Deck Review: Pixie’s Marseille Tarot

A recent Kickstarter addition to my collection is Alejandro R. Rozan‘s Pixie’s Marseille Tarot. I don’t own many Marseille decks – my well-documented Dread of The Pip may have something to do with that, lol – but this one intrigued me, partly because its whole schtick is exploring a fascinating question: ‘what might the Tarot de Marseille look like if reimagined through the artistic vision of Pamela “Pixie” Colman Smith?‘ Or, to put it another way: what if Smith had been commissioned to illustrate a Marseille deck, rather than asked to draw Waite’s?

In the introduction to the guidebook, Chris Onareo describes Pixie’s Marseille Tarot as a “magnificent bridge between both traditions,” and that’s really the heart of the deck. Rather than turning the Marseille pips into fully illustrated RWS-style scenes, it retains their classical arrangements while filtering them through Smith’s distinctive visual language. Thomas Witholt at The Hermit’s Mirror describes this as a way to “make learning to read Marseille cards more accessible,” adding that this “is a good thing for the tarot community.”

And as someone whose maximalist brain tends to look at a traditional Marseille pip card and go absolutely not, I can testify to the appeal 😂. Keeping those classical pip arrangements while giving them a little more visual character offers a way to see – and perhaps actually learn to read – the Minor Arcana differently. Basically, it’s a gateway drug to the pips.

Some people are obvs gonna to hate this deck because they’re purists – and I say that with absolutely no judgement; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a purist in matters of esoteric taste! There are those who, for v understandable reasons, think the TdM and the RWS have no business getting up in each other’s grill. But I like it. I like that it’s a weird little mash-up of different Tarot traditions and different artistic styles. I like that someone has taken the two Big Boys of Tarot, shoved them towards each other and said: “…now kiss!”

Rozan was born in Cuba, a place he describes as “shaped by contradiction”, explaining that this tension has always marked his artistic sensibility. So perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s drawn to a project which deliberately brings two seemingly contradictory Tarot traditions together. His first love was very much the Tarot de Marseille – he recalls seeing it for the first time and feeling as though he was “standing before something ancient, timeless, and magical”. Its colours and patterns reminded him of stained glass, seeming to “belong more to a medieval church than to a simple deck of cards”. But he was equally struck by the fact that these were images created when printing itself was still in its infancy: the figures are “direct” and “awkward”, almost as though drawn by “someone still learning the craft”. Rather than detracting from the cards, though, these imperfections made them feel more alive to him, giving them character.

He also makes an interesting point about the strange “emotional disconnection” of many of the Marseille figures. Their expressions can seem completely out of step with what is actually happening around them – but that’s because these aren’t really people in the way we might understand the more narrative figures of the RWS. They are archetypes: “states, ideas, forces”, a distinction which becomes particularly interesting in a deck which deliberately introduces Smith’s much more whimsical artistic language into that older, stranger world.

You can also trace quite a clear journey towards Pixie’s Marseille Tarot through Rozan’s earlier work. One of his earliest decks, the Tarot des Ambiguïtés, was an homage to the TdM. Later, he created the Rider-Marseille Tarot, filtering “the narrative language of the RWS” through the visual aesthetic of the TdM. It was while working on this deck that he became increasingly interested in Smith as an artist in her own right, particularly “the centrality of line as a language, the elegance with which each stroke sustains the image”. And so we arrive at Pixie’s Marseille Tarot, which essentially flips that earlier experiment around: rather than bringing the RWS into the visual world of Marseille, what happens when you bring Marseille into the visual world of Pixie?

Because, of course, the two traditions speak quite different visual languages. Rozan describes the TdM as a “structural system”, whose language is based on “repetition, number, and visual rhythms”. The RWS, on the other hand, tells “a story.” As Rozan puts it, the TdM appeals to “emptiness and projection”, while the RWS appeals to “identification and story”. Pixie’s Marseille Tarot sits rather intriguingly in the space between the two.

Who’s That (Manic Pixie Dream) Girl?: The Life and Art of Pamela Colman Smith

A little “Pixie” context is useful here, because Pamela Colman Smith was far more than simply the woman Waite commissioned to illustrate his deck. By 1909 she already had a distinctive artistic language of her own, shaped by theatre, folklore, feminism, mysticism, music and a wonderfully bohemian circle of artists and writers. Long before the RWS, her work was already full of symbolic landscapes, archetypal figures and strange, dreamlike imagery – so there was plenty of Pixie in those cards, not just Waite (whatever he might like to claim, lol).

