I didn’t set out to buy a tarot set, and I never thought I’d pick a traditional design. There are so many beautiful sets out there and yet I didn’t feel a strong connection with any of them. In fact, I was quite turned off by the traditional Rider-Waite/Waite-Colman-Smith decks. There was nothing about them that made me want to touch them. It didn’t particularly bother me as I had no real plan to buy any, and yet I still kept looking.

When I first started looking for angel cards, I was drawn to one very specific blog post by James Himm Mitchell. I felt a real connection to those angel cards and this was confirmed when they arrived. But I had continued scrolling through his blog after reading his angel card reading, and I stumbled across an image of the 9 of Swords that I loved. Something about the symmetry and pattern almost vibrated inside me, but I couldn’t actually remember where I’d seen the image, nor what type of deck it was in. I had to wade back through all the sites I’d visited until I found it again and learned that it was from the CBD Tarot de Marseille deck by Dr Yoav Ben-Dov.

I started looking at the anything I could find on TdM but there definitely wasn’t as much information out there as there was with the many and varied RW/WCS decks. Many courses, books, blogs and YouTube videos have been written or made about Rider Waite, but very little about the Tarot de Marseille. I learned that the TdM has a much longer history than RW. That the deck I was looking at was based on a design from 1760 published by Nicholas Conver, restored by Ben-Dov in 2010, whereas the RW decks were originally published in 1910. There was also a lot of advice out there that said that the lack of imagery on the pip cards made reading them harder – everything had to be memorised and there was no symbols or icons to read to help you.

And yet.

This was still the deck that I wanted. When I finally found information about reading those tricky pip cards, it made sense to me. It linked the first ten Major Arcana cards in a sort of story arc, from the new energy of possibility, through exploring and learning more, mastering skills to the natural end of a cycle, it made sense to me. Further, it said that this same story arc linked the first ten cards of each suit. Learn the symbolism of the suits, remember the story arc, and those combine to give you a meaning. There may be some additional symbolism on the cards that you can look for, but the beauty of the TdM is that it’s up to you how you want to read them. There’s not a fixed interpretation or symbolism to miss on the pip cards at least. The TdM allows you to feel for yourself what is right, and fixing on a standard meaning almost defeats the purpose of the deck. Far from harder than RW/WCS, this felt liberating and a good fit for me. So into my Amazon basket they went and the next day I decided just to dive in.

Reading the TdM is also very open. In fact, Ben-Dov advocates a way of reading based on three points:

A tarot card does not have a fixed meaning

• A tarot card does not have a fixed meaning which can be learned in advance. Instead, the meaning emerges from what we see during the reading.
• The function of each position in a spread is not fixed, instead depending on the combination.
• We start by trying to see the whole picture

It is perfectly possible to use traditional tarot layouts but many people use a much more open 3 or 5 card layout. I saw various opinions on how to use the cards. There is a popular style of separating the Major Arcana out and using that alone for the reading. The theory is that those 22 cards cover the whole range of readings and is all you usually need, though you can supplement it by drawing additional minor cards on top of each to provide additional information. This has the added benefit for new readers in that there are fewer cards to learn as you start.

But as I held the cards in my hand, that didn’t feel right. I was meant to shuffle them as one and draw from the entire deck. So I did, and you know – I coped! I’m sure it wasn’t the swiftest or most readily given reading. I’m sure an experienced reader would look at my interpretation and disagree. But I could unpick the story arc and the suits, and I ended up with something that felt in my gut to be right. I was more fixed in my layout and style than Ben-Dov, but it was a good start. To help me with my reading, I had downloaded the CBD Tarot de Marseille app, and the Labyrinthos app. I combined these with my intuition to come up with my reading and that is how I intend to go forward. Holding true to the idea that the meaning from the TdM is open to the reader’s interpretation and not fixed & static.

So for someone who didn’t start out wanting a tarot deck, and who definitely didn’t like the traditional ones, I now have – and love – a very old style tarot deck. There is so much for me still to find out, but I look forward now to learning more about them and seeing what they bring to my readings.