Tips for reading with the Marseilles

Here's another tip I found useful: Ask a child you know (or have...but certainly don't go find one to do this experiment because that would be weird) to look at a simple spread of the cards in a row, like a sentence.

Their child-view is sometimes so simply elegant, picking up on patterns in the cards that one might tend to over-intellectualize.

For example, I used to look with suspicion on interpretations of (upright) La Maison Dieu as celebration, great joy, and Chutzpah, etc. Then, when I was reading for my brother and his wife, their kid (my nephew) looked over my shoulder and said, "Oooh! They're floating! And there's confetti and they need to stop playing together so loud or they're going into time out."

Isn't it strange how enlightening little kids can be?

Anyway, I'm brand-spankin' new to the Marseilles as well, but I've found that what works for me is to break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. I think it's like anything else in Tarot, really; it can be as simple or as overwhelmingly complex as you want to make it.

Find ways of relating to each card individually, no matter how silly it may seem. Look at their body language, their eyes, their facial expressions, the colors in the card. Even the horses have something to say! Surely there's something there that speaks to you on a personal level, or triggers something in your memory. Work with that!

For me, the important thing to keep in mind is that if it ever stops being fun, or starts being work, stops being enlightening, starts to become painful or boring, then I'm doing something wrong! It's not supposed to be about studying until you're miserable, or throwing yourself into history if that's not your thing; it's supposed to be about finding what works for you, as a person, as a Tarot reader, as an individual, and cultivating that.

Paul said:

...Then, when I was reading for my brother and his wife, their kid (my nephew) looked over my shoulder and said, "Oooh! They're floating! And there's confetti and they need to stop playing together so loud or they're going into time out."

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Yes! When my daughter was four we were watching a documentary about cougars - one of the cubs died and just when I was thinking I'd made a mistake, the show might be disturbing for a four-year-old, she said: "Oh! He took his body off!"

Maison Dieu is actually a pretty nice card in TdM, I can see a kid being helpful in overcoming "Waite damage".....

I'm kind of hesitant to tell a new Marseilles reader to discard what they've already learned, or the meanings they associate with particular cards from the tradition they learned. We can't disassociate ourselves from the past that easily, nor do I think we'd want to. After all, tradition is one of the chief things that the Marseilles deck has going for it. Tradition is what distinguishes Tarots from other oracle decks.

Specifically, the Waite and Crowley interpretations are now, for better or for worse, the major part of the tradition of Tarot in the English speaking world. They would not be there if this tradition itself were not robust and serviceable.

And, part of the process of settling into reading a pip card deck is to move up a level of abstraction, to move past PCS's images, traditional though they be, to more general symbols. After all, there is a sense in which each "four" in the deck embodies four-ness. This is the first way that using pip cards broadens possibilities. Can a common idea of four-ness be extracted from the tradition you first learned? What are its contours? How is four-ness expressed in the fields of life represented by the four suits? Are there apparent exceptions to your attempt to find something shared by all the fours? If so, are there traditional reasons for that?

If elements and numerology are part of the tradition you grew up in, you don't have to discard them. The Tarot of Marseilles is not a new deck; it is instead the common source of your tradition and others'. All the systems invented to interpret the Tarot work on it, and were designed, if not with this deck in mind, with it looking over someone's shoulder.

In time, with familiarity, you will see that the Tarot of Marseilles has its own personality, and you can read its images on its own as well as through the lens of a tradition you brought to it. Its virtues lie in its frankness, its lack of pretense - at least in my opinion. It shares its history with gamblers as well as sages. It is not fancy.

Hi ihcoyc,

I'm about to become a marseille newbie (deck in the post) and am finding this thread to be very, very helpful. However, something you said strikes me as being odd:

Specifically, the Waite and Crowley interpretations are now, for better or for worse, the major part of the tradition of Tarot in the English speaking world. They would not be there if this tradition itself were not robust and serviceable.

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The Waite and Crowley interpretations arn't 'traditional', they have merely become popular. However they do incorporate aspects of other Traditions, specifically for the purpose of occult pursuits and practises. They have earned a place in the Western Mystery Tradition, along with equally robust interpretations of tarot cards and regular cards from other sources.

