9 False Beliefs About the Tarot de Marseille That History Debunks

This is probably the most widespread belief, and one of the most inaccurate: Marseille did not produce playing cards until 1630 at the earliest. Historians have established that the tarot was invented in Northern Italy in the 15th century, most likely in the Milan region, before being brought to France during the military campaigns of Charles VIII (1494) and Louis XII (1499).

The oldest known surviving deck of the so-called “Marseille” type is the one by Philippe Vachier, discovered at an auction in… 2025! It was made in Marseille in 1639. As for the term “Tarot de Marseille,” it only appeared in the 19th century and was popularized by occultists.

All serious historical sources agree on this point: tarot was no different from other card games. Thierry Depaulis, in the catalogue of the exhibition Tarot, Jeu et Magie at the Bibliothèque Nationale, emphasized that the primary historical finding was “the omnipresence of the recreational aspect, attested by all the ancient sources consulted.”

Michael Dummett established that the divinatory use of tarot only appeared at the end of the 18th century, with Antoine Court de Gébelin and the Comte de Mellet. Tarot divination is a late invention, not an original purpose.

The notion of an original, pure, and canonical Tarot de Marseille is a modern construction. Thierry Depaulis demonstrated that there are at least two distinct variants of the so-called “Marseille” type, which he calls Type I and Type II, with notable differences across several cards.

Over the centuries, dozens of different card makers produced their own version: Jean Noblet, Pierre Madenié, Jean Dodal, Nicolas Conver, Claude Burdel, Jean Jerger… Each featured significant graphic variations.

What became established as “the” Tarot de Marseille in the 20th century is the Ancien Tarot de Marseille published in 1930 by Paul Marteau through Grimaud — a revised deck with standardized colors, incorporating elements from several earlier traditions. It is the product of a commercial and editorial construction, by no means the resurgence of an immutable archetype.

This is a common misconception. The ecclesiastical and civil prohibitions that targeted card games during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance were essentially aimed at gambling, not at divinatory practices. The Church condemned card-playing for its social consequences — the ruin of families, brawls, idleness — and because chance seemed to defy divine Providence.

As historian Isabelle Nadolny points out in Histoire du Tarot. Origines – Iconographie – Symbolisme, the condemnations of the era targeted card-playing as such, not the divinatory use of cards, which had not yet been systematized. Thierry Depaulis also notes that specific condemnations targeting tarot are extremely rare.

This idea, among the most romantic, is also among the best documented as being false. It originated in 1781 in Antoine Court de Gébelin’s work Le Monde primitif, in which he claimed without evidence that tarot was the survival of the mythical Book of Thoth, the sacred book of the Egyptian priests.

This theory was formulated at a time when Egyptomania was sweeping across Europe, and it was enthusiastically taken up by Etteilla, Éliphas Lévi, Papus, and Aleister Crowley. But it rests on no historical document whatsoever. Michael Dummett established that the claim of an Egyptian origin is entirely fictitious. Archaeological and historical research unambiguously places the birth of tarot in Europe, in Renaissance Italy.

The claim that the Tarot de Marseille is “the original tarot” from which all others derive is an oversimplification. Dummett showed that in Italy, from the very first decades of the game’s spread, three distinct branches had emerged, characterized by different trump orderings depending on the region:

The so-called “Marseille” tarot belongs to the Milanese branch — one branch among others, not the original source of all traditions. Other decks, such as the Florentine Minchiate with its 41 trumps, existed in parallel without ever “descending” from the Marseille model.

The idea that tarot images form a hermetic symbolic system, intentionally coded by initiates, is a retrospective projection by 19th-century occultists. Art historians agree that the trump images belong to the ordinary iconographic repertoire of the late Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance: allegories of virtues, figures of medieval cosmology, representations of social estates. These same images also adorned frescoes and tapestries.

The connection between tarot and the Kabbalah, alchemy, or astrology was the work of Éliphas Lévi (1856) and the occult societies of the late 19th century such as the Golden Dawn. It is brilliant as an intellectual construction, but has nothing to do with the intentions of the 15th-century card makers.

The legend associating the Romani people with the introduction of tarot to Europe is popular but has no documentary evidence. It was explicitly formulated for the first time by Papus (Gérard Encausse) in 1889 in his Tarot des Bohémiens, and was subsequently widely repeated.

However, the earliest historical mentions of tarot cards in Europe predate or are contemporary with the first major waves of Romani migration to the continent. No ancient source links the two phenomena. This association is a romantic invention of the 19th century, designed to bestow upon tarot a sense of exotic prestige and mystery.

The term “Tarot de Marseille” is recent. It is only attested in the second half of the 19th century, in the writings of occultists and collectors. They sought to unify under a single label various graphically different decks historically produced in several cities.

The name was adopted commercially in the 20th century, notably with the success of the Grimaud edition of 1930. In other words, the “Tarot de Marseille” as a defined category did not exist before the 19th century, and the term itself is the product of a retrospective reconstruction by the occultist milieu, not a contemporary designation used by the card makers who produced it.

In conclusion

The real history of the Tarot de Marseille is no less fascinating than its legends — perhaps even more so. It is the story of a card game born in the Italian courts of the Renaissance, a traveler, transformed by artisan card makers, and reclaimed five centuries later by romantics, mystics, and psychologists to become a universal tool for self-reflection.

Understanding what tarot is not historically is the key to better understanding what it has become, and why it continues, despite everything, to speak to us.