Marseille Tarot or Rider-Waite: The Real Differences When You Read

The Marseille Tarot and the Rider-Waite-Smith share the same 78-card structure, 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana, but they are read differently. The biggest practical difference lies in the minor arcana: Marseille “pip” cards show a geometric arrangement of cups, coins, swords or batons, so you read the number and the suit, whereas Rider-Waite-Smith minor cards show an illustrated scene you can read like a picture.

There are other differences, including card names, the swapped numbering of Strength and Justice, Le Mat outside the numbered sequence versus the Fool numbered 0, and Arcanum XIII identified by its number alone versus Death. Both decks are excellent tools. The choice depends on how you like to look at images and think. This article sets out the history of each deck, the differences that change your reading, and how to choose.

Two different histories

The Marseille Tarot is a pattern of cards produced in France, in Marseille and elsewhere, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The decks of Jean Noblet (Paris, around 1650), Jean Dodal (Lyon, early eighteenth century) and Nicolas Conver (Marseille, 1760) are famous examples. The pattern itself descends from the tarot cards that appeared in northern Italy in the fifteenth century. Originally, tarot was a card game: a trick-taking game still played in France and elsewhere today. Its use for divination, and later for personal reflection, developed from the late eighteenth century. The label “Tarot de Marseille” itself became common in the nineteenth century, long after the decks were first made. Our article on the history of the Marseille Tarot goes into more detail.

The Rider-Waite-Smith was published in 1909 in London by the publisher Rider. It was designed by Arthur Edward Waite, a writer on esoteric subjects, and drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith; both were associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an English esoteric society. The deck’s great innovation was to illustrate all 56 minor arcana with scenes, something very few earlier decks had done (a late-fifteenth-century Italian deck known as the Sola Busca is often cited as a precedent). Today it is the most widely used tarot in the English-speaking world and the template for most modern decks. You will often see it called simply “Rider-Waite”; many readers now add “Smith” to credit the artist who actually drew it.

The differences that change your reading

	Marseille Tarot	Rider-Waite-Smith
Numbered minor cards (ace to 10)	Geometric patterns: you read the number and the suit	Illustrated scenes: you read the image
Strength / Justice	Justice = VIII, Strength = XI	Strength = VIII, Justice = XI
The Fool	Le Mat, outside the numbered sequence	The Fool, numbered 0
Arcanum XIII	Traditionally identified by its number alone	Death
Suits	Batons, Cups, Swords, Coins	Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles
Court cards	Valet, Cavalier, Reine, Roi	Page, Knight, Queen, King
Reversed cards	Usually read upright; gazes and links between cards carry the nuance	Commonly read

Minor arcana: number or scene?

This is the difference that matters most in practice. In the Rider-Waite-Smith, the Five of Cups shows a cloaked figure mourning over spilled cups while two remain standing behind them: the image tells you the meaning, loss and the difficulty of seeing what remains. In the Marseille Tarot, the Five of Cups shows five cups arranged around a floral motif. You read the five, often understood as a stage of imbalance or movement after the stability of four, applied to cups, the suit of feelings and relationships.

The Marseille approach asks you to learn a logic: what each number means in sequence, and what each suit governs. Once you have it, it applies to all 40 numbered cards. The Rider-Waite-Smith approach lets you start reading immediately, but each scene carries a specific story that you either adopt or work around.

Card names

Several cards change name, and sometimes nuance. Le Bateleur (the Juggler or street performer) becomes The Magician. La Papesse (the Popess) becomes The High Priestess. Le Pape (the Pope) becomes The Hierophant. La Maison Dieu, literally “the House of God”, becomes The Tower. L’Amoureux, singular in French, shows a young man between two women with a Cupid above; The Lovers shows a couple beneath an angel. These names go beyond translation: they reflect different emphases. Translations of English decks into other languages multiply the variants, so the same card can carry three different names depending on the deck you hold.

The way of looking

The Marseille Tarot invites you to read relationships between cards: which way a figure is looking, what it holds, what repeats from one card to the next (a colour, a gesture, a posture). Its imagery is simpler and more stylised, with flat colours and strong outlines, which tends to draw attention to these structural details. The Rider-Waite-Smith, with its fuller scenes and backgrounds, invites you to enter each card like a small story.

