A Year of Tarot de Marseille: The Aces

In my previous post, I talked about using the Major Arcana as the basis for establishing a numerology unique to the Tarot deck (and, more specifically, to the Tarot de Marseille). Setting aside the Fool and the World, we’re left with two ten-card runs: The Acrobat (I) through the Wheel of Fortune (X) and Strength (XI) through Judgment (XX). We can then compare the cards in these sequences to pull out numerological significances latent in the structure of the Tarot.

Today, we’re going to start that process by looking at the first card in each sequence: The Acrobat and Strength. By looking at these two cards together and trying to find what unites them, I’ll establish a numerological key to the Aces in the four minor suits.

The first thing I notice about both of these cards is that they’re very self-oriented. I don’t mean selfish or self-centered in the pejorative sense; just that they are, fundamentally, cards about the self. The Acrobat is a performer whose job is all about drawing attention to himself. He needs to be center stage, to draw the crowd’s eyes with his skill and mastery. More than any other card in the deck, the Acrobat screams look at me! I’m so great!

Strength, on the other hand, is somewhat more demure, but is still a card of personal excellence and virtue. Especially that last word; she’s one of the three cardinal virtues that appear in the deck, alongside Justice and Temperance.* This is a card about strength of character, the quality within a person that allows her to overcome the travails of the external world.

Together, then, these two cards tell me that in a Tarot numerological system, Aces are qualities in yourself. Both the Acrobat and Strength highlight you, the querent, and the qualities within you that govern your behavior and determine your interaction with the outside world.

The Acrobat and Strength.

How does this look in each of the four suits? In the suit of Bâtons, which I’ve established as being about action, the “quality within yourself” is going to be decisiveness and the willingness to act. In the suit of Coupes, which I’ve established as being about well-being, thats going to be kindness and a disposition to beneficence. The suit of Deniers is about resources, so this quality will be the ability to use those resources; that is to say, resourcefulness. And finally, the suit of Épées is about strife, so this quality is going to be something nasty like spite or hatefulness.

These, then, are the keywords I’ve established for each of the four Aces:

Ace of Bâtons: Decisiveness, energy, power

Ace of Coupes: Kindness, compassion, beneficence

Ace of Deniers: Shrewdness, resourcefulness, intelligence

Ace of Épées: Anger, cruelty, spite

Two important caveats come with these meanings, as with all of the meanings I’m building over the course of this year-long project. First off, I am not saying anyone else should be using these meanings. I’m not claiming they’re the “true” or “correct” meanings, and I’m not trying to overthrow other schools of thought or longstanding traditional interpretations of the cards. Rather, I’m embarking on a personal project to set aside everything I know about Tarot and come to the deck with completely fresh eyes. I’m asking the question: If the enormous corpus of literature on Tarot didn’t exist, and you simply set a deck in front of me and told me that it could be used for divination, how would I go about doing that? This is a project of personal significance, and I’m not trying to say that existing Tarot tradition is wrong or bad, nor that people should use the meanings I’m deriving here instead of more established ones. (I’m actually quite conservative and traditional as a Tarot reader, and my Tarot book is rooted firmly in the RWS tradition.) If you’re reading these posts and you’re intrigued by the system I’m building, by all means, feel free to try it! And let me know how you like it. But don’t think that I’m demanding that everyone should, nor that I’m saying I know better than 200 years of Tarot tradition.

Secondly, these meanings may change over time. This whole process is experimental, and there’s some trial and error involved. As I continue to work out the system (and put it into practice with readings), I may find that there’s a better theme uniting the Acrobat and Strength, so I may change my numerological interpretation of all of the Aces. Or I may simply find another way of interpreting one particular card, which I feel fits better with the suit and numerology it combines. What you’re seeing here is the blueprint, but that blueprint may well change over time. Nothing here is final.

Thanks for sticking with me through this project. I’m really enjoying it, and enjoying writing about it, so I hope you’re enjoying reading it. I’m out of town next week so I likely won’t have a blog post up, although I might try to pre-record a video. But I’ll be back sometime soon, because we still have a whole lot of the deck to work our way through. Until then!

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*Where is Prudence, you ask? I pitched an idea about this (with which I now disagree) in this dreadful post from years ago where I tried to justify indifference to the suffering of others, which… Yeesh. Glad I’ve grown up somewhat since then. Anyway, my thought at the time was that the Hermit represented Prudence (or, as I called it then, Wisdom). Now, I’m inclined to say it’s the Star. Not only because the cardinal virtues are classically represented as women, but because there’s a numerological pattern among the virtues in the Tarot deck. Justice is number VIII; three cards later, we have Strength at XI, and three cards after that we have Temperance at XIIII. If we continue this pattern and go another three cards, we land on the Star at XVII.