Marseille Tarot Deck.

A candle, a cleared table, and a deck that asks you to do the seeing yourself. These are seventy-eight cards, woodblock-bright and unshaded, printed in the flat reds, yellows and blues that mark the true Marseille pattern.

The Tarot de Marseille takes its name from the French port city where, by the seventeenth century, printers had standardized this woodblock style across dozens of workshops; long before tarot meant fortune-telling parlors, these were ordinary playing cards. The Major Arcana carry their old titles in plain type along the border, and the Minor Arcana show only pips, with no painted scene to interpret on your behalf. Folklore holds that this pushes a reader back onto intuition. This edition is redrawn by hand from a nineteenth-century Marseille block set, so the linework keeps its slight woodcut irregularity.

Details

• Cards: 78, Major and Minor Arcana, with pip-only minors
• Stock: Matte and slightly toothy, made to be shuffled for years
• Box: Two-piece box of unbleached card, stamped in a single color
• Booklet: Upright meanings only; reversals are left to the reader

How to use

Shuffle with both hands until the deck feels loose rather than stiff, then cut it into three piles before drawing. Over time, let the pips build their own vocabulary in your hands.

A deck for people who like their symbols a little unfinished.