Each approach has its strengths, and they train different reflexes. Marseille readers often become very attentive to position and gaze; Rider-Waite-Smith readers often become very fluent at reading situations from imagery.

Major arcana: closer than you might think

For the 22 major arcana, the two traditions are close enough that most of what you learn in one carries over to the other. Both decks include the same figures, from Le Bateleur / The Magician to Le Monde / The World, and the broad ideas associated with them overlap: L’Hermite as withdrawal and searching, La Roue de Fortune as cycles and change, Le Soleil as clarity and warmth.

The differences are mostly in detail and emphasis:

• The numbering swap of Strength and Justice changes the sequence if you read the major arcana as a journey.
• Le Mat standing outside the numbering in the Marseille Tarot gives him a special place, travelling alongside or across the whole sequence.
• Arcanum XIII carrying its number alone in the Marseille tradition encourages readers to see it as transformation and clearing, a symbolic ending that makes room for renewal, and many Rider-Waite-Smith readers say the same about their Death card.
• Waite introduced specific symbolism from his esoteric circle into some cards, while Marseille readers draw on the older imagery and logic of their own tradition.

If you learned with one deck and switch to the other, start with the majors. They will feel familiar quickly. The minors are where you will need to rebuild.

Reading Marseille minor cards: number plus suit

If the Marseille minors feel daunting at first, look for structure where you expected a scene. The trick is to read them as a combination of two simple ideas: what the suit governs and what the number expresses. Schools differ in the details, but a common framework used by many Marseille readers looks like this.

The four suits:

• Cups (Coupes): feelings, relationships, what you love and long for.
• Coins (Deniers): material life, money, work, the body, practical resources.
• Swords (Épées): thought, words, decisions, conflict, cutting through.
• Batons (Bâtons): energy, desire, creativity, initiative, action.

The numbers, read as a sequence from one to ten:

• Ace: the potential, the seed, everything still to come.
• Two: gathering, meeting, waiting before action.
• Three: a first burst of expression, sometimes naive.
• Four: stability, foundations, security.
• Five: a new step that unsettles the stability of four; questioning, a bridge.
• Six: pleasure, harmony, doing what you like.
• Seven: action in the world, effort, putting yourself forward.
• Eight: order, fullness, things in their place.
• Nine: maturity and transition, the moment before an end.
• Ten: completion, and the threshold of a new cycle.

Put together, the Four of Coins becomes material stability, a secure base; the Seven of Swords becomes putting your ideas forward, defending a position; the Two of Cups becomes an emotional encounter still finding its balance. This is more abstract than a Rider-Waite-Smith scene, and it has a real advantage: each card stays open to many stories. The same card can describe a salary, a body or a home depending on the question, because the logic is general.

Court cards follow a similar idea of progression. The Valet is learning and still hesitant, the Cavalier is moving and carrying the suit outwards, the Reine embodies the suit from within, and the Roi masters it and acts on the world through it. In the Rider-Waite-Smith, the same four ranks exist, but their meanings are again shaped by the scenes Pamela Colman Smith drew.

Which one should you choose?

A few honest guidelines:

• You love narrative images and want to start quickly: the Rider-Waite-Smith is more immediate for the minor arcana.
• You enjoy observing, comparing and finding correspondences: the Marseille Tarot rewards that kind of attention.
• You want to work mainly with the 22 major arcana: either deck will serve you well, and the Marseille majors are a classic place to start.
• You read in French or about French tradition: the Marseille Tarot is the historical reference, and most French-language tarot literature uses it.
• You use Tarot Universel: our interpretations and our 78 card guides follow the Marseille tradition (numbering, names, suits).

You can also use both. Some readers keep a Rider-Waite-Smith for questions where they want vivid scenes and a Marseille deck for questions where they want a more structural, observational reading. What matters is keeping each reading coherent: choose one system per spread, and stay with it.

A few historical facts are worth keeping in mind along the way. The Marseille Tarot is older than the Rider-Waite-Smith, and it is itself a French pattern derived from earlier Italian decks. Cartomancy with tarot started in France with Marseille-type cards, long before 1909, so both decks have a genuine divinatory history. And the two decks share a great deal of meaning: for the majors the overlap is large, and for the minors the difference is one of method more than of spirit.

In the end, the deck matters less than the question you ask and the way you let the cards help you think about it. To get started, do a reading, browse the major arcana combinations, or read our guide on how to ask a good tarot question.