The History of the Marseille Tarot: From Italian Card Game to Mirror of Reflection

The Marseille Tarot descends from tarot cards created in northern Italy in the fifteenth century, where they were used to play a card game. The game spread to France and Switzerland, and a standard design emerged; the famous French decks of Jean Noblet (around 1650), Jean Dodal (early eighteenth century) and Nicolas Conver (Marseille, 1760) are its best-known examples. The name “Tarot de Marseille” only became common in the nineteenth century.

Divinatory and esoteric use came later, from the late eighteenth century, with Antoine Court de Gébelin, Etteilla, and then nineteenth-century occultists such as Éliphas Lévi and Papus. In the twentieth century, Paul Marteau’s edition and book made the Marseille Tarot the reference deck in France. The often-repeated story of an ancient Egyptian origin is a romantic myth: the documents place the birth of tarot firmly in Renaissance Italy. This article retraces that history using established facts and recognised scholarship.

Fifteenth-century Italy: a game of triumphs

Playing cards reached Europe in the late fourteenth century, most likely from the Islamic world. They had four suits, which in Italy became cups, coins, swords and batons, the same four suits still found in the Marseille Tarot.

Tarot was born when someone added to this ordinary pack a fifth series of picture cards that outranked the others: the trionfi, or “triumphs”, which gave us the word “trump”. Records from the 1440s, notably at the court of Ferrara, mention these “triumph cards”, and the oldest surviving tarot cards are luxury hand-painted decks made for the ruling families of northern Italy, such as the Visconti and Sforza of Milan, in the mid-fifteenth century. The word tarocchi appeared in the early sixteenth century, probably to distinguish the game from other uses of the word “triumph”.

The important point is this: tarot was invented as a card game, a trick-taking game in which the trumps beat the ordinary suits. The allegorical figures on the trumps, such as the Emperor, the Pope, Love, Death or the World, drew on the visual culture of Renaissance Italy: moral allegories, triumphal processions, Christian imagery. They spoke an open visual language that any educated viewer of the time could read at a glance.

The game itself spread quickly through Italian cities, and regional variants appeared, with different numbers of trumps and different orders: Bologna, Milan, Ferrara and Florence each had their own customs. Historians use these differences in the order of the trumps to trace how the game travelled. The sequence found later in the Marseille pattern corresponds broadly to the one used around Milan, which is one of the reasons scholars connect the French decks to that region. Michael Dummett’s The Game of Tarot (1980) documented this history in detail and remains the reference study.

France and the Marseille pattern

From the late fifteenth century and through the sixteenth, tarot spread from Italy to France and Switzerland, where it was manufactured on a large scale with woodblock printing and stencil colouring. Over time, a particular design became standard among French card makers. Historians call it the Marseille pattern, though it was produced in many cities.

Three decks are often cited as landmarks:

• Jean Noblet, a card maker in Paris, produced a deck around 1650 that is among the oldest surviving examples of the pattern.
• Jean Dodal, working in Lyon in the early eighteenth century, made a deck that shows the pattern in a mature form.
• Nicolas Conver, a master card maker in Marseille, produced a deck in 1760 that became a model widely copied and reprinted in later centuries.

These decks share a recognisable set of features: 22 trumps (with Le Mat, the Fool, standing outside the numbered sequence), Arcanum XIII identified by its number alone, the order with La Justice at VIII and La Force at XI, four suits of fourteen cards each, flat bright colours and strong outlines. Many of the details that Marseille readers pay attention to today, such as the direction of the figures’ gazes and the colours of clothing, come from this printed tradition.

Marseille itself was an important centre of card-making, which helps explain why the city’s name ended up attached to the whole pattern. But the label “Tarot de Marseille” is a later convention: it became common in the nineteenth century, long after Noblet and Dodal, and was firmly established in the twentieth.

The occult revival: Court de Gébelin, Etteilla, Lévi and Papus

For three centuries, tarot was essentially a game. That changed in the 1780s, in Paris.

In 1781, the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published the eighth volume of his vast work Le Monde primitif, in which he claimed that tarot was the remnant of an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom, preserved in disguise as a game. The same volume included an essay attributed to the Comte de Mellet linking the trumps to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Both claims were pure speculation, and the idea proved seductive and enormously influential.

Almost at the same time, Etteilla, the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a Parisian who had already published on fortune-telling with ordinary playing cards, published methods for reading tarot cards in the 1780s and later produced his own deck designed for divination. Etteilla gave upright and reversed meanings to the cards, laying foundations for the practice of cartomancy with tarot.

