I Le Bateleur

Marseilles decks

There are quite a number of designs for the 'Marseilles' deck, many not from Marseilles.

The earliest extent deck is by Jean Noblet, and dates from 1650. What is quite significant and fascinating is that the wand looks far more like a penis, which he holds and points towards his right hand, in which he holds ... what?

The latest is the Camoin 1998 version, a virtual copy of the 1761 Conver deck.

The Grimaud is a 1934 (?) modification of an earlier deck, and remains, by far, the most common Marseilles type deck.

There are, of course, other Marseilles decks, but I thought these are the ones which make for the most interesting comparisons and study.


--- Here is a link to another thread which discusses the Marseilles deck.

Hi JMD, I have yet to own a Marseilles deck and I have to admit that you have created a stir of interest for me in this deck. The art does not trully "call" to me, but the tradition of it does. I think the history of the deck is what makes it so special. In your work with it, what has made it so special for you? I would like to learn more about it ...

Personally, I tend to use the Schaffhouse/Classic more often in readings than any other deck. I have also used, prior to this deck, the Arcus Arcanum and a few other decks often enough in readings to value other decks for what they bring.

To answer your question directly ('In your work with it, what has made it so special for you?), I suppose that my interest was more awakened when I tried to ascertain whether some of the decks which were out there were truly Tarot. For example, is A. T. Mann's astrological Tarot a Tarot deck... and what about the Qabalistic Tarot (though each have 78 cards, these questions can legitimately be asked)?

Before answering those questions, I had to find what actually constituted a Tarot deck. I suppose that one could just go with the earliest known, and stick to that (in which case, the Visconti-Sforza would probably determine the veracity of other decks)... I did not think that this was the correct approach, however. For example, the Visconti-Sforza appears to have been painted specifically for a family, and maybe with their joining through marriage as a stimulus. Cards/illustrations could have, in such an instance, be quite properly 'dropped' (Death and the Tower) or modified (the Lovers).

For me, this only left a few possibilities. Either the Marseilles, the Flemish, or minor modifications of either of these.

I do think that research outside of the Tarot into its iconography, and meditation on its symbology, is vitally important.

For me, this is where the Marseilles came out with flying colours.

It is also interesting that many other sequences of cards, or decks, were in early existence... but none are Tarot, no matter how beautiful and intelligent they are (Montegna and the Sula-Bosca as examples).

Having 'determined' that the Marseilles is the closest to what I may refer to as the Ur-Tarot (following Goetheanian nomenclature), it became important for me to re-assess my many existing decks. They did speak newly to me. I also realised that, contrary to popular opinion, utilising a Marseilles type deck with those new to Tarot (in various Tarot courses) actually simplified understanding and readings: if you take a deck with un-illustrated pips, the courts and Majors 'jump out' far more in a spread... and the pips are learned from developing an understanding about the four elements and the numerals 1-10... which doesn't take that long (for a basic understanding).

I think that as I have become more and more immersed in those tools of Imaginative Iconography, I have come to appreciate and respect the incredible integrity of the Marseilles. This does not mean that I do not appreciate the work of others... on the contrary.

I remember reading in a Masonic Research bulletin (AQC) of the late 1970s a complaint about some people bringing their baggage with them in seeking to understand the Craft, rather than truly paying attention to what is there, and seeking to understand it on its own terms. Steiner makes similar remarks with regards to the different branches of knowledge (in his Science of Knowing)... I think, for better and worse, this also applies to the Tarot - and here the Marseilles may assist.

So to go back to your original question, my answer would have to be twofold. Firstly, what has made it so special is its own 'specialness' with regards to its traditional iconography... but, more importantly, it seems to embrace its archetypal form (in the Goethean, not Jungian, sense) in the closest way yet.

JMD:

I found your last post extremely interesting. I too have thought a great deal about differences among the early tarots, as well as about what separates them from today's decks.

