AUTHOR’S NOTE: I realize that it’s moot to identify as an iconoclast when dealing with a system of divination that – as I was told when I first took up the TdM – has no established or documented tradition of interpretation going back to the era of its origin. (After all, it was primarily a card game until the 18th Century.) If there is nothing to push back against, there is little point in trying to take up a contrary position in order to formulate a unique statement of purpose, so we might as well just forge our own path. Which is exactly what I did – with a little help.

The first thing I resolved to do when I became serious about working with the TdM was to leave behind all the esoteric trappings of 19^th Century occultism except the suit-and-number theory that is consistent across nearly all decks that qualify as “tarot.” Then I set about finding source material in English on which I could begin building my own vocabulary. This led me to Yoav Ben-Dov’s The Open Reading, then to Jean-Michel David’s exhaustive course material and eventually to the Tarology of Enrique Enriquez.

As I began to find my footing, other books (not in chronological order of discovery) helped to flesh out my understanding: Caitlin Matthews’ Untold Tarot; Cherry Gilchrist’s Tarot Triumphs; Joseph Maxwell’s The Tarot; Paul Marteau’s Tarot de Marseille; Jean Michel Le Gall’s Le Tarot de Marseille; Toward the Art of Reading by Camelia Elias; studies of tarot history by Paul Huson, Ronald Decker and Robert Place (I can’t read French so I was limited in that regard); last – and arguably least – the peculiarly surrealistic Way of Tarot by Alejandro Jodorowsy and Marianne Costa (I think she tried and almost succeeded in rescuing it from his strangeness).

Next, bringing my trained graphic artist’s sensibilities to bear on the layout of the pip cards in the same way that one would approach a Rorschach ink-blot test (i.e. by looking for suggestive patterns), I formed opinions about the general arrangement of suit symbols and incidental embellishments (David calls them “arabesques”) in each card to see what I might come up with for impressionistic themes that could be tailored into specific definitions. (I say “general” because I wasn’t impressed by – and didn’t want to emulate – the anal attempts by some of the authors mentioned above to parse every last design detail into some kind of intelligible meaning. I’ve never seen so much convoluted scholarship expended on making sense of ordinary flowers, buds, leaves and branches that, quite honestly, would have been intended only as decoration, beyond which anything more profound in the way of explanation amounts to overthinking.)

As I was working on this effort, I chanced to have a conversation with tarot writer Lee Bursten (he wrote the companion booklet for Lo Scarabeo’s signature TdM deck), who had preceded me as TdM moderator on the Aeclectic Tarot forum a couple of years earlier. Lee graciously offered to perform an editorial critique of my draft and helped me tighten up its language. The results were so convincing that I decided to follow through on my long-delayed plan to convert my previous five years of blog posts into five published ebooks, one of which I titled Pips, Courts and Trumps: A Short, Simple Guide to the Tarot de Marseille.

I received a favorable review of the pip-card content from Sherryl Smith on her Tarot Heritage blog, but also some legitimate criticism of the esoterically-slanted trump card section that I took to heart and soon came up with descriptive text to replace it that is more in line with the cultural and sociopolitical norms that would have existed in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries. (If you happen to find your way to my book, you an locate the supplemental trump-card material at the link below.) The court-card wording I left alone since it is more “proto-psychological” than overtly occult in nature.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Yoav Ben-Dov for his sterling example in deciphering the pips, and to Enrique Enriquez for bringing to my attention the visual poetry in the cards, which inspired my own view of the patterns I found in them. I assiduously avoided plagiarizing anything I encountered in their work, instead putting my own spin on it and wrapping that in my personal observations and opinions drawn from direct analysis of the images. But I also acknowledged the position of Enriquez that reading the tarot cards for divination is an “irrational act” and Ben-Dov’s theory that “Everything is a sign” by remaining sensitive to their inherent mysticism regardless of its lack of historical pedigree.

A Non-Esoteric View of the Trump Cards