In the nineteenth century, Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse-Louis Constant) developed, in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–1856), a system linking the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the Kabbalah. This made tarot a central object of Western esotericism. In 1889, Papus (Gérard Encausse) published Le Tarot des Bohémiens, which popularised these correspondences further and repeated the idea that tarot had been carried across Europe by the Roma, another romantic legend that the historical record contradicts. The same year, Oswald Wirth produced a redesigned tarot for esoteric use.

These authors transformed how tarot was seen, from a game to a symbolic system. The story of how this happened is told in detail in A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996), by Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett. Understanding it helps you separate the history of the cards from the stories later projected onto them.

Myths to set aside

Several popular claims about tarot dissolve under historical scrutiny.

The Egyptian origin. Court de Gébelin’s theory was formulated before anyone could read hieroglyphs. When Jean-François Champollion deciphered them in the 1820s, Egyptian sources revealed a religious and literary world entirely distinct from tarot. The cards are a European invention of the fifteenth century.

Bohemian or Roma transmission. The idea that the Roma brought tarot to Europe from the East was popular in the nineteenth century, but the records place tarot in Italian courts first, well before any link to the Roma appears, and the cards’ imagery is clearly Italian Renaissance.

An ancient secret code. The trumps’ allegories reflect the culture of fifteenth-century Italy: virtues, social ranks, Christian themes, popular triumph imagery. Later esoteric readings are interesting in their own right, but they were added centuries after the cards were made.

“The Marseille Tarot is the original tarot.” It is old, and it is a French standardisation of earlier Italian models. Tarot’s origins lie in a whole family of early decks, painted and printed across several Italian cities.

Setting these myths aside makes tarot even more fascinating. It brings its real history, which is wonderfully rich, into full view. It also frees you to use the cards as what they are: a powerful set of images that people have reinterpreted for six centuries.

The twentieth century: Paul Marteau and after

In 1930, Paul Marteau, director of the card maker Grimaud, published an edition he called the Ancien Tarot de Marseille, based on the Conver tradition, with its colours standardised. In 1949, he published a book, Le Tarot de Marseille, offering a detailed symbolic reading of every card, including its colours, numbers and details. Marteau’s edition and book became the reference for generations of French readers and did much to establish both the name and a particular way of reading.

In the decades that followed, the Marseille Tarot remained the dominant deck in France, while the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in London in 1909, became dominant in the English-speaking world. Our article comparing the Marseille Tarot and the Rider-Waite-Smith explains the practical differences.

From the late twentieth century, interest in the historical decks themselves grew. Researchers and card makers produced facsimiles of old decks such as Noblet’s, Dodal’s and Conver’s, and new restorations appeared; the best known is the version published in 1997 by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Philippe Camoin. Collectors and readers now have access to many versions of the pattern, each with small differences in drawing and colour.

Meanwhile, the game has lived on continuously. In France, tarot is still widely played as a card game, usually with a modern deck that uses French suits.

How the Marseille Tarot is used today

Today, the Marseille Tarot is used in several ways that coexist:

• As a game, in its historical form, by enthusiasts and historians of card games.
• For cartomancy, the divinatory tradition that grew from Etteilla and the nineteenth century.
• For esoteric study, following Lévi, Papus, Wirth and their successors.
• For personal reflection, an approach that treats the cards as a mirror for your own thinking, focusing on questions, images and decisions.

If you would like to see the pattern’s history with your own eyes, compare a facsimile of an old deck with a modern edition. You will notice small differences in the drawing of faces, the placement of colours, even the spelling of card names, which old card makers often abbreviated or misspelled. Arcanum XIII identified by its number alone, Le Mat outside the numbered sequence and La Justice at VIII remain constant. Looking at these variations is a good reminder that the Marseille Tarot has always been a living tradition of craftsmen copying, adapting and sometimes correcting one another over two centuries.

On Tarot Universel, we work in this last spirit, and we follow the Marseille tradition for card names, numbering and suits. Knowing the history helps: it reminds you that the images are human creations, made in a specific time and place, that have been read in many different ways. Your way of reading them can be thoughtful, centred on your own freedom to choose, and still respectful of a long tradition.

To explore the cards themselves, browse the 78 card guides or the major arcana combinations. And to use these old images on a present-day question, do a reading.