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Discussion
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Hello guys, I’ve been reading tarot for about a year now, but I still consider myself to be a beginner, because as it is just a hobby I haven’t been 100% dedicated. The deck that I work with is the deck of Marseilles, and I was wondering if it’s a good deck for beginners like me. I like the deck however I’ve had some difficulties determining when some cards are reversed (such as the [five of wands](https://tarotx.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/5-de-baton-marseille.png) here). If you could help me with these that would be great, and any other suggestions or tips are more than welcomed!
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Deck of Marseilles; Is it a good deck for beginners?
updated 3 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 7 Replies
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Marseilles is a very solid choice, but for beginners who want to build on the basics I’d recommend Rider-Waite deck, only because the majority of beginner books and reference websites use it for reference. However, do what speaks to you. A big part of your journey is going to be learning to build your intuition; what cards stand out in your readings, what do symbols mean for you personally. Tarot reading (at least in my experience, but I suspect in most peoples experiences) is deeply personal. I’m the end, there is no wrong answer. I have 2 decks already, and I’m actually going to be buying the Rider-Waite as my 3rd. From my personal collection, I am obsessed with the Pagan Otherworlds deck from Uusi, the quality is to die for. I also found “Holistic Tarot” to be the closest thing to a tarot bible I could imagine lol. It’s really a fantastic book (and huge!).
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Marseille works better with numerology, shapes and colours.
For reversed cards you can help yourself with the copyright logo that cards have.
But most Marseille users read cards together like doing equations 1+2+3=6 (and you must add the meaning of the card, the element, the number, the theosophic meaning of the number, the astrologic correspondences, the cabalistic sephirot meaning, etc… if you want of course LOL)
With this I mean not using spreads by separate like “in this position this card means this, and I this other position this card means that”, and not considering reversals.
You can see this in “The way of tarot ” by Jodorowsky where he make shapes with cards, mixing and confronting them like “when the magician looks at the empress in X context could mean this” or “when the king of swords gives his back to the page of wands in this Y context means that”… things like that.
That, or you can make a mark with a pencil at the bottom of each card.
Have nice readings 😀
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My first deck was Tarot of the Witches, which is a Marseilles style deck (The one by Fergus Hall, not to be confused with the more recent witch themed tarot decks. It’s an older deck. Yes, I’m old, I bought it in the 90’s.) For a very, very long time I just didn’t read reversals.
I also never really got “off book” with the pip cards. The Rider Waite pip cards have actual illustrations, which make reversals obvious, and for me are very helpful in intuitive reading. They also help trigger my admittedly bad memory. So the five of wands in an RW deck is actually five people clashing wands against one another in a loose circle formation. To me it’s a lot easier to recognize that as a card of conflict/strife since it’s illustrated.
In retrospect I would have been much better off with a simple RW deck to get started/learn with, even if the art didn’t “speak to me” the same way.
For my son, who is half Chinese and queer, I wanted to get him a representative deck, but knew he’d be better off starting with the traditional. My solution was to start him with printed tarot flash cards. I used the ones near the bottom of this page: https://benebellwen.com/tarot-readings/tarot-worksheet-downloads.
Someone else mentioned Holistic Tarot, the flash cards are from the author’s website. Besides the flashcards, she makes her study guides and a ton of other fantastic resources available for free download. I highly recommend her book when you have some extra cash on hand.
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Personal I consider marseilles advances because there are no illustrations for pips. I never learned how to read it
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Its not any harder than RWS there is just less published in English on it. Yoav Ben Dov has a great book on reading the Marseille.
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I started with a Marseilles deck. Mainly, because in my country that was the type of decks you could find at a book shop. If I wanted to get a RWS based one at that time, I would have had to order it. It came with a lofty colored book which was very thorough on the Major Arcana, but was very terse, if not bad at explaining Minor Arcana. That’s why I never managed to fully learn to use my deck. My take is that it’s not that much harder than RWS per se, but if you don’t have access to resources, it can easily become more daunting. I found it way easier to get back into tarot when my passion was revived about a year ago.
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You don’t have to read reversals.