I initially wrote about 2,500 words on her here before realising I had accidentally hijacked my own deck review, lol. JUST SHOW US THE PHOTOS OF THE CARDS, LUCY, NOT THE RAMBLINGS OF YOUR DAY SPENT PROCRASTINATING FROM DOING YOUR ACTUAL JOB 😂😂😂. So, if you want to know more about her fascinating and complicated life – including Jamaican storytelling salons, suffrage art, synaesthesia, the Golden Dawn, being woefully underpaid for the RWS, and why I’m not entirely convinced by the “Pixie died penniless in obscurity” narrative – you can disappear down the rabbithole with me here.

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The card stock is a little stiff and initially quite tricky to shuffle, although I’m sure it’ll ‘break in’ with use. BUT it has a high-gloss, slidey finish, which definitely helps. The cards have silver gilt edges, which look lovely and, given the deck’s vintage aesthetic, will probably still look pretty deec once they inevitably get a bit battered around the edges. It comes in a sturdy clamshell box, although mine sadly arrived dinged up at the corners (though nowhere near as bad as my Queer Revolution Tarot, which looked like it had been mauled by a hungry dog with a personal hatred of cardstock somewhere on its journey across the Atlantic 😂).

I love the muted, tea-stained vintage vibe of the card backs. They look like an old RWS that’s been loved and handled and, crucially, allowed to live – yesss 🙌.

The guidebook is a sturdy hardback tome: full-colour, beautifully produced, and packed with detail about the creative process behind the deck, as well as the design decisions behind individual cards and brief interpretations of their meanings (and they really only need to be brief, given that this is obvs a v. traditional deck). Best of all, it was included as part of the original Kickstarter package rather than being some additional extra you have to shell out for separately or: sorry! – no guidebook for you. J’approuve.

The art style is cool and quirky, and I love it. HOWEVER. Pen and Inkling, one of my favourite Tarot commenters over on Reddit, pointed out that the figures look a bit like Treasure Trolls and now I simply cannot unsee it 😂. As they put it:

“This is a deeply superficial hot-take, but… this deck is beautiful and I can’t get past the head-to-height ratio. It’s not so jarring in a Marseille deck because the medieval woodcuts are rough and abstracted anyway, but to me these otherwise-beautiful figures read a little like Treasure Trolls. This isn’t a fault with the artist. Other people more interested in style than representative proportion? Darius and Xerxes. The people who built Chartres. Marseille card artists. Picasso. Etc. But I think it’s an unexpected anachronism that comes from combining the styles: like hey, why did some old-timey artist get so good at rendering fine line work without ever confirming adult proportion?”

And I think “unexpected anachronism” nails it. The proportions make perfect sense as part of the chunky, stylised visual language of old Marseille woodcuts, but transplanted into all that delicate PCS-esque linework they suddenly become much more noticeable. Not bad – I actually think the slightly odd proportions add to the deck’s charm – but once someone has whispered ‘Treasure Troll’ into your ear, there is no going back 😂.

There was also a bit of controversy over on Reddit about Rozan’s decision to incorporate Smith’s distinctive PCS caduceus-style monogram onto each card. Smith famously signed every card except the Fool in the original RWS this way and, given how thoroughly her name was subsequently erased from the deck itself, that little monogram has taken on a significance of its own – a kind of symbol of artistic authorship and Smith quite literally making her mark on the work.

Rozan explains that he wanted to retain it here “not as a claim of authorship or as deception, but as both a symbol and a tribute”. As he puts it, the monogram does not say “this work belongs to Pixie”, but rather “this work communes with the spirit of Pixie”. And I can absolutely see the thinking: if the whole conceit of the deck is what might a Marseille deck look like if Pamela Colman Smith had drawn it?, reproducing one of the most recognisably Pixie elements of her cards makes conceptual sense.

BUT. I can also understand the people whose response is essentially: dude, maybe don’t sign your own artwork with someone else’s signature 😂. Particularly when that signature has become so bound up with questions of Smith’s authorship and historical erasure in the first place. So I think this one probably comes down to whether you read the PCS monogram as part of the visual language being recreated, or as an artist’s personal signature that shouldn’t be reproduced by somebody else. I can see both arguments.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from Pixie’s Marseille Tarot

I might actually be able to keep this review fairly short and sweet for once <gasp>, because the symbolism is obvs pretty conventional in a deck that deliberately models itself on two of the most famous Tarot systems in the world. So rather than going through everything with a fine-toothed comb, I’m mostly going to focus on the places where Rozan does something interesting in bringing those two traditions together.

