Head to the Sky

I've resumed reading Paul Marteau's Tarot de Marseille book after a month's hiatus and immediately encountered another interesting idea. He mentions that the Knight of Cups is bare-headed and therefore "he is directly receiving inspiration and support from Above." In contrast, although Marteau doesn't elaborate further, it struck me that those members of the tarot …

The Power of Leaves

Another idea that I picked up from Paul Marteau's Tarot de Marseille book is that the leaves forming part of the decorative ornamentation on the TdM pip cards represent storehouses, repositories or reservoirs of force in its potential form (much like the way foliage works in nature); depending on their color, these "energy wells" are …

“. . . Hanged If I Know”

If I had to choose the Tarot de Marseille trump cards that exhibit the greatest divergence of interpretation between tarot traditionalists and their modern counterparts, Le Pendu (the Hanged Man) would be near the top of the list The historical impressions are uniformly harsh: here is a traitor who is being severely punished for his …

A Tarot de Marseille “Energy Translation” Tableau

Here I align the seminal "root power" of the Ace and the linear binary projection of the Two with the "agency" of the court cards and the situational "ways and means" symbolized by the remaining pips to produce a developmental tableau that enlivens Tarot de Marseille delineation. Rather than following the esoteric assumption that only …

The “Condensing and Concentrating” Cups

In his 1949 Tarot de Marseille book, Paul Marteau made frequent use of the term "condensing" when discussing the action of the suit of Cups on the emotional "vapors" (my word, not his) of the human psyche. The Cups are obviously vessels for holding liquid, and my fanciful take on Marteau's idea is that they …

Pips, Courts and Trumps: A Short, Simple Guide to the Tarot de Marseille

UPDATE: Success! I was finally able to publish my book on Lulu, the only platform I could find that will accept OpenOffice "ODT" documents without a lot of reformatting effort. I should mention that this is not a work for the absolute beginner since it's aimed it at the "experienced TdM generalist and serious student" …

Color Me “Plaid”

The more Tarot de Marseille books I read, the more weary I become of the ubiquitous (and usually anal) attempts to parse all of the bits of local color in an image into some kind of coherent meaning; when they don't drive me crazy, these exhaustive permutations soon degenerate into a monochromatic blur in the …

Intuition as “Awareness Practice”

I recently came across a fascinating passage in The Tao of Thoth that perfectly captures my quarrel with the widely-held belief that intuitive tarot reading unsupported by study is the optimum way to practice the art. (The author's martial-arts context here is that of looking for openings to exploit in an adversary's defense while at …

A Simple Oracle: Yes/No/Maybe

It's common for those who consider themselves wise in the ways of tarot to say loudly (and, in my opinion a bit smugly) "There are no bad cards!" (This attitude strikes me as just a convenient excuse for dodging profound contemplation of the possibility). The more thoughtful among them will allow that "Their fortunate or …

Why the TdM?

Why, you might well ask, after spending almost 40 years studying and divining with the Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot and The Book of Thoth, and then nine more years striving to master the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (RWS), would someone want to take on the task of trying to fathom the Tarot de Marseille (TdM) and its non-scenic …