Mystical systems
Tarot de Marseille
Direct answer
Tarot de Marseille: The Tarot de Marseille is the traditional woodcut pattern of tarot cards printed in France and Switzerland from the seventeenth century, with unillustrated suit cards.
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At a glance
- Also called
- marseille tarot, tarot of marseilles, conver tarot
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Tarot, Major Arcana, Minor Arcana, Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot
The Tarot de Marseille is the traditional woodcut pattern of tarot cards printed in France and Switzerland from the seventeenth century, with unillustrated suit cards.
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What is the Tarot de Marseille?
Tarot de Marseille is the name for a standard design of tarot deck that French card makers printed from woodblocks and coloured by stencil. It has the usual seventy-eight cards. The twenty-two trumps carry French titles and Roman numerals, and the numbered suit cards show only their signs: seven cups, nine batons, laid out in a pattern with a little foliage.
Tarot de Marseille was first a pack for playing the game of tarot. When Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote in 1781 that the tarot held Egyptian teaching, the cards in front of him were of this pattern, so the whole occult reading of the tarot began from it. In France, Italy and Spain it is still the deck many readers prefer.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Tarot, runes, I Ching.
What sets Tarot de Marseille apart
The Marseille pattern is a craftsman's design, repeated with small changes by dozens of workshops over three centuries. Lines were cut in wood, and a handful of flat colours were dabbed on through stencils. Its trumps have a fixed look: the Popess, the House of God in place of the Tower, a thirteenth card with a skeleton and often no name, a Fool with no number. The numbered cards of swords and batons are interlaced bands that have to be counted, a point where the pack still shows it was built for play.
- Earliest known decks: Jean Noblet, Paris, about 1650; Jean Dodal, Lyon, about 1701
- Model version: Nicolas Conver, Marseille, 1760
- Suits: cups, coins, swords and batons
- Suit cards: suit signs only, with no scenes or figures on the numbered cards
- Name fixed: by Paul Marteau, who issued the Ancien Tarot de Marseille in 1930
Often mistaken for something else: The Visconti-Sforza cards are hand-painted luxury tarots made for the dukes of Milan in the fifteenth century; the Marseille pattern is the cheap printed standard that ordinary players bought.
The story behind Tarot de Marseille
The pattern is thought to descend from cards made in Milan and carried into France around 1500. The oldest surviving decks of the type include one by Jean Noblet of Paris, about 1650, and one by Jean Dodal of Lyon, about 1701. Nicolas Conver cut his blocks at Marseille in 1760, and his became the model version. The name itself is modern: Paul Marteau of the firm Grimaud issued his Ancien Tarot de Marseille in 1930 and wrote a book on it in 1949.
Why Tarot de Marseille matters
Tarot de Marseille is the form of the tarot that the eighteenth-century occultists actually saw, and it shows how the cards looked before the scenes of 1909 were added.
How to read Tarot de Marseille
Readers who work with it lean on number, suit and the direction in which the trump figures face, and many lay only the twenty-two trumps.
Tarot de Marseille in practice: an example
Faced with the Six of Swords in this deck, a reader has no boat or figures to describe, and works from the number six and the suit instead.
Where readings of Tarot de Marseille go wrong
The deck is a printing tradition of card makers. No evidence links its designs to Egypt, to the Cathars or to any hidden school.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- marseille tarot, tarot of marseilles, marseille deck meaning, tarot de marseille cards, conver tarot
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is the Tarot de Marseille?
It is the traditional French pattern of tarot cards, printed from woodcuts since at least the middle of the seventeenth century. Its suit cards are plain arrangements of cups, coins, swords and batons.
Was the Tarot de Marseille made in Marseille?
Some of it was, and Marseille was an important centre of card making in the eighteenth century. The pattern is older than that, and early examples come from Paris and Lyon. The name was fixed in the twentieth century.
How does the Marseille tarot differ from the Rider-Waite-Smith?
The Marseille suit cards have no scenes, Justice is numbered eight and Strength eleven, and the thirteenth trump usually carries no title. The 1909 deck illustrates every card and swaps those two numbers.