I really like the Popess/High Priestess, for example. Rozan describes combining the “firm[ness]” of the TdM figure with the “soft[ness]” of the RWS, and I think it works beautifully. I also love the way he’s hidden her associated Hebrew letter, Gimel (ג – the camel) within the folds of her robes. And I really like the camel as a metaphor for the High Priestess. A camel is equipped to cross an environment that appears barren and inhospitable, carrying within itself what it needs to survive the journey. There’s something super Priestess-y about that: she asks us to venture beyond the comfortable, visible world and into the unknown, trusting in resources that are hidden from view. The things buried in our subconscious can be frightening, but the High Priestess is our camel across that strange inner desert – quietly carrying us through to the other side.

The Emperor also has his Hebrew letter, He (ה), blended into the cracks and crags of the rocky mountains behind him, further rooting his archetype in solidity, stability, and structure. Rozan also draws attention to the TdM convention of numbering the card IIII rather than IV. Read this way, four isn’t created through subtraction – taking one away from five – but through the steady accumulation of I + I + I + I. Nothing is taken away; the Emperor is built. Layer upon layer, stone upon stone, he becomes structure, boundaries, authority, and all the stability (or rigidity) that comes with them.

The Lover follows the TdM tradition too, and regular readers will know that I actually prefer this version to the RWS. Rather than an Adam-and-Eve-ish couple gazing at each other, we have a man standing between two women, apparently faced with a choice while Cupid hovers overhead, ready to make it for him if he dilly-dallies too long. The imagery has often been linked to the ancient story of Hercules at the crossroads, in which Hercules must choose between two women representing Vice and Virtue – essentially, the easy-but-wrong path and the difficult-but-right one. It’s a wonderfully Tarot-y archetype: we’re forever arriving at crossroads where we have to choose not simply what we want, but which path feels true to the person we want to be.

And I think that makes the TdM meaning of the card beautifully clear: love is a choice. Choose the path, person, job, home, life – whatever – that your heart recognises as right, and then commit to it rather than standing forever at the crossroads waiting for Cupid to make the blimmin’ decision for you. I also love that in the TdM it is Le Amoureux – The Lover, singular. The focus isn’t really on the romantic couple at all; it’s on him, the person who has to choose.

And I love love LOVE what Rozan has done with Cupid here. Rather than the traditional little winged cherub, he’s transformed him into one of Pixie’s strange RWS angels – complete with that fabulous fiery-leafy hair we see above the Lovers in Smith’s original card. It’s such a clever little point of fusion: the composition and meaning remain unmistakably Marseille, but hovering above it all is pure Pixie. [Author’s note: Oh look – surprise! – this review is turning out just as rambly as all my others after all 😂]

I’m also very pleased that the Wheel of Fortune retains the deeply uncanny Marseille Wheel, which I have a bit of a soft spot for. Unlike the RWS, where the Wheel floats rather serenely in the sky, older versions of the card draw much more directly on the medieval Rota Fortunae: figures cling to the Wheel as they rise, reign, fall, and begin the climb again. The message is basically nothing lasts forever. Kings and fools alike get carried around by Fortune; today you’re riding high, tomorrow you’re face-down in the dirt. Or, as I put it in my Wheel of Fortune deep dive: shit happens. 😂

The Marseille version makes this even weirder by turning the figures themselves into strange human-animal hybrids, complete with tails and donkey-like ears. There’s a olde timey LOLZ medieval joke buried in there: ass-like features were associated with stupidity, stubbornness, and vanity, so the creatures climbing and reigning on the Wheel are quite literally making asses of themselves – puffed up by their temporary good fortune and apparently oblivious to the fact that they’re about to come crashing back down. Rozan adds another interpretation that I really like, though: these creatures also suggest that “there is no fixed form. There is transformation. The Wheel does not only turn, but it also transforms.” And that feels like a meaningful extension of the usual what goes up must come down reading. The Wheel doesn’t simply change our circumstances; being carried through those cycles of success, loss, struggle, and renewal changes us too.

I’ve also really come round to the deeply creepy TdM Death over the years. At first, all those severed hands, feet, and faces poking out of the ground were a bit much, lol, but the more I’ve read about the imagery, the more I’ve come to love it. Rather than seeing Death as simply scything people into pieces, I like Wayne Limberger’s suggestion that we might read him as cultivating the strange field around him: the body parts become almost like seedlings planted in fertile earth, ready to grow. Sallie Nichols similarly describes them as “already springing to life”, with Death preparing the ground for the eventual rebirth we’ll see in Judgement. Death becomes less a grim executioner and more an unlikely gardener (the constant gardener, indeed) – cutting things back so that something new can grow. I particularly love Limberger’s suggestion that we might imagine his scythe eventually “hammered into a ploughshare”: the instrument that cuts down the old becoming the tool that prepares the earth for what comes next.