I feel that there are two "ur decks," rather than one, considering the extreme class stratification of Renaissance times. The various Visconti decks were quite obviously for consumption by aristocrats only, and certainly reflect aristocratic values. The early Marseilles decks, on the other hand, executed rather crudely in a woodblock format, reflect a more working class version of both the game and the symbology of the trump cards.
There are a few early Italian woodblock decks too, but their iconography exhibits much more variety than the French packs. So with the early Marseilles decks, we might be seeing the beginnings of codification of tarot imagery.

There are some interesting variations among the early Marseilles decks, however. Jacques Vievel's deck, roughly contemporaneous with Noblet's, features a World trump which unmistakably shows Jesus, wearing a cape and holding a sceptre, in the center of the oval. Noblet's World figure has breasts, but it's androgynous, has the cape and sceptre, and is related to the figure in Vievel's deck. Was that figure originally intended to be Jesus, and did the change occur because the crude images were difficult to discern clearly? In either case, the Marseilles World card is always much different from the same trump in the early Italian decks.

Likewise, Vievel's trump no. 16 shows no tower; a man runs toward a tree to shelter from a storm (an odd place to shelter in a lightning storm), and the card is called "The Fire." The 16th card always showed the most iconographic variation of any trump, and is one of the hardest to interpret.

Like you, I much prefer non-illustrated pip cards. They remind me that the suited cards had an existence and identity of their own before they were incorporated into the tarot pack, and still do.

Regards,
Dave B

I intend to add to this discussion... but won't have time until I get back in a couple of weeks... at which stage I'll modify this post.

But on a quick note, in XVI of the Vieville deck, the person appears to be running under a tree to shelter himself from a hail storm, not so much a thunder storm... though the title may very well indicate a meteoric 'storm'.

With regards to Christ in XXI, even the Marseilles is claimed to represent an early Gnostic depiction of a young beardless hermaphrodic Christ.

Glad to see your post... and will respond and continue this great conversation in a couple of weeks... unless I miraculously get the opportunity beforehand.

I certainly took longer than two weeks to catch up with reading various posts and responding further...

I'm quite interested in what you have to say above, catboxer, and wonder if I have read your post correctly: are the two 'ur-decks', in your opinion, the Marseilles and the Visconti type, or the Marseilles in its variations?

The question which also has to be asked is whether each of these early decks were slowly distilled and 'codified', or whether, from the myriad (teaching) cards available, one sequence 'became' the Ur-Tarot. That the woodcuts were relatively grossly made doesn't, in my opinion, take away from the careful rendition of the minutia of details incorporated therein. If they were used for esoteric purposes (whether teaching or otherwise), then their relative ambiguities would not only not have mattered, but would have also assisted in its task.

If they were 'designed' solely for game purposes, I find the details reproduced quite fascinating, coming from an age in which much spiritual and esoteric knowledge was communicated through the visual symbolic medium of illustration (whether as carved images or cardboard illustrations)... by the way, I do not mean to imply that the 'game' thesis is in any way suggested by previous posts.

I also have wondered at times whether the significant ways in which decks like the Vieville differ from Marseilles, and whether the absence of cards such as the Tower from decks such as the Visconti actually share a common cause, resulting in Vieville omiting such depictions in his deck.
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Apart from these important musings from those of us interested in such, is anyone interested in going through the deck, starting at 1-Magician, and working through with some comments?

jmd:

Thanks for getting in touch with me. I assume you're back in Australia after your trip to Europe (Germany?) and glad to be home. I've been stuck here in redneck country the whole time.

You've brought up so many fascinating topics it's hard to know where to begin, but first of all, I definitely would like to take part in a serious analysis of each of the 21 trumps and the Fool, which sounds like the work of 22 different study threads.

My research capacity is limited, as I have only Volume II of Kaplan's books and Decker, DePaulis and Dummett's <i>Wicked Pack;</i> getting Kaplan Vol. I and O'Neil's book has proved difficult. I haven't seen any other books I consider trustworthy.
Still, considering the tremendous number of primary documents published by Kaplan, that's enough information for starters, or at least, to ask interesting questions.

