English good books to learn to read Marseille

daphne

I am looking for some good books for Marseillle deck in English, I wonder what is out there these days.
Not keen now on history of the cards or other additional, though exciting and interesting, info on origins of these decks, but in a good, down to earth, thorough book on learning to read Marseille, especially the minors, on majors anyone can spend a novel for each.

I have the Jodorowsky book, but it is not my taste, lots of... quite personal take on cards, meditations, personal interaction with cards, etc. Also, very skewed, too much on majors, very very very little on minors. Little and not helpful to me.

I also have and read almost twice the book of Yoav Ben-Dov, Tarot - an open reading. While more to the point, I found it too simplistic, like a summary; every page felt short to me, like there is a wealth of information left outside.

I`d like to read a book on learning Marseille in somehow the same tone, richness, deepness, complexity and in the same time plain useful info as Rana George's book is for learning lenormand.

Any suggestions?
 

Barleywine

There is the Camelia Elias book Marseille Tarot: Toward the Art of Reading. It's a good addition to the tiny population of Marseille publications in English, although I found the English a little sketchy in spots, assuming it was a translation issue. The Open Reading left much more of an impression on me, and I've read it twice so far. You can get Jean-Michel David's Marseille course material in book form as a pdf document from Lulu for a very small amount of money compared to the paper version. I'm working through it now. Then there is Enrique Enriquez, but I've never pursued his on-line material and I'm not sure there is (or will be) a book. There seems to be no hope at present for a stand-alone reissue of Lee Bursten's "tarot kit" book from LoS, despite demand for it.
 

Lee

Hi daphne,

If Yoav Ben-Dov's book felt too short, then my book probably wouldn't have satisfied you. I was given length restrictions by LS and it turned out to be only 64 pages. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and it's apparently proved to be useful to many people, but if you're looking for something comparable to Rana George's Lenormand book, you would probably need to look elsewhere.
 

daphne

Hi daphne,

If Yoav Ben-Dov's book felt too short, then my book probably wouldn't have satisfied you. I was given length restrictions by LS and it turned out to be only 64 pages. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and it's apparently proved to be useful to many people, but if you're looking for something comparable to Rana George's Lenormand book, you would probably need to look elsewhere.

Apparently, there is not yet such a book for Marseille in English, so I guess I will read from more sources to satisfy my thirst for no non-sense deep treatise.
Thus your book, after reading about its clarity and structure, it would be a useful addition. I hope one day I'll have the chance to read it.
 

Lee

I think part of the problem is that there's really no history of a "tradition" of reading method with TdM the way there is with Lenormand. Rana's Lenormand book isn't based solely on tradition but there is a lot of tradition in it. If you're looking for tradition in TdM, there's not a lot of "there" there. My understanding is that in Europe, much TdM reading is done with trumps only. When pips are used, often some kind of number+suit method is used, but with a lot of variety between one reader and another, as with playing cards. The pip section of my book is mostly concerned with helping people create their own meanings based on number+suit.

It seems to me the most solid tradition one would find among people who used TdM would be the Golden Dawn tarot system. While the GD members used their hand-drawn decks for pathworking, when doing divination they would probably have used TdM's. So if you're looking for a meaty system, you might want to consider that, if the GD's system appeals to you (it doesn't appeal to me, so I've never particularly felt drawn to use it for TdM).
 

Nemia

I wish you could write a long and new version of that book now, Lee!
 

Lee

Thanks Nemia! I've attempted to contact LS about it, but have not heard back from them.
 

Lee

Another thought for daphne:

There are two old threads of mine that you may want to check out if you haven't already. One is a reading exchange between myself and le charior which, if I may be so immodest, is a good example of a TdM reading.

The other is the Pips-as-Trumps thread, where we explore using the trumps to inform the pip meanings, in contrast to the numerological approach I took in my book.
 

Barleywine

In working through JMD's book, I began looking at the Pips-as-Trumps model a little more closely. I was never satisfied that we're limited to associating the pip cards with the first ten trumps only, and all of the different approaches for dealing with that in the thread Lee linked never did much for me.

So I set all of the trumps up in two lines with the Fool off to the side (I through X and XII through XXI) with the middle card in the series (XI, Fortitude) as a kind of fulcrum between the two lines. Then I set the Ace through 10 of the "active" or "hard" suits (Batons and Swords) above the upper line, aligned with the Magician through the Wheel of Fortune, and the Ace through 10 of the "passive" or "soft" suits (Cups and Coins) below the lower line, aligned with the Hanged Man through the World. The two sets of pips can then be cross-referenced across the "divide."

Interestingly, if you subtract "11" from Trumps XII through XXI, you get the number of the trump card in the top line immediately above each one (for example, XII, the Hanged Man, minus 11 = I, the Magician. Coincidence? It does seem to have some internal consistency, making Fortitude a kind of "broker" between the two sets.

http://www.tarotforum.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=83370&d=1468855171

Lately I've been spending a lot of time with the number theories in Joseph Maxwell's book, The Tarot, which is TdM-based, and the graphic symbols in J.E. Cirlot's A Dictionary of Symbols, both of which cover the unity (One, or the Point), the binary (Two, or the Line), the ternary (Three, or the Triangle) and the quaternary (Four or the Square - material - and the Diamond - spiritual); everything beyond that is just a permutation of those basic concepts. I posted my explorations in another thread here.