Difference between Wirth and Marseilles?

Kirali

I have neither of these decks and I saw an earlier post saying that the Oswald Wirth deck is not a true Marseilles deck. From seeing the scans online from both types, they look very similar. Could anyone enlighten me on the difference between the two please? :)

Thanks for reading!
 

ihcoyc

Kirali said:
I have neither of these decks and I saw an earlier post saying that the Oswald Wirth deck is not a true Marseilles deck. From seeing the scans online from both types, they look very similar. Could anyone enlighten me on the difference between the two please? :)

My understanding is that the Wirth deck is an early esoteric deck that tracks the Marseilles fairly closely. It slightly amplifies the late nineteenth and early twentieth century interpretation of the Marseilles cards:
  • It turns the miscellaneous doodads on the Magician's table into suit emblems;
  • It adds Egyptian motifs to the Chariot and the Wheel of Fortune;
  • It turns the Devil into Baphomet
  • It puts Hebrew letters on the cards.
  • There's a yin-yang on the Papess's book
There are probably other minor changes.

Most of the changes were meant to amplify the symbols that early esoteric tarotists saw, or thought they saw, in the Marseilles designs.

IIRC, Wirth's deck was used to illustrate Papus's Tarot of the Bohemians. You at least get the original French names on the Wirth deck I have seen.

My opinion is that Renaissance Italy was a magical enough place, and there is no need to introduce bogus Egyptiana into the Tarot. Apart from that, Wirth's designs and names are pretty standard and usually preserve the Marseilles symbolism rather than replacing it. Only a Tarot de Marseilles deck is a "true Marseilles deck." Others have been creatively re-interpreted in different ways, and with different degrees of fidelity. As a re-interpretation, this one is more faithful to the original than many.
 

Kirali

Ah thank you very much! Well I kinda liked the Wirth deck. I was hoping to find a Marseilles deck where the art wasn't too distracting. ah well I might get it anyway! :)

Thanks again for posting that information!
 

Phoenix

I was the same way when trying to find a Marseille deck that I liked. All the ones that I found were very harsh looking. Then, I decided, on a whim, to look at Lo Scarabeo's website, as I knew that they publish a couple of Marseille decks. This is what I found:

Tarot of Marseille
Ancient Tarot of Marseille

I prefer the Ancient Tarot of Marseille, and according to JMD, I have chosen a good deck.

BTW, to those interested, I have ordered this deck from Tarot Garden.
 

catboxer

I think Ihcoyc listed all the visible details that distinguish the Wirth trumps from those of a true Marseilles deck, with the exception of the halo of stars around the Empress's head and the crocodile on the Fool card. I suppose we should also add that Wirth's cards were, I think, engraved, while the designation "Tarot of Marseilles" denotes a product printed from woodblocks and hand painted with stencils.

However, the most significant differences between the early occult decks, of which Wirth's is a prime example, and the classic Marseilles products, are invisible and derive from the intent and purposes of the card makers. The inclusion of Hebrew letters and "Egyptian" details on the Wirth trumps shows that the deck's originators were inspired by the theories of Court de Gebelin, Comte de Mellet, Eliphas Levi, and Paul Christian, which assert a connection between Kabbalah and tarot as well as maintaining that the cards originated in ancient Egypt. Today the Egyptian theory has been thoroughly discredited, finally (although there are still a few people around who cling to it as if it was something valuable), but the association of tarot cards with Kabbalah seems to have taken on a life of its own, and unfortunately appears to be a permanent legacy of the spurious pseudo-scholarship of the 19th-century French occultists.

In fact, it looks to me as if tarot will never recover from the influence of Levi, Christian, Papus, and their English counterparts in the Order of the Golden Dawn, all of whom cooked up evidence-free histories of the cards in the Masonic lodges Ihcoyc mentioned. Even a genuine scholar such as Stuart Kaplan uses terms like "Major and Minor Arcana," which were invented and first used by Christian and Papus after 1865 (See Decker et. al.'s "A Wicked Pack," chapters on Christian and Papus). It might be well to remember that tarot had already existed for over 300 years before anybody thought to suggest that there might be a connection between the cards and Kabbalah, or Egypt, or astrology (even though some astrological symbols undoubtedly appear on the earliest cards), and that the Marseilles tradition, during nearly all of its existence, contained no trace of such ideas.

Wirth's trumps do indeed look very much like Marseilles cards. They remind me of the way that early Christian art looked almost identical in style and content with late classical art; the differences between them are in the minds of the artists, and in what they intend their pictures to represent. Pictures of Jesus from the catacombs look awfully much like portraits of Apollo, but those very similar images convey radically different contents. In the same way, Wirth's very gracefully rendered Magician looks nearly like his counterpart in the Marseilles decks, but he is a whole different animal. Trump I in the occult decks is a bona fide magician or magus, while in the older decks he is an artisan such as a cobbler, a pedlar, or the kind of low-level conjurer and trickster you might run across at a county fair. The differences between these very similar pictures are vast.
 

jmd

The Wirth deck is indeed influenced by various esoteric traditions making use of various ideas many historians would now reject. However, the rejection is, I tend to think, sometimes as illegitimate as the face-value theory.

If we look at the cards themselves and the historical millieu of either late mediaeval or early renaissance northern Italy, or France, or Provence, or the northern Spain and Langue D'Oc regions, we find people having a vastly different mindset than, on the whole, ourselves.

