Where tarot comes from · Lesson 4 of 6

Waite-Smith and Marseille

Tell the two great tarot lineages apart, understand why Strength and Justice trade numbers, and read a minor card both by its pattern and by its scene.

6 min read

Two lineages, one deck

Almost every tarot you are likely to hold descends from one of two families. The older is the Marseille pattern, a set of woodcut designs that settled in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Jean Noblet’s Paris deck of about 1650 and Nicolas Conver’s Marseille deck of 1760 are the names historians reach for. The younger is the deck Pamela Colman Smith drew for A. E. Waite in London in 1909, published by William Rider and Son, which is why you will hear it called Rider-Waite, Rider-Waite-Smith or simply Waite-Smith.

Olivia belongs to the second family. Knowing the first one makes you a sharper reader of it, because many of the choices you take for granted on a card page were once decisions, and some are still argued over.

The Marseille pattern

In a Marseille deck the twenty-two trumps carry Roman numerals and bold, flat colour, and the Fool, Le Mat, has no number at all. The suits are batons, cups, swords and coins. Each Ace shows a single large emblem, sometimes held by a hand from a cloud. From Two to Ten there are no figures and no story: only the right number of suit emblems, arranged in a pattern and wreathed in flowering ornament. On a Marseille Five of Cups you see five cups and some foliage, nothing more.

Readers of this tradition read a pip from its number, its suit and the shape the emblems make on the card. That is a real skill, not a lack. It asks you to know what five means, what the cups stand for, and how the two meet, without a picture to lean on.

What Smith and Waite changed

Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, and her boldest move was to give every minor card a scene with figures in it. Illustrated pips were rare but not new: the Sola Busca tarot of about 1490 had done it, and Smith is thought to have studied its images shortly before she began. Waite is usually credited with guiding the Major Arcana closely, drawing on the symbolism of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, while the minor scenes are largely Smith’s invention. His guide, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, followed in 1910.

The scenes changed how people learn. A beginner can look at Smith’s Five of Cups, a cloaked mourner beside three spilled cups with two still standing, and grasp loss and what remains almost at once. The cost is that a scene can pin a card to a single story. A Marseille reader holds the number open; a Waite-Smith reader has to remember that the picture is one telling of the number, not the only one.

Why Strength and Justice swapped

On the Marseille pattern Justice is VIII and Strength is XI. The Golden Dawn exchanged them. Its members gave the trumps the twenty-two Hebrew letters in order, and each letter already carried an element, planet or sign from older Kabbalistic tradition. Eighth place fell to Teth, the letter of Leo, and eleventh to Lamed, the letter of Libra. With Justice at eight, the card of the scales would have carried the lion’s sign, and the card of the lion the sign of the scales. Swapping them put the lion with Leo and the scales with Libra. Waite followed the Order, so the Waite-Smith Strength is VIII and Justice is XI.

Neither order is a mistake. Many Marseille readers still keep Justice at eight, and the Thoth deck, another Golden Dawn descendant, keeps Adjustment at eight and Lust at eleven. When a book or another reader counts the Majors differently, check which lineage they are working in before deciding who is wrong.

Where Olivia stands

Olivia follows Waite-Smith order and naming throughout. The Fool is zero, Strength is VIII after the Chariot, Justice is XI after the Wheel of Fortune, the courts are Page, Knight, Queen and King, and the fourth suit is Pentacles rather than coins. Every minor card is carved as a picture rather than a pattern, and many keep Smith’s compositions: the Five of Cups still has her cloaked mourner, three fallen cups and two standing, though Olivia sets a small gold heart on the bowl of one standing cup. Where Olivia departs, the page says so: Smith’s Fool walks under a sun, and Olivia’s looks up to a gold star.

Each card page keeps the older lineage in view. On the minor cards, the number note is the Marseille skill: what the number means in this suit, with or without a picture. Nearly every tradition note says what the Marseille card showed and what Smith changed, and some reach back to the Sola Busca. Read both and you are using two ways of seeing at once.

A worked example

The Three of Swords, read twice

Three of Swords

Open the Three of Swords and cover the image with your hand. Read it the Marseille way first, from the number note alone: three is the first number that makes a shape, and in Swords, the suit of mind, what takes shape is understanding, which can hurt. That is already a reading. The tradition note tells you a Marseille deck would show you nothing more than curved and straight blades in a pattern.

Now uncover it. The pierced heart first appears in the Sola Busca tarot and reached most readers through Smith’s 1909 card, but Olivia carves it in its own way: an anatomical ivory heart rather than a valentine, its great vessels rising from the top, three ivory blades meeting inside it, fine slanting lines scratched into the lapis below the clouds. Gold runs over the heart in thin rivers that branch like veins or mended cracks.

Notice what the scene adds and what it narrows. The number gave you understanding that hurts. The carving gives you a place in the body where it lands, and in those gold seams, a question the Marseille pip could not ask: what here is already being mended?

Try this

Open the Strength and Justice card pages, read both tradition notes, and copy into your notebook the sentence in each that explains the swap.
Pick any card from Two to Ten, cover the picture, and write one line from its number note and suit alone.
Uncover the card and write one line from the carved scene, then note what the scene added and what it narrowed.
Open three more minor card pages, find where each tradition note describes the Marseille card, and list what the older deck showed instead.

To remember

Marseille pips show number and pattern; Smith’s 1909 cards gave every minor a scene.
The Golden Dawn moved Strength to VIII and Justice to XI; Waite and Olivia follow.
Read a minor card by its number first, then let the scene add to it.