The other way to read: Marseille and the card with no picture

For eighteen lessons you have been reading cards that tell you a story. Draw the Five of Cups and someone is grieving over spilt cups. Draw the Eight of Pentacles and someone is bent over a workbench. That is the gift of the 1909 deck in these pictures, and it is why this course began with it.

But for most of tarot's history, the numbered cards looked nothing like that. This lesson is about the other way of reading: the one the Tarot de Marseille asks of you, where a Seven of Cups is seven cups and nothing more.

The deck most of history used

The pattern we now call the Tarot de Marseille took shape in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is a record of tarot cards being made in Lyon by 1507, and Marseille became a great centre of card-making, sending decks across Europe. By the eighteenth century the design had settled, and makers in Paris, Switzerland and northern Italy printed it too. So the name describes a style, not an address: a "Marseille" deck may never have been near the city.

This was the deck the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century occultists studied when they built their theories, and one of the main models for the 1909 deck. Its Major Arcana have pictures: bold woodcuts in a few strong colours, some under names you haven't met. The Magician is le Bateleur, the street performer. The High Priestess and the Hierophant are the Papesse and the Pope. Card XIII has a number but no name. The court cards are pictured too.

It is the numbered cards, the Twos to the Tens of each suit, that are different.

What a Marseille pip shows

A Marseille Two to Ten shows the suit symbol repeated as many times as the number, laid out in a geometric pattern and framed with leaves and flowers. Three cups stand in a triangle. Two wands cross in the middle. There is no person, no landscape, no weather.

Wands and Swords can be hard to tell apart at first, because both are drawn as long narrow bands. The wands are straight and cross at the centre of the card. The swords are curved, bending into arches that cross near the top and the bottom, and on the odd-numbered cards a single straight sword runs up through the middle.

Above is the Eight of Swords as Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909: a woman bound and blindfolded, standing in shallow water, fenced in by eight swords planted in the ground, with a castle on the hill behind her. You can hardly miss what it means. She is trapped, though her bindings look loose enough that she may not be.

Now picture the Marseille Eight of Swords. Eight curved blades bend into arches on either side, crossing above and below, and close in on a small flower at the centre, drawn as if seen from above. That is all. No woman, no blindfold, no castle.

Two ways in

Readers of the Marseille cards have two broad ways of reading a card like this, and many use both.

The first reads by number and suit, and you already know it. Lesson X gave you the suits and lesson XI the ten positions from Ace to Ten. Put them together and you have the card. Lesson XI read the Eight of Swords as effort in the mind: thinking hard, and perhaps thinking yourself into a corner. On a Marseille deck, that is most of the reading.

The second reads by the image: not a scene, but the arrangement itself. Which way do the leaves turn? Is the flower crowded or comfortable? Is the card calm or tense? The Marseille reader Yoav Ben-Dov sees the flower in the Eight of Swords as enclosed by heavy barriers, but brightly coloured, as if it is there by choice: shut in, perhaps, or sheltering in a fortress, like a well-guarded treasure.

Notice what has happened. Smith's woman is trapped. The Marseille flower might be trapped, or might be safe behind walls of its own making. The picture no longer decides for you. The question, and the cards around it, have to.

What you gain by losing the picture

A scene is a gift to a beginner, and it is also a narrowing. Ben-Dov puts it plainly: the illustrated cards show particular life situations, so their range of possible meanings is relatively narrow. Once you have seen a blindfolded woman, it is hard to read the Eight of Swords as a treasure kept safe.

The Marseille pips leave that range open, and a reader gains three things:

• Freedom from the artist's story. The card can lean whichever way the reading needs, not the way an illustrator chose in 1909.
• Attention to small things. Which way a leaf turns, whether the colours are quiet or sharp. Ben-Dov notes that the more red bands there are on a swords card, the stronger its feeling of tension.
• A clearer view of the pattern. With no scenes competing for your eye, number and suit stand out, and a spread full of Eights or full of Swords is hard to miss.

The price is real. Ben-Dov notes that many newcomers to the Marseille deck leave the numbered cards until later, once they know the rest. That is exactly why this course started with scenes.

A different craft, not an older look

It's tempting to think of Marseille as the same tarot in plainer clothes. It isn't. The Marseille cards grew over centuries in the hands of card-makers who left no written key to their designs. Readers have had to build a language for them, from Renaissance art, from number symbolism, and from looking. Some read a whole spread as one scene, following which way the figures on the Major Arcana face. And Marseille readers disagree among themselves, about method and about which historical deck is the truest model. An honest account of the tradition has to say so.

Try it once. Take the four Eights from your own deck and, before you look at the pictures, read them only as eight of each suit. Then turn to the pictures and notice what they had already decided for you.

What to take from this

• For most of tarot's history the numbered cards had no scenes. The Marseille Twos to Tens show only the suit symbols, arranged and decorated.
• You already know the first method: suit plus number, from lessons X and XI.
• The second method reads the arrangement, and it leaves a card more open than a scene does.
• It's a different craft, not a lesser one, and its own readers argue about how it should be done.

Next, the system under the pictures: what the occultists wrote onto the deck, and why the cards stop looking arbitrary once you can see it.