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About this Deck
Tarot has been read and reread for centuries, each generation and each hand adding its own layer of meaning to the same seventy-eight cards. This tool holds three of those layers together: the Rider-Waite-Smith, the deck that shaped most modern tarot reading; the Marseille, the older continental tradition it grew out of; and the Inner World Tarot, a deck built from scratch as a landscape — no people or creatures, only place, each one a location in a world you can enter. Every card here carries the same core meaning underneath, whichever face you choose to read it by.
A Brief History
Tarot began as a card game, not a divination tool. The earliest decks were commissioned by Italian nobility in the 1440s (the Visconti-Sforza deck among them), and for centuries the cards were used for trick-taking games like Tarocchi. Divinatory use came much later — Etteilla was the first to write about reading tarot for fortune-telling, in 1770, and the first occult deck followed in 1789. The order of the trumps in use today was already largely fixed by 1470. In 1909, A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, working out of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, published the deck that would become the basis for nearly all Anglo-American tarot reading since — muting some of the deck's Christian imagery (Pope to Hierophant, Papess to High Priestess) while keeping its bones intact.
Traditional Rider-Waite-Smith
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1909 (the "Pam-A" first edition), now in the public domain. It is the deck most people picture when they picture tarot at all.
Traditional Marseille
The CBD Tarot de Marseille — a faithful reproduction of the traditional deck printed in Marseille by Nicholas Conver in 1760, restored and adapted by Dr. Yoav Ben-Dov in 2010 (www.cbdtarot.com), released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. This is the older continental tradition the Rider-Waite-Smith itself grew out of — no scenic pip cards, just the bare geometry of the suit.
Modern Inner World
The Inner World Tarot, created with AI collaboration by Kelly Fitzgerald. The majors are places within the landscape of this world — there are no people or creatures in them, only space, each one anchoring the world with its own archetypal energy, connected to a specific location that welcomes you to enter. The minors are connected to Direction, Season, and Element: North/Winter/Air (Swords), East/Spring/Water (Cups), South/Summer/Fire (Wands), and West/Autumn/Earth (Pentacles).
Three decks, one deck of truth.