Then and there, the idea that vast knowledge was to be found in the Ancients, and that these pointed to the Romans, and even more to the Greeks, and even more to Egypt, and the lands of the Old Testament, certainly indicates that any carefully constructed design would include much which somehow contained reflections of what was both ancient and partly dormant. That De Gebelin made his Egyptian comments for the Tarot is probably both correct and incorrect. It is certainly incorrect if what we are looking for is a deck (irrespective of number of cards included) with a sequence of figures or pictures following the Tarot sequence. On the other hand, and as mentioned a number of times, the past certainly lived as metamorphosised echoes in Europe at that time (as it does, too, now).

Within these, Egyptian motifs can be found - but not as Egyptian. That Wirth included, for example, the crocodile as one of those highly significant symbolic Egyptian icons is, in my opinion, taking away from the purity of the fullness of the image of the Fool. That he included a Hebrew letter (for example, Alef upon I the Magician) again in many ways took away from the 'purity' of the deck - and yet also added an element of traditions which were beginning to emerge.

Perhaps, however, it may also be worthwhile to consider Mark Filipas's thesis: could the very sequence of the Major Arcana of the Tarot be a reflection of a Hebrew abecedarium? If this proves in any way partially correct, then the Kabbalistic cul-de-sacs have shown themselves useful after all - and the Marseilles deck the ultimate Ür-deck!
 

catboxer

Ah, jmd, you're a great guy, a real gentleman, and a true scholar. It's always, as they say in the trades, "a pleasure doing business with you." But I'm afraid I have to part ways with you on this issue.

What was left of ancient Rome certainly was a key component of southern European Renaissance culture, but Renaissance thinkers and artists really had little in common with the rigid formalism of the Romans. Renaissance culture was innovative, boisterous, and full of itself. The comprehensive catalog of Roman ruins engraved by Giambattista Piranesi (17th century) shows that, at least by that time, Roman ways of thinking and being had become vague, indistinct memories to their descendents, who were still awed by the scale and grandeur of what had been left behind. The gap, after all, was over 1000 years.

If Roman culture was an unfocussed memory by 1500, what could be said of the leavings of the autocratic society of ancient Egypt, which was already ancient when Augustan Rome was built? For sure, Renaissance thinkers, including those who played a part in the origins of tarot, were enamored of Plato's philosophy, and probably had more in common with the Greek philosophers of 2000 years before them than with any other ancient people. But that raises another "tarot problem:" neoPlatonism and Kabbalah are philosophically incompatible.

My point is that our "ancestral memories," as Dr. Jung would have it, may be long, but our historical memories are short. I find myself unable to make any spiritual or cultural connection with my Puritan ancestors of 350 years ago, for example. They might as well have been from Mars. For these reasons, I find nothing of value in the work of people like DeGebelin, Levi, and Crowley, but I do find much that has done irreparable harm, as these people used no sources for the histories they made other than their own imaginations and the cryptic pictures on a bunch of old playing cards. In other words, they made stuff up.

Maybe there is wisdom embedded in our genes and subconsciousnesses that can be applied to history in a valid way. Right now I'm reading Robert Graves's "The White Goddess," and it seems to me that Graves tries to have it both ways: he's a real scholar, well-versed in all the archaeological and historical evidence that was available to him, but he also uses what he would call poetic intuition as source material. Can we do that and get away with it? I'll have to think about it some more.

However, for right now, I always assume that what can't be documented in three-dimensional ways doesn't exist except in the overheated imaginations of occultists, and I would reiterate that from 1440-whatever until 1781, nobody having anything to do with the cards ever mentioned (out loud or on paper) anything about Kabbalah, Egypt, or astrology.

I'm always open to changing my mind. A lot of people like Rachel Pollock argue that the founding of occult tarot was the establishment of a sort of second tradition (following the first, which I guess would be Italian/Marseilles cards). But did that founding have a real foundation? If I was to agree that the symbolic vocabulary of modern tarot connects with regions of the mind and soul that can't be accessed by analytical thinking, and that it gives us a pathway to truths that can't be discovered any other way, then I'd be able to get over that hump that I can't get past, which is the anti-historical nature of occultism.
 

ihcoyc

catboxer said:
However, for right now, I always assume that what can't be documented in three-dimensional ways doesn't exist except in the overheated imaginations of occultists, and I would reiterate that from 1440-whatever until 1781, nobody having anything to do with the cards ever mentioned (out loud or on paper) anything about Kabbalah, Egypt, or astrology.
The folks who turned the original Tarot into the Minchiate deck apparently thought that astrology somehow "belonged," and expanded the inherited Tarot to include more astrological references. Some of the early painted card Moons feature astrologers or astronomers.

Mentioning Robert Graves brings to mind Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon, in which he goes into great length on Graves. While Graves probably invented his Goddess out of his own fantasies of dominance and submission, Graves was also mining a vein of romanticism that was a hundred and fifty years old at the time he wrote the book.

The Tarot is a folk tradition. These traditions are notoriously liable to appropriation and re-interpretation by every generation that perpetuates them. My personal tastes run towards the traditional also. But to expect Tarot not to change, or not to be re-interpreted, is to stand with King Canute and resist the tides.
 

catboxer

Ihcoyc:

Everything you say is true, and I should have remembered that a comprehensive representation of the entire system of astrology is a part of the Florentine Minchiate. That certainly could be seen as possible evidence that the regular tarot is, at least partly, an astrological vehicle.

I also liked what you had to say about the evolution of folk traditions. But is inventing a spurious history out of whole cloth, as the French occultists did, the same thing as evolution and transformation of a folk tradition? Suppose I was to write a book claiming that the novel "Dracula" is actually an encrypted exposition of ancient Peruvian cosmography. Suppose a lot of people believed it. Suppose 100 years from now it was generally accepted by all but the very skeptical. Would longevity and general acceptance lend it any truth?