Таро Марсельское: История и особенности колоды.

Standard pattern of 78 cards

The Tarot of Marseilles is a standard pattern of Italian suited tarot pack with 78 cards that was very popular in France in the 17th and 18th centuries for playing tarot card games and is still produced today. It was probably created in Milan before spreading to much of France, Switzerland and Northern Italy. The name is sometimes spelt Tarot of Marseille, but the name recommended by the International Playing Card Society is Tarot de Marseille, although it accepts the two English names as alternatives. It was the pack which led to the occult use of tarot cards, although today dedicated decks are produced for this purpose.

Research by Michael Dummett and others demonstrates that the Tarot pack was invented in northern Italy in the early 15th century and introduced into southern France when the French conquered Milan and the Piedmont in 1499. The antecedents of the Tarot de Marseille would then have been introduced into southern France at around that time. All Italian suited tarot decks outside of Italy are descended from the Milan–Marseilles type with the exception of some early French and Belgian packs which show mixed influence from Tarocco Bolognese (see below). The earliest surviving cards of the Marseilles pattern were produced by Philippe Vachier of Marseilles in 1639 and went up for sale in 2023, having recently been discovered by Thierry Depaulis.

The use of obviously Christian traditional images (such as the Pope, the Devil, the Grim Reaper and the Last Judgement) and indeed controversial images such as La Papesse have spawned controversies from the Renaissance to the present because of its portrayal of a female pope. There is no solid historical evidence of a female pope, but this card may be based around the mythical Pope Joan. One variant of the Tarot de Marseille, now called the Tarot of Besançon, replaces the controversial Popess and Pope and, in their stead, puts Juno with her peacock, and Jupiter with his eagle. Developed in Alsace at the beginning of the 18th century, this deck was popular among Catholics living in regions that bordered Protestant communities. Protestants, and Catholics living outside contentious zones, preferred using the Marseilles pattern. During the French Revolution, the Emperor and Empress cards became the subject of similar controversies and were displaced by Grandfather and Grandmother. It arrived in Besançon only at the beginning of the 19th century where mass production caused the current association of this deck to that city. An updated variant of the Besançon pattern is the Swiss 1JJ Tarot which is still in use by Troccas and Troggu players.

In the early eighteenth century the Marseilles Tarot was introduced in Northern Italy starting from the Kingdom of Sardinia, which also included the Savoy (now in France) and Piedmont, where the card manufacturing industry collapsed following a severe economic depression. The Piedmontese players did not have difficulties to accept the Marseilles Tarot, because the images were similar and even the French language captioning was widespread in many areas of Piedmont. Around 1820 some manufacturers active in Turin, capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, began to produce tarot decks in Marseille's pattern, but after few years they introduced captions in Italian and small variations in certain figures. For example, the Fool was not chased by a wild animal but had a butterfly in front of him. In a few decades, variation after variation, was consolidated the iconography of the Piedmontese Tarot, which therefore must be considered as a derivation of the Tarot of Marseilles. It is currently the most widely used tarot deck in Italy. In the Austrian ruled Duchy of Milan (modern day Lombardy), the Marseilles pattern also took root with Italian captioning starting around 1810. The "Death" card was given several names by different manufacturers such as il Tredici (Thirteen), lo Specchio (the Mirror), and Uguaglianza (Equality). Production of this pattern stopped before the First World War. Around 1835, Carlo Della Rocca of Milan engraved an elaborate interpretation of the Marseilles pattern. It became popular throughout Lombardy for the duration of the 19th century. It spread to Piedmont where a double ended version was adapted to local tastes and was popular until the 1950s.

A few early French decks exhibit certain curiosities. The 1557 luxury tarot deck by Catelin Geoffrey of Lyon, the early 17th century Tarot de Paris, and Jacques Viéville's Parisian deck (c.1650) share many things in common with each other and the Marseilles pattern but also have designs that seem to be derived from the Bologna Florence tradition as seen in the Tarocco Bolognese and the Minchiate. Adam C. de Hautot of Rouen produced a deck similar to Viéville's around the second quarter of the 18th century where la Papesse is replaced with Le 'Spagnol Capitano Eracasse (Italian > the 'Spanish Captain' Fracasso, a stock character from Commedia dell'arte). The Pope, often depicted holding an orb or a covered communion chalice, is replaced by Bacus (Bacchus, the Greek god of wine) holding a wine cup or bottle and a fruited vine cane or bunch of grapes while astride a beer barrel or wine cask; this was copied from the Deuce of Acorns found in some German suited patterns. The Hanged Man is shown still pendant but right side up. Temperance bears the motto FAMA SOL (Latin > "The Rumored or Omened Day") in a scroll, probably counseling patience until the day of their deliverance from Spain. The Tower is renamed La Foudre (French > "The Lightning"), and shows a man sitting beneath a tree being struck by lightning. The Star shows a man with compasses staring up at the sky next to a tower. The Moon shows a woman holding a distaff and The Sun shows a man on horseback bearing a banner. The World depicts a naked woman atop a globe parted into a moon in a starry sky and a sun in a blue sky over a tower on land. Unusually, the Fool is numbered as trump XXII likely showing that it functioned as the highest trump. Very similar decks were soon produced in the Austrian Netherlands (modern day Belgium) until the beginning of the 19th century. Packaging indicates that they were locally called "Cartes de Suisse". This may suggest that Belgian players were being influenced by a new mode of play emanating from Switzerland in which the Fool is treated like the highest trump as in Troggu. Dummett conjectures that this family of decks, especially those of Viéville's design, originate from the Savoy Piedmont Lombardy region and were used until the collapse of the local card manufacturing industry at the end of the 17th century (as described above). Viéville's ordering of the trumps is almost identical to 16th century orders in Pavia and Mondovì. However, no cards from this region before the 18th century are known to have survived to prove or disprove this theory.

