Learn Tarot · The Suits in Depth · Lesson 15 of 25

Reading the Marseille pips

The numbered cards of the Marseille decks have no scenes, so you read them from number, suit and the design itself: odd and even, open and closed, bare and flowering.

Cards without scenes

Turn over a numbered card from the Conver deck of 1760 and you will find no story, only an arrangement of the suit: swords, batons, cups or coins among stems and flowers. That is how the pip cards looked for most of tarot's history. Apart from one fifteenth-century Italian deck, the Sola Busca, scenes on every card arrived with the Smith-Waite deck in 1909.

So how do you read a Five of Swords with no figures in it? The same way readers did for centuries: from the number, from the suit, and from what the design itself does. It sounds harder than a picture. In practice it is freer, because the card does not tell you a story you then have to fit to the question.

The four suits in their old dress

The Marseille suits are Batons (Wands, Fire), Cups (Water), Swords (Air) and Coins (Pentacles, Earth). The app uses the familiar names, but the old ones are worth knowing, because each suit has its own way of filling the card.

• Swords are curved blades that meet to make an oval, like a lens or a seed.
• Batons are straight staves that cross to make a woven lattice.
• Cups stand in rows and columns among sprouting stems.
• Coins sit in a grid bound together by vines and flowers.

Swords and Batons carry their number in Roman numerals at the sides; Cups and Coins you count.

Step one: number and suit

Start with what you learned in the lesson on numbers: the number gives the stage of the story, and the suit gives the element in which it happens. Put them in a short phrase before you look at anything else.

• Four of Coins: stability in material things. Security, savings, a firm base.
• Five of Batons: disruption in the will. A contest, friction, a challenge to a plan.
• Nine of Cups: feeling at full intensity. Deep satisfaction, a heart full.
• Two of Swords: the first meeting in the mind. Weighing two thoughts, a decision held in balance.

That phrase is the core of the card. Everything else refines it.

Step two: look at the design

Now look at the card. Many modern Marseille readers pay attention to what the arrangement does, and the Conver deck rewards it.

Odd and even in Swords and Batons. On the even cards the pattern is closed and symmetrical: the curved swords enclose a flower, the batons cross in a woven knot. Something contained, protected, balanced. On the odd cards a single straight sword or staff drives up through the middle of the pattern. Something has broken in: a decision, an action, an intrusion. A Six of Swords is a closed oval with a flower at its heart; the Seven is the same oval pierced by one straight blade. The Ten of Swords breaks the pattern with two straight blades crossing at the center.

Growth and bareness. Look at the stems, leaves and flowers. Many buds and open blossoms suggest life, growth and fertility in the matter; sparse, bare stems suggest something leaner. Cups heaped with foliage feel abundant; a Coin card bound tightly by vines feels held, perhaps held back.

Open and crowded. A card with space in it breathes; a crowded one presses. The Nine and Ten of Batons are dense thickets, which fits the strain of those numbers.

Step three: let the neighbors speak

Pips without pictures borrow detail from the cards around them. A common Marseille approach treats the trumps and courts as the main events and the pips as their circumstances. The Chariot followed by the Eight of Coins might be a move made for work; The Chariot followed by the Three of Cups, a journey to a celebration.

Count, too. Several pips of one suit say which element dominates the matter. Several of one number repeat its stage of the story, so three Fives make a strong statement about disruption. This is the synthesis lesson again, and with Marseille decks it carries more of the weight.

Special cards and reversals

A few pips carry extra decoration. In the Conver deck the Two of Coins is bound by a long ribbon that also bears the date, and the Four of Coins carries a shield with fleurs-de-lis; the Aces are large single emblems, the Ace of Swords crowned and the Ace of Batons held in a hand from the clouds. These are printers' marks and flourishes, but readers have long given the Aces and the Two of Coins extra weight as cards of beginning and exchange.

Reversals are awkward with Marseille pips: many look almost the same either way up. Plenty of Marseille readers simply do not read them and let the neighbors and the dignities do that work. If you keep reversals on in the app, it will still show you which way the card fell, so you can decide, as the lesson on reversals suggests, before you start.

A short example

Question: will this project come together? The cards: the Two of Coins, the Seven of Swords, the Ten of Cups.

The Two of Coins is the first meeting in material things: an exchange, a juggling of two resources, bound by its long ribbon, perhaps a contract. The Seven of Swords is a contest of minds with one straight blade breaking through the oval: one decisive idea, or one person, cuts through the careful plan. The Ten of Cups is feeling brought to completion. Together: the project rests on an agreement between two parties, it will be tested by one sharp intervention, and if it survives that, it ends in real satisfaction. No scene was needed to get there.

Try it

Choose the Conver deck in the app and draw three cards. For each pip, write its number-and-suit phrase first, then one thing the design adds (odd or even, bare or flowering, open or crowded), and only then look up its meaning.

Next lesson: Positions and spreads