Tarot de Marseille vs Rider-Waite:
The Real Differences
In short
What is the difference between the Tarot de Marseille and the Rider-Waite?
The Tarot de Marseille leaves its 56 Minor Arcana unillustrated: five Cups are drawn as five cups, and you read them through number and suit. The Rider-Waite-Smith, published in 1909, draws a scene on all 78 cards, so the images teach you as you go. The two also number the trumps differently: Justice is VIII in the Marseille and XI in the Rider-Waite. Learn the Rider-Waite first if you want to be reading this week; come to the Marseille when you want a deck that stops suggesting the answer.
These are the two traditions everything else in tarot descends from. Almost every modern deck on the market is a Rider-Waite derivative, which makes the choice less about two products than about which grammar you are going to learn first.
1. What Each Deck Actually Is
Tarot de Marseille
A woodblock pattern fixed by card-makers in Lyon and Marseille during the 1700s and copied ever since. 78 cards: 22 trumps, 16 court cards, and 40 pip cards that carry no scene, only the suit sign repeated and arranged. The colours are flat, the line is heavy, and nothing on a pip card tells you how to feel about it.
Rider-Waite-Smith
Conceived by A.E. Waite, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, published in London in 1909. Same 78-card skeleton, one decisive change: every Minor Arcanum became a picture with characters, setting, and action. It is the ancestor of the overwhelming majority of decks sold today.
A point that trips people up: the Rider-Waite-Smith is not a modernised Marseille. Waite worked from the Golden Dawn's system, which had its own attributions and its own trump order. The two decks share a structure inherited from 15th-century Italian tarot, then diverge on almost every decision made after that.
2. The Five Differences That Change Your Reading
1. The Minor Arcana carry no picture
This is the difference everything else follows from. Open a Rider-Waite-Smith at the Five of Cups and you see a cloaked figure looking down at three spilled cups, two still standing behind him. The image hands you grief, and the detail you missed. Open a Marseille at the same card and you see five cups, arranged. Nothing narrates. You are looking at the number five and the suit of Cups, and you have to know what five does to a suit before the card speaks at all. That is not a flaw. It is a different instrument, one that refuses to put a mood in your head before you have looked at the spread as a whole.
2. Justice and Strength trade places
The Marseille numbers Justice VIII and Force XI. Waite reversed them so the trumps would follow the zodiac order used by the Golden Dawn, where Leo, the lion of Strength, comes before Libra, the scales of Justice. The change is small on paper and large in practice: any spread that reads position by number, and any correspondence table you copy from a book, is wrong for your deck if the book assumes the other tradition. Check which numbering your deck uses before you trust a printed table.
3. The thirteenth card has no name
In the Marseille pattern, trump XIII is printed with a number and no title. The Noblet deck of around 1650 is the exception that proves it deliberate elsewhere, since it does print LAMORT. The Rider-Waite-Smith names the card Death and gives it a rider, a banner, and a fallen king. Readers who work with the unnamed version tend to report a different relationship with the card: without a word on it, the mind is slower to jump to the literal reading.
4. Two ways of getting to a meaning
With the Rider-Waite-Smith you read the image, then check it against number and suit. With the Marseille you read number and suit, then check them against the table: which way the court figures are looking, which cards face each other, whether a suit repeats. Marseille reading leans hard on relationships between cards rather than on any single card. This is the part of the method Alejandro Jodorowsky spent decades formalising, and it is why his readings look nothing like a card-by-card interpretation.
5. The available help is not equal
If you learn in English, the Rider-Waite-Smith has a century of books, courses, apps, and forum threads behind it. The Marseille has a serious body of work too, but a large share of it was written in French and Spanish and never translated well. Anyone learning the Marseille from English sources will hit thinner material sooner, and will find more disagreement between the sources they do find.
Full Comparison Table
| Criteria | Tarot de Marseille | Rider-Waite-Smith |
|---|---|---|
| First appearance | Pattern printed by Lyon and Marseille card-makers in the 1700s (Dodal c. 1701, Conver 1760) | Published 1909 in London by William Rider & Son |
| Minor Arcana | 56 pip cards: suit signs arranged geometrically, no scene. Only the 16 court cards show figures | All 56 illustrated with a narrative scene, a first for a widely circulated deck |
| Suits | Bâtons, Coupes, Épées, Deniers (Batons, Cups, Swords, Coins) | Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles |
| Justice and Strength | VIII Justice, XI Force | VIII Strength, XI Justice (swapped to match Golden Dawn zodiac order) |
| Card XIII | Printed without a title, the nameless arcanum | Named Death |
| How you read the Minors | Number plus suit, then how the cards relate on the table: direction of gaze, repeated signs, sequences | Read the scene directly, then refine with numerology and suit |
| Time to a first usable reading | Weeks: the Minors say nothing until the grammar is learned | Same day: the images carry the meaning |
| Learning resources in English | Thinner. Much of the serious material is in French or Spanish | Vast. Effectively the reference standard of the anglophone tarot world |
| Typical price | $30–50 for a restored edition | $15–30 for a standard edition |
3. Which One Is For You
Start with the Rider-Waite-Smith if...
- →You want to lay a spread and get something out of it this week
- →You learn better from images than from tables
- →You expect to use books, apps, or courses written in English
- →You may want to read for other people fairly soon
- →You plan to explore modern decks later, since most follow its logic
Go to the Marseille if...
- →You already read reasonably well and want less imagery in the way
- →You are drawn to reading card relationships rather than single cards
- →You are interested in Jodorowsky, psychomagic, or the French tradition
- →You would rather learn a grammar once than memorise 78 pictures
- →The flat colours and heavy woodblock line appeal to you on sight
4. Where the Two Names Come From
The name is younger than the deck
No 18th-century card-maker sold anything called a Tarot de Marseille. The pattern existed, printed from woodblocks in Lyon and Marseille and traded across the region, but the label came later: the occultist Papus put it into circulation in 1889, describing a family of decks retrospectively. So the deck people call the oldest tarot is carrying a name coined by the esoteric revival that adopted it. Worth knowing before anyone tells you the name proves its antiquity.
Two surviving references anchor the pattern
Jean Dodal printed his deck in Lyon between roughly 1701 and 1715. Nicolas Conver followed in Marseille in 1760, and his woodblocks became the most copied source for later editions. When a modern deck says it is a restoration, these are usually the originals being restored. Alejandro Jodorowsky and card-maker Philippe Camoin published theirs in 1997, working from the Conver line.
The Rider-Waite-Smith was a deliberate break
A.E. Waite set the structure and symbolism; Pamela Colman Smith drew all 78 cards. Published by William Rider & Son in 1909, it was the first widely circulated deck to illustrate every Minor Arcanum as a scene, and that choice is why it took over the English-speaking world. Smith is generally reported to have been paid a flat fee with no royalties and to have died without money in 1951. That account is repeated consistently across tarot sources, though it rests on secondary ones rather than on a contract or estate record anyone has published.