A Year of Tarot de Marseille: Finding a Numerology

In my previous post, I sat down with the four minor suits of the Tarot de Marseille in order to get a sense of what those suits signify. Reading the minors in TdM is broadly accepted to be a process of synthesizing a card’s suit with its number: There’s a particular meaning associated with the suit, and another meaning associated with the number, and you put those things together to get the meaning of the individual card. The next step in my journey with the TdM, then, is figuring out what the numbers mean.

This turned out to be a more complicated process than I had hoped. The nature of TdM reading is looser and less standardized than RWS or Thoth-style Tarot, where the significance of the Minor Arcana is strongly influenced by Qabalistic numerology. (Aces are Kether, Twos are Chokmah, and so on down the Tree of Life.) Now, I could very easily choose to just import that Qabalistic numerology, and I would have a workable system to apply to the suits. It might look something like the following:

1. Unity
2. Force
3. Form
4. Mercy
5. Severity
6. Harmony
7. Desire
8. Ego
9. Illusion
10. Manifestation

Honestly, though, that feels like cheating. My goal with TdM is to avoid importing any later assumptions or structures that got added onto the Tarot. I don’t want to reapply Qabalistic numerology; I want to discover a numerology latent in the Tarot de Marseille itself.

Most of the books I’ve read, including ones specifically on the TdM, use a roughly Pythagorean system of numerology for the suits. Each author has a slight twist on it, but broadly speaking, a Pythagorean numerology will look something like this:

1. Unity
2. Duality
3. Creation
4. Stability
5. Discord
6. Harmony
7. Growth
8. Wisdom
9. Fulfillment
10. Completion

And there’s nothing wrong with this, exactly. It seems fine. There’s precedent enough for it in the long history of Western numerology. But in some way I can’t quite express, this misses the mark for me. Again, it feels like an external system of numerology that we’re imposing on Tarot, rather than something organic to the structure of the deck itself. So while I know plenty of readers who use these meanings (or something like them) for the numbers of the minor suits, this doesn’t satisfy me for the sake of this project.

So I decided to turn to the deck itself to try and understand what the numbers mean.

I am, by and large, not a fan of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Way of Tarot, but there’s one excellent observation in that book that makes it worth the price of admission. Jodorowsky points out that the structure of Tarot is fundamentally decimal; after all, there are ten pip cards in each suit. He further observes that this decimal structure extends to the trump cards. If you remove the Fool and the World (both of which exist outside the progression of the trumps) you’re left with twenty major cards: Two sets of ten.

The trump cards arranged in sets of ten.

The first sequence of ten runs from the Acrobat* (I) to the Wheel of Fortune (X). The second runs from Strength (XI) to Judgment (XX). By looking at these sequences in parallel, we can start to piece together a Tarot-specific numerology. Look at the first card in both sequences: What do these cards have in common? What quality unites them? We can take that quality and extrapolate it out to the number 1 more broadly, applying it to the Ace of each suit. We can then go on to do the same thing with the second card in both sequences, and the third, all the way up to the tenth. In this way, the trump cards themselves can tell us what the numbers of the minor suits signify.

1. The meaning of the Aces is given by the Acrobat and Strength
2. The meaning of the Twos is given by the Popess and the Hanged Man
3. The meaning of the Threes is given by the Empress and the thirteenth card
4. The meaning of the Fours is given by the Emperor and Temperance
5. The meaning of the Fives is given by the Pope and the Devil
6. The meaning of the Sixes is given by the Lover and the House of God
7. The meaning of the Sevens is given by the Chariot and the Star
8. The meaning of the Eights is given by Justice and the Moon
9. The meaning of the Nines is given by the Hermit and the Sun
10. The meaning of the Tens is given by the Wheel of Fortune and Judgment

Note that this arrangement is different from the way the Majors in RWS Tarot are often linked with numerology. Drawing on Pythagorean numerology, RWS guidebooks usually take a card’s number and add its digits together to get something between one and nine. For example, the Star is number 17; its numerological significance would be taken as 1+7=8. Judgment is number 20; its numerological significance would be taken as 2+0=2. This other approach—the one I’m taking here, which is borrowed from Jodorowsky—doesn’t look at how the cards are numbered, but rather at where they fall in a given sequence of ten. So on this system, the Star’s numerological significance is 8 and Judgment’s significance is 10, because they are the eighth and tenth cards in their sequence, respectively.

Why prefer one approach over the other? There are a couple of reasons.

First off, the Pythagorean method doesn’t give us meanings for the number 10. Because the digits of 10 add up to 1+0=1, we can’t get different meanings for the Aces and the Tens if we use this method. Secondly, the Pythagorean method feels off-balance here. The numbers 1, 2, and 3 each have three trump cards (the Acrobat/the Wheel of Fortune/the Sun, the Popess/Strength/Judgment, the Empress/the Hanged Man/the World), whereas numbers 4 through 9 only have two. Jodorowsky’s approach to numerology strikes me as more elegant, more balanced, and more suited to the actual structure of the Tarot deck.

And finally, again, I’m a little suspicious of Pythagorean numerology here. I don’t really want to import a system exogenous to the Tarot, and it strikes me that this method of assigning numerological significance to the Majors by adding up their digits is doing exactly that: It takes a popular non-Tarot numerological technique and applies it to the deck. Jodorowsky’s “two sequences of ten” approach to the trump cards feels to me like a more honest engagement with what’s already there in the Tarot deck.

So here I have the skeleton of a numerology. Jodorowsky goes on to provide his own numerological interpretations for the deck, but frankly, I really dislike the interpretations he gives. Rather than use those meanings, what I’d like to do instead is to go through the ten-card sequence one number at a time, reflect on the pair of cards given for each number, and try to come to my own understanding of what those cards have in common and how they can generalize as a numerological meaning. Then, I’ll look at applying that newfound numerology to the cards in each of the four suits.

It’s a lot of work, and it will probably result in an idiosyncratic understanding of the Tarot deck that doesn’t really align with the card meanings and interpretations that other readers use. Nonetheless, I feel like this is the right way to go about my project of rebuilding my relationship with Tarot from the ground up. I’ll see you next week for a discussion of the number 1 in the Tarot deck—looking at the Acrobat, Strength, and the four Aces.

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*A note on the names of the trump cards: I’m electing to use direct translations of the French names of the cards. “Bateleur” in French means “acrobat” or “tumbler,” so I’m calling that card the Acrobat instead of the Magician. “Le Mat” doesn’t have a good translation in English. “Mat” in French is an adjective that translates to English as “matte,” and it generally applies to things like colors or materials. It has a secondary sense of being muted—either in the sense of dull colors or soft sounds. But I don’t really think that something like “The Mute” would be a perfect translation, because to the best of my knowledge, the French adjective “mat” never applies to a human to signify the inability to speak; you’d rather use the word “muet.” So for the time being, I’m going to keep calling this card the Fool, unless I can think of a more appropriate word.