What is the Tarot de Marseille?

The Tarot de Marseille is a standardised French woodcut pattern for the 78-card tarot pack that took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries. Named after the card-making city of Marseille, it became the archetypal European tarot and the ancestor of most modern decks.

Who was Nicolas Conver?

Nicolas Conver was a master card-maker in Marseille whose pack, dated 1760, is the most famous and widely reproduced example of the pattern. It is often treated as the archetype of the Tarot de Marseille and remains the reference point for modern restorations.

Why do the Marseille minor cards have no scenes?

The Marseille was built for a card game, not fortune-telling, so the numbered minors show geometric arrangements of the suit symbols rather than illustrated scenes. Scenic minors were a later innovation of the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

How is reading Marseille different from Rider-Waite-Smith?

With scenic RWS minors you can read the picture directly. With Marseille pips you build meaning from the suit, the number, and the direction and colour of the symbols, so readers lean more on numerology, elemental suit associations and the interplay of cards.

Is the Tarot de Marseille older than the Rider-Waite-Smith deck?

Yes. The Marseille pattern dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, with the Conver archetype of 1760, whereas the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was published in 1909 and drew on the older tradition.

What is the Jodorowsky-Camoin deck?

It is a restoration of the Marseille pattern published in 1997 by the film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky and card-maker Philippe Camoin, who reconstructed the imagery and colours from historic woodblocks, including the Conver line. It helped drive the modern revival of Marseille reading.

The Tarot de Marseille

Published 31 July 2026 · Updated 2 August 2026 · Reviewed by the Olivia Rivera

If you want to understand where tarot's visual language really comes from, you have to spend time with the Tarot de Marseille. This is the standardised French woodcut pattern that dominated European tarot for the better part of three centuries — the pack most people played with, the design later occultists reinterpreted, and the direct ancestor of nearly every deck sold today. It is also the tradition our own house-style deck is drawn from, so we hold a particular fondness for it. Below we look at how the pattern came together, how it is built, why its plain numbered cards ask more of a reader than modern scenic decks, and how it came roaring back into fashion in the late twentieth century.

A standardised woodcut pattern

Tarot began in fifteenth-century Italy as the card game tarocchi — a story we tell in full in the origins of tarot. As the game spread north and west, hand-painted luxury decks gave way to affordable production by woodcut and stencil: an outline printed from a carved block, then coloured through cut templates. This industrial method needed consistency, and over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French card-makers converged on a shared set of images, titles and numbering. The southern port of Marseille was one of the great card-making centres of the era, and by the nineteenth century its name had come to stand for the whole pattern — the Tarot of Marseilles.

The single most celebrated example is the pack of the master card-maker Nicolas Conver, dated 1760 and produced in Marseille. Conver's deck is so crisp and complete that it is routinely treated as the archetype of the pattern — the version restorers return to and the benchmark against which other Marseille decks are measured. When people speak loosely of "the" Tarot de Marseille, they usually have something very close to Conver in mind. It is worth stressing, though, that Conver did not invent the pattern; he was a superb craftsman working within a design already decades old, itself descended from earlier Italian and Milanese models. Historians sometimes distinguish an earlier "Marseille I" type from the later "Marseille II" that Conver represents.

How the pack is built

Like every traditional tarot, the Marseille has 78 cards in two parts:

22 trumps (the atouts, later the Major Arcana) — a fixed sequence running from Le Bateleur (the Magician/Juggler, numbered I) up through La Papesse, L'Impératrice, L'Empereur, Le Pape, the virtues, La Roue de Fortune, La Mort, Le Diable, La Maison-Dieu (the Tower), and on to L'Étoile, La Lune, Le Soleil, Le Jugement and Le Monde — plus Le Mat, the unnumbered Fool.
56 suit cards (the Minor Arcana) — four suits of Coins (Deniers), Cups (Coupes), Swords (Épées) and Batons (Bâtons), each running Ace to Ten with four courts: Valet, Cavalier (Knight), Reine (Queen) and Roi (King).

Two visual habits mark the genuine article. First, the palette is deliberately limited — bold black outlines filled with flat red, blue, yellow and flesh tones on off-white stock, a direct consequence of the stencil method. Second, the titles are in French and the numbering uses old additive Roman forms, so nineteen appears as XVIIII rather than XIX and Justice and Strength sit at VIII and XI (the Golden Dawn later swapped their positions, a change the RWS deck inherited). These are details we preserve in our own deck out of respect for the source.

The trump imagery

The Marseille trumps are frank, emblematic pictures. They do not whisper hidden Egyptian secrets — that claim was a later invention we debunk in myths debunked — but they do carry the full weight of medieval and Renaissance allegory. La Roue de Fortune turns its little crowned figures up and down; La Maison-Dieu shows a tower struck and figures tumbling; Le Mat, staff over shoulder and dog at his heels, walks off the numbered sequence entirely. Because the drawing is stylised rather than narrative, small details do heavy work: the direction a figure faces, the colour of a garment, the objects held. Readers of the Marseille learn to notice these things, and much of the pattern's depth lives in them.