The first one I've already broached: which came first, the aristocrats' decks or the common people's? Which one derives from the other? Or did a Milanese aristocrat get hold of a commoners' deck, introduce the game to his family, then commission the first deck of "high art" cards? Decker <i>et al</i> lean toward the former conclusion (aristocratic origin) (p.28), set an absolute earliest possible date for the first appearance of the cards at 1410 (p. 27), while noting as you have that the cheap wood block cards "have a much closer connection in design with later cards than do the de luxe items." (p. 28).

Of the very early woodblock cards, there are a number of uncut sheets housed in the Met in NYC and in the Fine Arts Museum in Budapest, but all of them, pictured by Kaplan (II) on pps. 272-276, are apparently derived from only two blocks. Kaplan dates them as "fifteenth or sixteenth century," and they are indeed extremely crude productions.

Of these two blocks, the more easily discernible (pps. 272-274) is extremely important because of the unorthodox numbering of the trumps, which will play a part later on in discussions of whether the cards derive from a systematic body of esoteric theory and wisdom or are "simply a game." These include an Old Man (XI) holding a lantern rather than an hourglass; a horizontally-oriented sun (XVIII); Judgment at (XIX); Justice at (XX); an un-numbered World using the standard Italian device of the time, an angel holding a globe; a Moon (XVII) whose surface is covered by a huge eyeball, and is held up by a putto; a Love card (XVIII); and Temperance at (VI). Some of the pictures are related to what we find later in the Marseilles decks, and some aren't. The trump sequence proves only that in the earliest days of tarot, there was no firmly set sequence, and this undermines attempts to solidify any theory of systematic occult correspondences, or the idea that the cards originated as a means of teaching a specific body of theoretical esoterica.

But perhaps the most important woodblock, as it pertains to the question of the origins of the Marseilles pattern, is the one shown by Kaplan on p. 286. This is a skilfully executed, elegantly drawn uncut sheet of six whole and 14 partial cards from Italy, dated about 1550. The cards are un-numbered, but it's here that we first see the familiar Marseilles motifs such as the "lobster by moonlight," the sun shining on two putti, the star lady with Aquarian overtones, and the Bagatto in three-quarter profile oriented to the right. This one looks like the ur-Marseilles.

Looking at all this stuff, and considering the material in Decker, DePaulis and Dummett, I've come to the following tenuous and very preliminary conclusions:

1. In the beginning, tarot was a game only. However, the trump cards are obviously vehicles of a symbolic content, and there is no telling how early people may have applied the cards to purposes of divination and what might be called parlor psychoanalysis. We simply don't know. There might be a symbolic significance connected with the addition of queens to the suit cards also (a loose connection with the Arthurian legends). The pips originally had no symbolic significance.

2. The symbolic content of the deck is non-systematic. It is rather casually and unsystematically reflective of Renaissance cultural currents and motifs: Christian symbolism, the mythology of classical Greece, Rome, and the Hebrews; astrology, the Arthurian corpus of legends, romantic and epic poetry of the time, especially that of Petrarch, etc. Attempts to tightly connect the deck with systematic expositions of esoteric theory (kabalah, astrology, etc.) have been unconvincing, as they impose themselves upon the available documentary evidence from without, rather than being derived from it.

I think that's probably enough to start a discussion. I have to go to work now, and will not have time to return today. However, I hope we can continue this in the near future.

Dave B
(Catboxer)

I've only come back from the Perth on the west coast of Australia, not Europe (well Scotland is part of the EU, isn't it?)... the latter I haven't visited for a couple of years.
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I would like to come back to the woodcuts later... but first, let's see where we may be both in agreement and 'at odds'.

From your paragraph point 1, I can only totally agree when you say 'the trump cards are obviously vehicles of a symbolic content'. However, the view that Tarot was a game only, I think, has been proposed without deep nor convincing arguments... I guess I'm only stating the reverse here of what those who argue for that position say about those of us who sense that there was more to it than that (and I do not think from mere wishful thinking, but from seeking to understand).