Rozan points out another detail here that I’d never really thought about: Death himself is missing a foot. This quirk appears in some historical TdMs, most notably the Conver Tarot, and Rozan interprets it as suggesting that the skeleton hasn’t only been hacking merrily into the world around him like some demented Leatherface persona – he has also cut into himself. As he puts it, this makes Arcanum XIII “not just an agent of transformation but transformation itself”. And I love that. Death doesn’t get to stand untouched outside the process he represents; nothing is exempt from transformation, not even death.

Ah, the Tower, my problematic fave. I do like a TdM Tower, with all its castration symbolism and the fiery sun of God’s wrath blazing down from above. There’s something very Book of Revelation about the whole thing: the sixth seal is opened, there’s a great earthquake, the sun turns black “as a sackcloth of goat’s hair”, the moon turns to blood, the stars fall from heaven like figs from a wind-shook tree, mountains and islands are wrenched from their places, and everyone from kings to commoners runs for the rocks crying, “hide us… from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?” (Revelation 6:16-17). It’s that same wonderful sense of cosmic order going spectacularly tits-up: earthly structures are powerless when something much, much bigger comes crashing through.

Although I particularly enjoy the fact that Rozan’s two falling figures seem remarkably chill about this particular apocalypse 😂. One looks less like he’s been violently ejected from a collapsing tower and more like he’s casually practising a handstand, while the other appears to have spotted some particularly rare mushrooms at the base of the building and decided it’s time for a spot of light foraging. WHO SHALL BE ABLE TO STAND? Well, not these two apparently, but largely by choice.

Rozan also draws attention to the fact that the Sun Twins wear collars, just like the two figures in the Devil card – but here the chains are gone. I love that visual rhyme. Under the Devil, connection has become bondage and attachment; under the Sun, it becomes connection without captivity. They can belong to one another without being bound to one another.

The Ace of Wands looks like some kind of severed limb, all blood and pulp. An Ace is raw potential, and this one looks RAW raw, lol. And it got me thinking about how often Tarot decks lean into the pain of the Wands suit. I’m thinking of the Thích Quảng Đức-coded figure in the Yukika Tarot‘s Ten of Wands, the dying woman on the Black Tarot‘s Nine, the ravaged, flaming face of the King of Wands in the Blood Moon Tarot. We tend to think of Swords as the painful suit, but Wands can be painful too, just in a less obvious way. Swords often hurt because something is being done to us (or because our own thoughts torment us); Wands often hurt because of what we are desperately trying to do. The fire that fuels us also burns us. Creation and passion are glorious, but they can also hurt: exhaustion, obsession, sacrifice, pouring so much of yourself into something that it takes a little piece of you with it. The Ace is life handing you the gift of inspiration – still bloody and pulpy because it’s just been freshly hacked out of your soul, haha.

I love how Rozan’s managed to make a bunch of sticks look so celebratory for the Four :-). The ribbons, flowers, greenery, and sunny yellow background turn the rigid geometry of a TdM pip card into something that feels genuinely festive, while the little castle in the distance gives us another nod to Smith’s RWS scene. It has all the visual order and stability you’d expect from a Marseille Four, but decorated with the fruits of what we’ve built: structure with the bunting up, basically 😀.

Some folks online have found the weirdly disembodied arms in the Five of Wands a little off-putting, but I really like them, they capture a sense of slightly chaotic struggle. And without faces or bodies to tell us exactly what’s happening, it becomes almost pure struggle: everyone pushing their own way, nobody yielding, all that competing energy getting tangled together.

And then for the Ten I really like how Rozan’s managed to cleverly underlay Smith’s struggling bloke with the classic Marseille pip arrangement, his body becoming almost tangled up in the geometry of the card. I love that because it makes the traditional Ten of Wands meaning feel as though it has grown organically out of the pips themselves: the neat accumulation of Wands has reached its logical conclusion and become a burden that somebody now has to carry.

The Page has got one of the weird severed limb style Wands again, knobbly, fleshy, leaf buds like wounds, and I am here for it. And I also love that the Page is examining it with such curiosity. If the Ace was inspiration freshly hacked, bloody and pulpy, out of your soul, here’s the Page encountering that raw creative potential and going: oooh, what can I do with this?

