Favorite Books to Learn How to Read the Tarot de Marseille

Thanks for sharing the list. Was it created by ChatGPT?

Can you give more information for this book and where it can be purchased?

“The Tarot de Marseille: A New Interpretation” by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Thanks!

Thanks for posting this!

I wasn’t able to get any hits for “The Tarot de Marseille: A Guide to Interpretation” by Mary K. Greer. Is this title correct?

Good catch! I think this is another book title that ChatGPT just made up.

I think this is a good example of why AI can’t yet be trusted to give reliable information. I guess this goes to show that book recommendations from real people are still relevant and important. :grin:

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Although it has taken me longer than expected, I’ve finally been able to record and post the video with the Tarot Books we recommend at 78 Puertas.

You can watch the video here:

My apologies for being so, so late :sweat_smile:

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Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack are my 2 favorite books on the Tarot.
You could only buy the one on Major Arcana.

The source of Jodorowsky’s, Ben Dov’s and Enrique Enriquez’ etc way of reading the cards was Tchalai Unger. In 1980 she wrote the LWB for the Marseille Deck. She was also Jodo’s teacher and I think she deserves much more attention in the tarot community. Her ‘way of tarot’ is sublime. If you read the cards with ‘rhymes’, analogies between the cards, gazes etc, Tchalai is the source and a her texts on the tarot a must read.

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Great book recommendation @Parzival!

I also agree that Tchalai Unger’s The Tarot: Why, How, and How Far is excellent. Because it is out of print, I don’t think it’s as popular or as accessible as the others listed above.

For those who are interested, here is a link to a thread on a forum where you can learn more about her. It also contains a link to download her book in English.

https://www.cultoftarotforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=2281

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I absolutely agree with you, @Parzival
That’s why I included her book in our video review of the best TdM books.
It’s really magnificent and eye opening :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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I’ve bought a used copy of “Tarot - How To Read The Future” by Fred Gettings published in 1973 a couple of months ago and thinking about to start reading it now. Have you read it? What do you think about it?

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I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the reviews look promising. Please let me know what you think, and I may try to get a copy too! :slightly_smiling_face:

It’s new to me, sorry. I have no idea :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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Do you have any update about your thoughts on the book?

I found Sallie Nichols’ “Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey” to be a fascinating look at the subject. I don’t think it’s been mentioned here.

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I found this one to be extraordinarily complementary to Ben Dov’s book, and generally useful for folk cartomancy. I’ve integrated elements of both approaches.

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@Jaysunkei Which book are you referring to?

Jung and Tarot is on my reading list. Does it contain a lot of practical applications?

I read it soon after the Jodorowsky and Ben Dov books and found it both useful and fun to read. If you’re a fan of Jungian psychology, it’s definitely worth it and can be useful to diversify your readings.

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I recently picked up Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive by Laetitia Barbier. This is now one of my favorite books on the history of the tarot.

I wrote a blog post about the book here:

I was so impressed with the book that I also wanted to offer it to our customers. So, it is now available in our shop.

If you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

There are a lot of good suggestions on this thread.

By and large, the literature in French on how to read Tarot mirrors what exists in English, in that it is formulaic: potted history of the cards; symbolism of the trumps; divinatory meanings and spreads, etc etc. Some of the better-known names from the 80s onwards include Kris Hadar, Alain Hadès, Colette Sylvestre, Marcel Picard, Georges Colleuil… And there are other more recent authors whose works might also be considered reasonably comprehensive and systematic: Bruno de Nys, Florian Parisse, Corinne Morel…

Very little if any of this has been translated into English, presumably because there are more than enough books already which purport to provide just this, i.e. the cartomantic method, with respect to the RWS decks (or any of the countless other decks since then, for that matter).

So what has been translated and published in recent decades is a motley selection of the outliers; tarologists who had their own more or less original or striking views on the matter, and which stand above the generic works on the subject.

Hence Tchalaï, Jean-Claude Flornoy, Jodorowsky (we’ll include him in a supposedly French “school”), and Marianne Costa, and so forth. The Anonymous Meditations could probably be included here as well, since they were originally written in French (although they do not deal with divination at all). From this rather ill-defined current in English, we have Yoav ben-Dov, Camelia Elias, and Enrique Enriquez’s works, and Jean-Michel David too.

But it is worth bearing in mind that the French literature did not develop in a linear fashion: for a long time, cartomantic books in French simply copied meanings taken from Etteilla’s works, but applied to Tarot de Marseille cards, until the Belle Époque occultists began to create their own decks, and adapt these definitions to suit their purposes - Papus, Oswald Wirth etc.

It is only really with Joseph Maxwell and Paul Marteau in the first half of the 20th century that one gets a sense of a comprehensive synthetic system based on the Marseille cards, and even then, Marteau had the benefit of being able to create his own deck (albeit one based on older models). Possibly only Eudes Picard preceded them in this endeavour, but he adapted the pip card imagery to suit his own astrological reading of Tarot. Both Maxwell and Marteau are now in English; Picard is an ongoing project.

Calvino of course merits an honorary mention, and it is instructive to consider his own readings on the subject when he was writing his book (André Virel etc).

Many texts by and about these authors have been translated on my blog, since this is a particular interest of mine.

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