That the whole deck appears to be a non-systematic in its content or order I agree with... but this does not mean that there wasn't an actual meaningful and systematic order which was 'corrupted', rather than codified. Mark Filipas makes, effectively, such a claim with his thesis that the Major Arcana may have been nothing more than a Hebrew alphabetic 'picture-book' (I do not in the least claim that he is correct, rather that the systematic order may be somehow inherent in the deck, but either as yet unrecognised, or recognised by some but not historically accepted as correct).

With regards to your comment that 'attempts to tightly connect the deck with systematic expositions of esoteric theory (kabalah, astrology, etc.) have been unconvincing, as they impose themselves upon the available documentary evidence from without, rather than being derived from it', I have to agree... but again, this does not mean that such 'external' interests and 'evidence' may not be useful in penetrating the veil around the Tarot.

As researchers, one of our tasks, I would also presume, would be to seek to understand the vastly different mindset people at that time had, and their manifold but interconnected interests. Many who would have had an interest in symbolic repreentations would also, of necessity given the times, also have had an interest in far more esoteric life than many historians appear to be happy to credit them with.

These, though perhaps not central to the development of Tarot, may perhaps be as important.

The plates which show a different numbering may show either a 'pre-codification' sequence, or a corrupted sequence. But I cannot, of course, argue for this latter from historical sources.
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I'll have to come back latter and add some comments regarding the Magician, so that we can begin our exegesis...

Dear Jmd:

As always, it's a pleasure to read your perceptive and stimulating remarks, which force me to dig a little deeper and think a little harder. Just a few additional comments before we get into our card-by-card workup...

The best evidence that supports the thesis that the trumps (leaving aside the suit cards for the time being) were intended to serve as a vessel for the convenyance of a body of esoteric teaching is the early standardization of trump subjects, as has been observed by virtually every reputable author on the subject. Decker et. al. note that "When the pack was first standardised, the subjects of the trump cards were standardised, too." (p. 25) The only possible weakness in this observation is the absence of the Devil and Tower cards from the two earliest Visconti decks; R.V. O'Neil has suggested they might never have been part of those decks.

Evidence against the "body of teaching" thesis is, first, while the subjects of the cards were standardized, the iconography was not, as we discussed above.

Secondly, the trump sequence was not standardized early on, but rather exhibited significant irregularity from place to place. "The variations in order were not a later development," Decker et. al. argue, "but must have occurred from the earliest moment." (p. 25) Thus, I think it's somewhat futile to conclude even in a tentative way that variant orders are corruptions, because it assumes that there was a "right" oder, and that we know what it was. Additionally, numerous early decks, most notably the Visconti-Sforza, were un-numbered. If the trumps represent a systematic body of teaching, sequence would necessarily be an integral component of the system.

Most of the tarotists I know (and respect) take a disciplined and systematic approach to the interpretation of the cards, but here's what I don't understand. Rachel Pollock, for example, in her "Complete Illustrated Guide" states baldly (and accurately) that "No historical evidence exists to back up the claim that Tarot cards derive from the tradition of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah." (p. 30) She then goes on to devote several pages to the application of Kabbalah to tarot studies!? If there was no connection between the two to begin with, how can there be one now? Are systematic impositions "from the outside" useful? I see them as projections "on" to the cards, rather than knowledge "from" them.

That Renaissance aristocrats spent a lot of time thinking about things esoteric is undoubtedly true. How much the majority of tarocchi players -- working class people -- thought about and discussed such subjects is open to debate, although some intellectual influence from the upper classes must have filtered down via the Church and popular written and oral literature. And there is much esoterica in the trumps. But are they a system?

I'm going to spend some time trying to figure out how to post my own trumps to the board as we run through this discussion, and comment on my reasons for design decisions. I'm very much an amateur artist, but I tried to conceive and execute my cards very carefully.

Looking forward to our next conversation...
Dave B

edited