All cards were originally printed from woodcuts; the cards were later coloured either by hand or by the use of stencils. Tarot was recorded as being very popular card game throughout France during the 16th and early 17th century but later fell into obscurity with the exception of eastern France and Switzerland. Very few Marseilles pattern cards from the 17th century have survived, chiefly among them are Noblet's. In contrast, dozens of decks from the 18th century have made it to the present. From eastern France and Switzerland, the game spread north to Sweden and east to Russia starting from the middle of the 18th century, making it one of the most popular card games of that era until being overtaken by Whist in the 19th century. One well known artisan producing tarot cards in the Marseilles pattern was Nicolas Conver (circa 1760). It was the Conver deck, or a deck very similar to it, that came to the attention of Antoine Court de Gébelin in the late 18th century. Court de Gébelin's writings, which contained much by way of speculation as to the supposed Egyptian origin of the cards and their symbols, called the attention of occultists to tarot decks. As such, Conver's deck became the model for most subsequent esoteric decks, starting with the deck designed by Etteilla forward. Cartomancy with the Tarot was definitely being practised throughout France by the end of the 18th century; Alexis Vincent Charles Berbiguier reported an encounter with two "sibyls" who divined with Tarot cards in the last decade of the century at Avignon. From the mid 18th to early 19th centuries, Marseilles and Besançon tarots were replaced by the French suited animal tarots throughout most of Europe. These were then superseded by genre art tarots like the Industrie und Glück. French players ignored animal tarots but during the 20th century, they switched over to the genre art Tarot Nouveau. Since then Jodorowky, in collaboration with Marianne Costa, published a Tarot book based around this reconstructed version of the Marseille deck.

In the English speaking world, where there is little or no tradition of using tarots as playing cards, tarot decks only became known through the efforts of occultists influenced by French tarotists such as Etteilla, and later, Eliphas Lévi. These occultists later produced esoteric decks that reflected their own ideas, and these decks were widely circulated in the anglophone world. Various esoteric decks such as the Rider–Waite Tarot deck (conceived by A. E. Waite and rendered by Pamela Colman Smith), and the Thoth Tarot deck (conceived by Aleister Crowley and rendered by Lady Frieda Harris)—and tarot decks inspired by those two decks—are most typically used. Waite, Colman Smith, Crowley and Harris were all former members of the influential, Victorian era Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at different respective points in time; and the Golden Dawn, in turn, was influenced by Lévi and other French occult revivalists. Although there were various other respective influences (e. g., Etteilla's pip card meanings in the case of Waite/Colman Smith), Waite/Colman Smith's and Crowley/Harris' decks were greatly inspired by the Golden Dawn's member use tarot deck and the Golden Dawn's tarot curriculum. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was essentially the first in the Anglophone world to venture into esoteric tarot. Francophone occultists such as Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, Eliphas Lévi, Oswald Wirth and Papus were influential in fashioning esoteric tarot in the French speaking world; the influence of these occultists has come to bear even on interpretation of the Tarot de Marseille cards themselves. Even though the Tarot de Marseille decks are not "occult" per se, the imagery of the Tarot de Marseille decks is claimed by Levi to have Hermetic influences (e. g., alchemy, astronomy, etc.). Referring to the Tarot, Eliphas Levi declares: "This book, which may be older than that of Enoch, has never been translated, but is still preserved unmutilated in primeval characters, on detached leaves, like the tablets of the ancients It is, in truth, a monumental and extraordinary work, strong and simple as the architecture of the pyramids, and consequently enduring like those a book which is the summary of all sciences, which can resolve all problems by its infinite combinations, which speaks by evoking thought, is the inspirer and moderator of all possible conceptions, and the masterpiece perhaps of the human mind. It is to be counted unquestionably among the very great gifts bequeathed to us by antiquity " However, Dummett has shown Levi's claim to be entirely fictitious. In the French speaking world, users of the tarot for divination and other esoteric purposes such as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kris Hadar, and many others, continue to use the Tarot de Marseille. In the mid 1990s Jodorowsky contacted a late descendant of the Camoin family, who has printed the Tarot of Marseilles since the 19th century. They worked together for almost a decade to put together a 78 card deck, including the original detail and 11 color printing. In 1998 Alejandro Jodorowsky and Philippe Camoin published a restored version of the Tarot of Marseilles based on a study of all the oldest existing decks and wooden moulds. in 2003, Daniel Rodes and Encarna Sanchez of Le Mat published El Tarot de Marsella: Los antiguos iconos del Tarot reconstruidos, featuring a reconstructed Marseilles Tarot. Igor Barzilai published a restoration of the Nicolas Conver tarot, hand painted, and using old paper techniques. In 2019, Krisztin Kondor and William Rader of Artisan Tarot of Denver, Colorado, published a restored and redrawn edition of the Nicolas Conver tarot. Artwork was added to bring the cards up to the popular tarot aspect ratio of 2.75″ x 4.75″. Two versions were published in French and English. Additionally, Kondor released a limited edition 11 3/4” x 16 1/2" linocut print of Le Bateluer, in eight colors of ink on archival quality paper.