Tarot de Marseille

The Tarot de Marseille is a woodcut tarot pattern established in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose figures and order of the arcana became the reference for French-speaking tarot reading. It was not born in Marseille: the city was one of its major manufacturing centers, and the name only took hold in the nineteenth century, popularized in 1930 by Paul Marteau’s Grimaud edition. Its unillustrated pip cards are read by number and suit.