I really like the way Rozan has made the Cups themselves absolutely massive in this Five, while bringing Smith’s isolated figure, his back turned to us, blocking us out of his private misery, right into the foreground. Also, the overturned Cups don’t appear to be spilling nice metaphorical wine so much as actual blood, pooling across the ground. For a deck with Marseille-style pips, this deck is very visceral to work with!

I really like Rozan’s decision to zoom right in on the stained-glass window in the Five of Pentacles, so that it fills almost the entire card. Your eye is immediately drawn to all that majesty – and then down to the faces of the two wounded, struggling people shuffling past beneath it. The contrast feels much starker at this scale: immense beauty and apparent abundance towering over people who have access to neither. As Rozan puts it, it’s “a reminder that behind the beauty of the stained glass there is a reality that cannot be ignored.” There’s something accusatory about it here: what good is all this beauty, wealth, and splendour if somebody is freezing on the pavement underneath it?

The positioning on the Two of Swords is chef’s kiss. Smith’s blindfolded figure is nestled right at the bottom of the traditional Marseille pip arrangement, with the Swords curving around and enclosing her head. Given that Swords are the suit of thoughts and the mind, I love the suggestion that she’s imprisoned inside her own thinking: going round and round the same mental enclosure, unable to see her way beyond it. And then, right above her, Rozan describes the central motif as “a kind of eye or flower that opens at the centre, generating a symbolic contrast between blindness and perception”. She can’t see it – literally or metaphorically – but the possibility of another way of seeing is already opening above her.

It’s v. obvious to me working with this deck that Rozan really is as into stained glass as he says he is, lol. For the Four of Swords, he zooms right in on the stained-glass window that’s tucked away in the top-left corner of Smith’s original card, making it the dominant image. And that lets us properly see details that are super easy to overlook in the RWS – particularly the inscription PAX (‘peace’) around the head of the taller figure, almost like a halo. It cleverly reinforces the card’s sense of rest as something sacred and necessary, rather than simply inactivity. I also love the way Rozan has integrated the traditional Marseille Swords around the scene, almost enclosing it in a quiet little chapel of its own. And, as he points out, “from the resting hands, a flower emerges, suggesting regeneration after rest.” Rest isn’t the absence of growth; sometimes it’s what allows growth to happen.

That’s why I always think of the Seven of Wands as the activist card: holding your ground because you believe you’re right, even when you’re off-balance, outnumbered, dishevelled, or slightly out of your depth.

But, as ever, Smith weaves some shadow onto the card. Given her theatrical background and her habit of sneaking Shakespeare into the RWS, the mismatched footwear has been linked to Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, who arrives at his wedding spectacularly ill-dressed, including “a pair of boots that have been candle-cases, one buckled, another laced,” partly to show Kate that he literally doesn’t give a shit about her feelings or her dignity. So Petruchio offers a much less flattering version of Seven of Wands energy: belligerent, domineering, absolutely convinced of his own rightness. So perhaps the question isn’t simply are you prepared to fight for what you believe in?, but are you actually right? There’s a fine line between courageously holding the moral high ground and merely planting yourself on a hill and refusing to come down, lol.

[I accept other readings of The Taming of the Shew – and why Petruchio acts like such a plonker – are available, but I have always, unsurprisingly, been #TeamKate.]

One of the reasons I love the Seven is because I love that PCS manages to give us both fight the bastards and occasionally check that you yourself are not, in fact, the bastard. Excellent card.

Overall, I think Pixie’s Marseille Tarot does exactly what I hoped it would do: it feels less like a mash-up of the RWS and Tarot de Marseille than a genuine conversation between them. Rozan clearly knows and loves both traditions, and there’s an enormous amount of thought in the way he’s woven them together – Smith’s figures emerge from, disappear behind, and interact with the Marseille pips rather than simply being plonked on top of them. And I think that process has made me look more closely at both decks. Tiny details in Smith’s imagery suddenly loom large; familiar RWS scenes take on slightly different meanings when they’re enclosed within Marseille structures; and the TdM pips themselves start doing far more narrative work than I sometimes give them credit for. It’s clever, quirky, occasionally a little visually weird, but above all it feels made with enormous affection for Tarot history and for Pixie herself. Also, I guess the fact that this whole review sent me down a completely ridiculous Pamela-Colman-Smith-shaped rabbithole, is a fairly ringing endorsement 😂.

You can buy the deck from Rozan’s website here for £46.

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