The evolution of chinese money has made a stupendous journey, collecting a panarama of social, cultural and esoteric content along the way. All of which is encoded in little squares of cardboard - with or without fancy illustrations.

Rider-waite decks come with some version of Rider-Waite interpretations. Marselle decks don't. They are encoded with meanings from pre-waite eras and other locations. These early cards are what the RW was built on, the Rider-Waite is an 'adjusted' tarot, adjusted to accord with the perceptions and understandings of Waite and Co.

Having said that, if the cards are primarily being used as tools for divination, then it little matters what source the interpretations are taken from - you can create your own! The 'magic' is in the person, the reader.

Bee

EDIT: ihcoyc, OMG - APOLOGIES. Just re-read your post - minus other things which previously were claiming my attention - and see that I've ranted on quite unecessarily (pointlessly...). Sorry if I came across as being argumentative ihcoyc. (But I still can't agree that RW is 'traditional'. )

I quite agree B! Don't apologize. The RWS deck isn't traditional altho Waite claimed it was. But who appointed him the arbiter!? When reading TdM I think Pythagoras is your best guide perhaps as his ideas were certainly "in the air" at the time of the TdM and would represent the worldview held by those living then.

Bernice said:

The Waite and Crowley interpretations arn't 'traditional', they have merely become popular. However they do incorporate aspects of other Traditions, specifically for the purpose of occult pursuits and practises.

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I tend to use the word "tradition" in an anthropological / folklore sense. Traditions, as broadly defined here, are beliefs and practices that have been passed down from one generation to the next. They grow and change in this process, as the people and environments into which they pass change as well. There is no sense that the oldest tradition is the most authentic or best, or that the purpose of studying traditions is to recover their original contents, so that this original can be used to reform contemporary practice.

The Tarot of Marseilles is a tradition. It has existed from before at least 1650 to the present. The RWS is a tradition, almost a hundred years old now. The Golden Dawn tarot teachings are almost a century and a half old now. They both borrowed heavily from Etteilla's tarot, almost two and a half centuries old now. And Etteilla's tarot was in turn derived from his piquet pack card readings, which preceded his Tarot by several decades. All of these things pass the basic test of generational persistence.

Traditions survive by adapting. I want neither to disparage the past, nor to worship it and turn into some kind of tarot fundamentalist. Both of these approaches seem to me to be dead ends. If we all didn't respect the past, we probably wouldn't be interested in the TdM. On the other hand, we don't want to hurl the Marseilles deck down from the mountaintop, shouting "thy cards are false" to the orgy below. When confronted with the Egyptian Cat Goddess Tarot of the Celtic Feminist Gypsies from Atlantis and its many variations, I'm sometimes tempted. We ought to be welcoming people who come to the TdM from such backgrounds, and requiring them to repent and renounce the false gods of their past is probably counterproductive. That's all I am trying to say.

ihcoyc said:

I'm kind of hesitant to tell a new Marseilles reader to discard what they've already learned, or the meanings they associate with particular cards from the tradition they learned. We can't disassociate ourselves from the past that easily, nor do I think we'd want to. After all, tradition is one of the chief things that the Marseilles deck has going for it. Tradition is what distinguishes Tarots from other oracle decks.

Specifically, the Waite and Crowley interpretations are now, for better or for worse, the major part of the tradition of Tarot in the English speaking world. They would not be there if this tradition itself were not robust and serviceable.

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I would suggest discarding all that, at least while working with the TdM. Slow-cooking a roast and frying fish are two different things. "Tarot" is a catch-all word nowadays. Kind of like "cooking."

IH, I didn't think dogma or repentance was happening here. I just think it important to note TdM does have a unique worldview.

Good to see an old face back on the forum ihcoyc.

Doesn't this thread just show that reading the Marseilles deck is a personal thing? So many of us read differently and still find the deck to be insightful for our purpose, whatever that may be.

Personally, the Marseilles opened up more for me when I stopped trying to imagine the equivalent card from the Spiral deck and instead started to use what was in front of me. I agree that we cannot ignore our past experiences, whatever they were, they shape how we look at every aspect of life in the here and now, including Tarot.