Non-scenic pips: the heart of Marseille reading

Here is the feature that most distinguishes the Marseille from the modern mainstream. Its numbered minor cards are not illustrated with scenes. The Five of Cups is simply five cups arranged on the card; the Eight of Swords is eight interlaced blades and some flowering stems. There is no weeping figure, no bound prisoner — those are storytelling images that Pamela Colman Smith painted for the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, and they were a genuine innovation, not a restoration of anything older.

This changes how you read. With scenic RWS minors, a beginner can often read the picture straight off the card. With Marseille pips there is no picture to narrate, so meaning is built from three ingredients: the suit and its elemental temperament (Coins for the material, Cups for feeling, Swords for conflict and mind, Batons for action and will); the number, read through a simple numerology in which, broadly, Aces begin, fives disturb, and tens complete; and the visual arrangement — how the symbols sit, whether the composition feels open or blocked, and how a card converses with its neighbours in the spread. It is a more austere, more combinatorial way of reading, and its admirers argue it keeps the reader honest, because you cannot lean on a pre-drawn mood. As the film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky, a tireless champion of the pattern, liked to insist, "The Tarot is a language." The Marseille teaches you its grammar rather than handing you the sentences.

A practical way to feel the difference: pull the Eight of Swords from a Marseille deck and from an RWS deck side by side. One asks "what do eight swords and this arrangement suggest here?"; the other shows you a blindfolded, bound figure and half the interpretation is already done. Neither is better — they are different instruments.

The ancestor of modern decks

For all that the Rider-Waite-Smith deck now dominates, it stands on Marseille foundations. Waite and the Golden Dawn took the Marseille's 22-trump sequence, its four suits and its structure as a given and then reinterpreted and re-illustrated them. Even the celebrated scenic minors were, in part, an answer to a "problem" the Marseille never had: how to make the pips readable to newcomers. The Marseille is therefore not a quaint dead end but the trunk from which the modern tree grows — and, unusually, a trunk still very much alive, since Marseille-pattern decks remain in print and in play.

Revival: Jodorowsky and Camoin

By the mid-twentieth century the Marseille had come to seem old-fashioned beside the picture-rich RWS. Its fortunes turned in 1997, when Jodorowsky joined forces with the card-maker Philippe Camoin — heir to the Camoin firm, which had absorbed the historic Conver line — to publish a painstaking restoration. Working from old woodblocks, they reconstructed the outlines and argued for a specific symbolic colour scheme, presenting the result as a recovery of the "true" Marseille. Scholars debate some of their interpretive claims, but the deck was hugely influential: it put the Marseille back into serious circulation and helped seed a generation of readers who prefer non-scenic pips. Today the Marseille enjoys a confident revival, taught and read alongside the RWS rather than beneath it.

Common misconceptions

"The Tarot de Marseille is a single, original deck." It is a pattern — a family of related decks from many makers over two centuries — not one canonical object. Conver's 1760 pack is the famous archetype, not the "original."
"Marseille cards are older and therefore more mystical." They are older than the RWS, but the pattern was made for a card game. Its esoteric readings were added later, like everyone else's.
"The blank pips mean the minors don't matter." Quite the opposite — Marseille readers give the pips rich meaning through suit, number and arrangement; the work simply happens in the reader rather than on the card.
"Marseille and Rider-Waite-Smith are basically the same." They share a skeleton but diverge sharply in the minors, in two swapped trumps (Justice and Strength), and in whole philosophies of reading.

Reader FAQs

Should a beginner start with a Marseille deck?

You can, but most newcomers find the scenic RWS minors gentler at first. The Marseille rewards a reader who enjoys building meaning from suit and number. If that appeals, dive in; if not, start with RWS and come to Marseille later. Our beginner's guide works with either.

Which Marseille deck should I buy?

Restorations of the Conver 1760 pattern are the safest starting point, including the Jodorowsky-Camoin edition and various faithful reproductions of historic packs. Look for clean outlines and the traditional limited palette.

Do I read reversals with a Marseille deck?

Some readers do, some do not. Because the pips are symmetrical arrangements, many Marseille readers rely on card interactions and directionality within the spread rather than upright-versus-reversed. It is a matter of method, not rule.

Why is Justice numbered VIII and Strength XI?

That is the traditional Marseille order. The Golden Dawn swapped the two for astrological reasons, and the RWS deck followed suit, which is why modern decks usually show Strength as VIII. Neither ordering is "wrong" — they belong to different traditions.

Is the Marseille only for fortune-telling?

No. It began as a game and is still played with in France and Italy, and many people today use it purely for reflection and storytelling. Its history sits within the wider origins of tarot.

How does it compare to your house-style deck?

Our deck keeps the Marseille's French titles, additive numerals and limited palette while making its own choices about the minors. We explain the reasoning in our Tarot de Marseille review and in our house style.

In short: the Tarot de Marseille is the classic French woodcut pattern — standardised in the 17th and 18th centuries, archetyped by Nicolas Conver in 1760 — whose plain, non-scenic pips ask the reader to think, and whose structure underlies nearly every deck that followed.

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Written & reviewed by Olivia Rivera

Grounded in documented history; see our editorial standards.