When I started working on the “open reading” book I did not plan to publish my own Tarot deck. My initial idea was to use illustrations from one of the Marseille versions which were already in print. There were some available options, but the process of copyright negotiation which i got into has made me think again. I could see this as an opportunity to create the deck that I always wanted for myself: an edition of the Tarot de Marseille which captures their magic in the most effective way, with the smallest amount of distortions and omissions, and which can be used for practical reading.
The question where to look for this magic seemed simple enough. Among the different versions of the Tarot de Marseille, Conver’s 1760 deck clearly holds a special position. One could say that it stands exactly at the point of transition between the two great eras in the history of the Tarot. On one hand, the Conver deck is the product of four centuries of Tarot evolution and development. It appears just a short time before the great changes of the 19th century, while still continuing the old tradition of the earliest popular decks. On the other hand, among all the Marseille decks, this is the one that has made the strongest impression on later generations of Tarot readers and has become commonly regarded as the closest to “the real thing”. It has also served as the main source for the new 20th century Tarot de Marseille decks.
We can think of this in the following way. Clearly, Tarot cards have some mysterious qualities which have a strong effect on people’s minds. The concrete expression of this “magical” quality is the fact that the Tarot cards inspire and awaken strong emotions in so many people over so many generations. From such a viewpoint, we might agree that the Conver deck, which became the most influential and appreciated among all the traditional versions, is the one which expresses the magic of the Tarot cards in its strongest form. But until now, it couldn’t be found in a version both practically usable and faithful to the original.
There are decks available today which are facsimile copies of original Conver cards, preserved in libraries and private collections. But these cards have undergone centuries of use and wear. Their colors are faded, and many line details are missing or have become unclear. People buy these decks for research and study or as collector’s items, but they are not suitable for actual reading.
On the other hand, there are several new Marseille decks which are based on the Conver cards, such as the decks by Marteau and by Jodorowsky-Camoin mentioned above. These new decks are designed for use in reading, and they are printed in clear lines and fresh colors. But they are not really faithful to Conver’s original. Their creators have changed many of the card details, adding elements from other decks or just giving them new forms according to their own personal ideas.
The reason for this lies in the basic vision of the Tarot shared by these creators. In one way or another they were influenced by the idea that the original Tarot was conceived by a group of secret initiates, and then transmitted through the centuries with occasional mistakes creeping in. In this vision, later decks such as Conver’s are just degraded copies of the original and should therefore be rectified in order to restore “the real Tarot”.
My vision is different. First, as I have discussed in this chapter, the “secret tradition” theory seems to me very dubious historically. Second, even if we want to restore “the real Tarot” which supposedly existed in the late Middle Ages, we have no available original from that period. Therefore, in practice the method used by the new decks creators was to take the Conver deck, and modify it according to their own ideas of “what the real Tarot should have been”. And third and most important, for me the Tarot is not a representation of some message that existed in the remote past and was since lost. Instead, it stands in its own right as a mysterious and magical work of art, evolving through the centuries and achieving its most potent form in the Conver deck. Therefore, instead of trying to improve on Conver, I wanted to remain faithful to his original designs while minimizing the effects of my own interpretation.
For this purpose I have used copies from several decks of the original Conver cards. These decks were made at different dates, but their lines were all printed from the same original woodblocks. I have had to rely on several decks as in each one different details were blurred or missing. As for the colors, the decks that I used differed from each other because the coloring templates were worn out after some years of use, and in later printings they were replaced by inexact copies. As a rule I followed the earliest printing that I had available, which I assumed to be the closest to, if not the same, as Conver’s original design.
A special challenge, in all this, was the fact that in the Marseilles cards, and particularly in Conver’s deck, there are many anomalies in the image details. There are, for example, objects which merge into other ones, ambiguous shapes which can be interpreted as parts of different objects, irregular anatomical features or impossible perspectives, coloring which breaks the shapes of objects or continues outside their borders, irregularities and inconsistencies in the spelling of card titles, and so on. Creators of other restored decks have often tended to “correct” such anomalies. But whenever possible I have preferred to keep them. This is not only because I wanted to remain faithful to the original, but also because I feel that they enhance the feeling of magic and mystery of the cards, opening them up for new and interesting interpretations.
Still, what I have tried to create was not an exact copy of a 250 year-old deck, but a deck which would be used by people reading the Tarot today. This meant that however faithful to the original I wanted to be, I still had to make some adjustments and modifications. It is impossible to reproduce exactly the techniques, the coloring materials, the quality of the paper and the human expertise of the 18th century card industry. And even if we succeeded in imitating them with artificial means, the visual impression on the observer would be completely different. Our eyes and brains today are accustomed to a different world of images and graphic material. This is especially relevant in Tarot card reading, where the “feel” that the reader gets from the card is the most important factor.
These considerations influenced my work on the cards at several points. For example, sometimes I had to soften an “abnormal” detail which the modern printing techniques would make too eye-catching. I made especially significant changes in the face expressions, since an exact copy would have made them too gloomy and depressive to a present-day reader. Still, I tried to preserve the general physical traits. In addition, since there is no way of replicating the original shades of color pigments and the impressions that they made at that time, I have had to define for myself the scale of shades of the various colors. This means that a red surface in Conver’s cards is still a red surface in mine, but I had to decide which shade of red to use. In order to adapt the cards to the visual sensitivity of present-day readers, I tested early versions of the deck with various people, some of whom had previous knowledge of Tarot while other did not. I made necessary changes according to the reactions that I got. I thank all those who contributed their time and attention to this effort.
Most of these considerations I did not decide in advance. Instead, they emerged as part of the process, as if the cards and not myself were making the key decisions. Initially the idea was to undertake a short and simple project which would take a few months, just in order to illustrate a book. Yet a series of seemingly accidental circumstances along with the feeling I had, that the cards demanded more effort, eventually led to a three-phase process, with each phase taking about a year or a bit more.
At first, a commissioned illustrator (Leela Ganin) copied the lines of the old woodcuts on paper using an ink nib, working “by the eye” in real size. Then, a digital graphic designer (Nir Matarasso) did corrections on the line details, adding the card titles in letters copied from the originals as well as adding color to the high-resolution scans of Leela’s drawing. Finally, after learning the necessary digital graphics techniques myself, I re-shaped all the lines and colored areas comparing them with scans of the original cards, until the final result seemed to have the right feeling and a satisfactory degree of exactness.
The outcome of this effort was published in 2011 as “CBD Tarot de Marseille” (CBD standing for Conver – Ben-Dov). The cards were printed in Belgium by Carta Mundi. you can order a deck of CBD Tarot de Marseille here.