A Year of Tarot de Marseille: Rebooting

For those of you who have been following along at home, I’ve committed myself to exploring the Tarot de Marseille in depth in 2023. I’m interested in this project for a couple of reasons, which I explored when I first began it: TdM is the system of Tarot that I’m least familiar with, and as my other magical and divinatory work takes me further afield from the kind of Qabalistic magic stemming out of the Golden Dawn, I’m increasingly interested in understanding Tarot without having to look at it through the Golden Dawn’s eyes. So I want to strip away everything I’ve learned about the card meanings, astrological and elemental correspondences, and so on—and just start over from the beginning.

Most of the work I’ve been doing this year has been centered on developing an understanding of each individual card among the pips, combining an understanding of the suits’ meanings with a numerological system derived from the trump cards in sequence. I worked my way from the Aces up through the Tens, working from first principles and trying to pull out a divinatory structure inherent to the Tarot.

The problem, dear reader, is that it’s not working for me.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s been an interesting and valuable exercise, and I’m glad I’ve done it. But what I’m noticing is that it’s turning out to be a purely intellectual exercise. I’m not actually finding it practical and useful in terms of applying the deck for concrete results in a reading. When I have questions and I want answers, I still find myself reaching for the Thoth deck. And when I do force myself to use the TdM, well, the card meanings I’ve come up with just sort of feel dead and uninspired. Not false, exactly. Not wrong. But… Rote. Formulaic. This doesn’t feel like a way of approaching divination that has life in it.

It’s hard to admit that, because at this point I’ve sunk several months’ worth of work into this project. But if it ain’t working, it ain’t working—and that’s okay. The point of this year is to experiment, to try new things, and to unlearn and relearn Tarot in a new way. Not all of that is going to work. Not all of it should work. Part of what I’m doing here is reapproaching Tarot as a novice and allowing myself to stumble through it as if for the first time. As a novice, I’m going to get some things wrong and make some mistakes, because that’s what beginners do. It’s all part of the learning process.

Feeling a little exasperated with my project and not sure what to do to fix it, I decided to do a reading for myself—because really, if I don’t use the cards for this, then why am I even here? This is what I drew.

The Madman, the Three of Deniers, and the Wheel of Fortune.

This presents a clear message. The Fool (me) is moving forward, but the Three of Deniers stands in his way. If he can overcome that obstacle, he will find the revolutionary change of the Wheel of Fortune. The only question, then, is—what is the obstacle represented by the Three of Deniers?

Here, I’m going to fall back on the interpretive meaning of the card that I came up with. Even though I’m looking to abandon this set of interpretations, they’re what I have to work with right now. In my post on the Threes, I identified the Three of Deniers as symbolizing regulations, rules, and bureaucracy. In other words, it’s about a structure that is imposed to limit individual action.

Here, I think this means that the structural approach I’ve taken to reading the TdM—identifying suit meanings, deriving pip numerology from the trump cards using Jodorowsky’s method (even though I dislike Jodorowsky’s book), and then combining them to produce a specialized meaning for each card—is fundamentally flawed. I need to break out of that structure and think about Tarot using an entirely different set of rules. Part of that, I think, is that I’ve been fixated on trying to find the correct symbolic meaning of each pip card, but with the exposure I’ve had to TdM over the past several months, I increasingly feel like such a thing doesn’t really exist. The RWS and Thoth systems have 78 cards each with its own range of symbolic and thematic interpretations; the TdM, on the other hand, feels much more fluid. I think that trying to approach this deck with an attitude of “This card means X, that card means Y” has been counterproductive.

So where do I go from here? Well, I’ve decided to go to people who know more about this deck than I do and have more experience reading it. In particular, I’ve decided to go to one person: Camelia Elias. I’ve read Elias’s blog posts over the years and always sort of had her work in orbit, but I’ve never read any of her books or taken her courses. I got my hands on a copy of Read Like the Devil, and in starting to read it, I’m finding her approach to TdM reading deeply appealing. So I think I’m going to work through this book and commit myself to trying Elias’s approach to Marseille reading, at least for the time being. When you’re not succeeding at figuring everything out on your own, it makes sense to seek out someone who can teach you.

Read Like the Devil: The essential course in reading the Marseille Tarot by Camelia Elias

In terms of what this means for the blog moving forward, you’re likely going to see a bit less TdM content. The reason for that is simple: If I’m trying to learn Elias’s method, I don’t want to be putting out blog posts that are simply rehashing her words. After all, if you want that, you should just go read her book, the same as I’m doing. I will likely still blog about my experiences using TdM, but those posts will be much more closely focused on me—samples of readings I’ve done, for example—as opposed to the specifics of the technique. We’ll see how things go.

This is all an adventure to me. There are pit stops, winding roads, and points where the car breaks down and I have to spend the night in a shady roadside motel hoping I don’t get bedbugs (or murdered). But even though I’m more or less scrapping the past seven and a half months of work, I still feel like it’s all taking me in the right direction. I’m developing a relationship with this deck, and testing to see what things work and don’t work for me.

For those of you who have been following me on this journey, I hope you don’t feel cheated somehow by my decision to move in another direction. If you’ve been interested in the card meanings I came up with and want to try using them for yourself in reading, by all means, please do so! I don’t think they’re bad or wrong or unacceptable. But they’re just not sitting right with me. I started to feel this way quite a while back, but felt like I had to plough forward and stick with the project even though it wasn’t really working out. In actuality, though, I don’t have to, and it’s silly to keep up with a version of this that I find lacking instead of trying to explore further afield and find something that satisfies me.

Onward and upward, friends.