Origin 1650 to 1760
The Tarot de Marseille is not one deck but a pattern: the standard arrangement of 78 cards that crystallised among the woodblock card-makers of northern Italy, Lyon and Marseille across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has no single author, no first edition and no fixed year. Its landmarks are printers rather than authors (Jean Noblet in Paris around 1650, Jean Dodal in Lyon in the first decade of the eighteenth century, Nicolas Conver in Marseille in 1760), each cutting the same trumps in the same order under the same French titles. The name "Tarot de Marseille" is itself a twentieth-century label applied in France long after the pattern it describes, and the deck was made for a trick-taking card game before it was ever made for divination.
Two features matter when comparing it with the deck most modern readers learn from. First, the numbering: Marseille gives La Justice the number VIII and La Force the number XI. Rider-Waite-Smith reverses them, putting Strength at VIII and Justice at XI, so a trump number is not a reliable identifier across decks. Second, and more consequential, the pip cards are not scenic. The Five of Cups in a Marseille deck is five cups in an ornamental arrangement, not five cups and a mourner; the numbered minor cards carry no narrative image at all. Marseille reading therefore works from number and suit rather than from a picture, which is a genuinely different method, not a poorer version of the same one.
The trumps are titled in French and several names differ from their English equivalents: Le Mat (the Fool, and unnumbered rather than zero), Le Bateleur (the Magician, literally the mountebank), La Papesse, Le Pape, L'Amoureux in the singular, La Maison Dieu (the Tower), and a thirteenth trump that most Marseille printings leave untitled rather than name Death. The titles are given here in their plain forms, without the French accents.
The four suits are Batons, Coupes, Epees and Deniers (clubs, cups, swords and coins), the Latin suit signs the pattern inherited from Italy and Spain, against the Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles of the English-language decks. The pip cards carry the numeral and the suit signs and no title at all; the French names used for them here are the conventional ones rather than anything printed on the card. Two of the suits are drawn as interlace and two as counted objects. In Batons and Epees the signs cross one another in a lattice, the Epees blades curved into almond shapes, the Batons straight, and every odd number from three upward adds one further sign standing upright through the centre of the crossing, so the odd cards are structurally unlike the even ones. In Coupes and Deniers the signs do not touch: they are ranged in symmetrical groups with floral ornament in the spaces, the even numbers dividing evenly and the odd numbers setting one sign apart from the rest. Each of the four Aces is a single large emblem rather than a count, and each is unnumbered.
The sixteen court cards are the only figural cards among the fifty-six and the only minors that print a title on the face. The ranks are Valet, Cavalier, Reine and Roi, corresponding one for one with the Page, Knight, Queen and King of the English decks, and the woodblock spellings move about between printers: ROY for roi, REYNE for reine, BASTON for baton, COVPE with a V for the U, DEPEE run together.
How the pips are read is a real body of practice and a genuinely contested one. With no scene to interpret, meaning is built from the number and the suit together, most schools working from a decad in which each number from one to ten carries a fixed character that the suit then colours. The best-known modern statement of it is Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa's, developed alongside Philippe Camoin's restoration of the Conver woodblocks; the older French cartomantic lists descending from Etteilla assign quite different values to the same cards, and the two do not reconcile. There is no single authoritative table, and the atlas does not supply one. What is not legitimate is reading a Marseille pip through the Rider-Waite-Smith picture of the same card: the mourner on the Five of Cups, the walker on the Eight of Cups and the pierced heart on the Three of Swords are Pamela Colman Smith's inventions of 1909 and carry no authority over a pattern that predates them by two centuries.