Tarot: Meeting Granddaddy Marseille

It surely does not need repeating on this blog that the tarot cards started off life as a game, not a magical tool - oh damn, couldn't stop myself saying it again. Personally I love using tarot decks that were designed for playing games rather than divination. I particularly love the Italian style called tarocco piemontese, a descendant of the French tarot de Marseille style.

I want to draw a parallel between the Marseille tarot & the King James Bible. We all know it's venerable. It looks & feels lilke the real deal. We all know it's old. It looks right when a tarot deck is required for a reader to turn over card XIII in a film - you see, it takes over. Normally I would say the Death card but under the influence of this deck you start doing funny things.

Both this deck & the King James Bible also attract a certain fundamentalism. If you are going to seek the one true tarot deck, you might as well fix on this one. Personally I think there's more mileage in the school of thought that this style of deck makes you read differently from a wholly pictorial deck. The Marseille fundamentalists also tend to insist on their own pet edition of the deck, just as the King James Bible fanatics often insist on a Cambridge University Press edition, or anyway will collect multiple editions.

For some time I have had the standard Grimaud edition of this deck in the house: as far as I know no purists insist on this deck, but up until modern paganism made inroads into France, that was the standard divination deck there just as RWS ( or whatever you could get) was here.

Since I have had it this deck has spent much of its time in its box in my wardrobe. The Christians would no doubt say a Bible in the wardrobe is useless, & this parallel extends to the following statement, which is both obvious & an oxymoron: it has stayed in my wardrobe because I can't read with it.

I have rationalised this in my head as being because the colours are odd, which is a downright lie, since I'm not bothered by the Death figure's skeleton in my tarocco piemontese being coloured blue & yellow!

The King James Bible fanatics are very keen that its language need not be a barrier to evangelism, & the Marseille-only tarotists are also firmly convinced that it is not more difficult to read. They will acknowledge that you may have to do more learning before you can read proficiently with a pips deck. For me that isn't a problem: I have several systems of numerology fixed in my mind; bits of the Tree of Life remain on & off in my mind; if push comes to shove I can mentally reference RWS; & ffs, I'm a witch, if I can't read intuitively with whatever comes to hand there's no hope. There is no conceivable reason why I would not be able to read with this deck & not others, after all I'm fond of saying that the purpose of divination tools is to get you psychically to the point where you don't need one. But for no apparent reason, a veil is drawn over everything when I pick up this deck.

Until last night, that is. I took it to the pub with me, ironically with a view to giving it away to one of my friends, but when I took the cards out one of my friends said 'Do me a reading'. The most extraordinary thing happened: I do know the person I was reading for, but it was as if the cards came alive. I would tend to see the Tarot de Marseille as a little stodgy, & so was amazed to see some wild kinky sex coming up for her at the end of the month! So then I read for someone else, who I've met before but don't really know. The reading was fairly pedestrian, showed clearly that what he was desperately worried about wouldn't be as bad as he thought it would be.

So far so much better than I thought. Then we played a card game with them. I'm not all gone for shitface as a game - I'm still convinced the rules kept changing as we went along. I actually wanted to play Strip Jack Naked, but unfortunately Jack was having none of it. I didn't get an impression that the cards minded this cavalier treatment.

I'm actually quite surprised that my deck came alive in the pub being treated at best casually. Perhaps this is the downside of the King James Bible approach to the tarot - it teaches you to hold this deck in such awe that you actually can't get intimate with it. On the other hand they showed this deck's origins clearly: it showed itself comfortable with normal people who may sit in a bar & see what is going to happen by pulling cards out of a deck, over & against the decks born in high-falutin' occultists' drawing rooms.

The best came when someone else joined himself on to our group & asked to have his cards read. I have met him before but don't know him. Unfortunately when I drew cards showing such acute misery that I could only go with it & begin by asking him if he has financial troubles, this deck came up 'trumps' again. They also clearly showed the origin & solution to his problem: way too much cups goinbg on in his life, & if he'd just get on top of that, his coins would be much better!

The upshot is I took the deck home with me & will now see if I can get a better connection with it. Now I've discovered at least one way in to this deck, it may see more boozy outrageous readings in pubs, rather than being treated as a deck for meditative readings at the altar.

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