza, the Marseille tarot cards don’t illustrate the minor arcana with scenes. The Two of Swords is two swords. The Eight of Cups is eight cups. There’s a kind of purity in that. It’s symbolic, not narrative. If you want to read the Marseille tarot, you need to understand numerology, elemental associations, and visual pattern.
That’s part of why so many people find it intimidating. But it also means the Marseille tarot meanings are more open-ended. You’re not being told a story. You’re interpreting a language. And once you learn how to read that language, it’s incredibly powerful.
Mystics, Magicians, and Misattributions
Occultists Who Fell in Love
The Marseille Tarot didn’t begin as a mystical tool, but it didn’t take long before people started reading more into it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers like Éliphas Lévi and Papus began assigning esoteric meaning to the trumps. They tied the cards to the Kabbalah, astrology, and alchemy. They turned what was once a tavern game into a book of mystical symbols.
Lévi saw the Marseille deck as a kind of sacred book. He believed each card held hidden wisdom. And Papus, writing a few decades later, took that idea even further, giving the cards detailed spiritual correspondences and linking them to secret teachings.
From Street to Sacred
This reinterpretation paved the way for the esoteric boom that would come later. The Marseille deck influenced the occult revival that brought us the Rider Waite Smith and the Thoth Tarot, both of which kept Marseille’s structure while layering on their own symbolic systems.
Even today, when people ask how to read Marseille tarot, they’re often stepping into a blend of tradition and innovation. Some stick to the older, minimalist interpretations. Others bring in mysticism. The beauty of the Marseille is that it can hold both.
Gay Marseille and Modern Reimaginings
Queering the Classic
In recent years, the Tarot de Marseille tradition has been revitalised through queer, decolonial, and artistic reinterpretations. The most iconic example is The Gay Marseille Tarot by Charlie Claire Burgess. This deck doesn’t just rework the classic format. It queers it, centring trans, non-binary, and LGBTQIA2S+ identities with bold, celebratory imagery. Clergy figures are gender nonconforming. Lovers appear in polyamorous configurations. Justice is pictured in protest, rooted in queer history and activism.
Burgess has crafted a vibrant, joyful, and sex-positive deck that integrates queer cultural references throughout, from a sapphic pool party under The Moon to the Stonewall Inn as The Tower. As a non-binary creator, they bring lived experience into each card, creating a deck that’s liberatory and deeply personal.
Other Creative Adaptations
Other artists have followed Burgess’s lead by putting inclusive spins on the Marseille system. Decks like the Tarot de Carlotydes and Marshmallow Marseille play with colour, a softer aesthetic, and fluid representations, showing how flexible the Marseille structure can be while respecting its origins.
Living Tradition
These modern Marseille tarot decks extend the tradition. They don’t abandon it. They hold onto the same 78 card structure and archetypes while making space for diversity, critique, and reclamation. They prove that the Marseille is still alive, still speaking, and continually transforming.
A Deck You Might Never Use
I’ve never owned or read with a Marseille deck. I admire it, I respect its place in history, but I’ve never felt called to work with it. That’s part of what makes this deck so interesting to me. It’s not about personal resonance. It’s about influence.
This is the tarot system that shaped the world of tarot as we know it. It influenced occultists, artists, and mystics. It’s the backbone of many modern tarot cards. But even if you’ve never picked it up, it’s shaped the way you read, think, and talk about tarot.
Why the Marseille Tarot Still Matters
The Tarot de Marseille might not be flashy. It doesn’t come with detailed guidebooks or lush illustrations. But it’s one of the most important decks in tarot history. It brought the cards to the people. It made tarot public, portable, playable.
It showed that tarot didn’t have to be elite to be meaningful. That the sacred could be found in woodcut lines and market stalls. That Christian imagery, folk art, and centuries of spiritual reinterpretation could coexist in 78 cards.
This was the deck that set the stage. That created a shared language. That passed through the hands of players, printers, mystics, and now readers like us.
Next in the series: the Etteilla tarot, where the mystical reinterpretation becomes the main event.
