Tarot as Objective Art: Exploring the Major Arcana with Marianne Costa

A Parallax 4-Week Course beginning Sunday, May 4th, 2025

Tarot: The Real Deal: A journey through the Major Arcana of the Marseille deck
With Marianne Costa

RSVP now:
https://www.parallax-media.com/courses/tarot-the-real-deal

The Origins and Significance of the Major Arcana

Andrew Sweeny: Let’s start from the beginning. The term Major Arcana—this word Arcana is maybe a word that not everybody knows. Also, you insist on the primacy of the Marseille deck.

Marianne Costa: The word "Arcanum," or "Arcana" in the plural, began to be used in the 19th century when the Tarot shifted from being a card game to an object of study and speculation, primarily within the occult and esoteric movements. Arcanum or Arcana means something that holds something arcane. Something that holds a secret. The Tarot is composed of 56 pip and court cards, numbered from one to 10, and then four court cards like the Page, the Knight, the Queen, and the King in four different suits that are basically the same as poker suits. It’s just that they’re the Italian suits: the Swords, the Cups, the Wands, and the Coins. These were called the Minor Arcana because the specificity of the Marseille deck—or any deck, actually, that anyone played with in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and up to the middle of the 19th century—is that these pip cards were not illustrated like they are in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. So, they were considered minor in the sense that they were just numbers and symbols, and also geometry, because they very clearly show triangles and ovals. I mean, they’re very interesting to study.

Then, there’s the series of Trumps, because they were actually what became, in the game, the Trumps. In any game like Bridge or anything that uses a suit of Trumps—whether it’s a specific suit like in the Tarot or whether it’s decided at any moment of the game that this or that suit becomes the Trump—the series of Trumps in the Tarot consists of 22 cards. They were initially allegories. By allegory, I mean a landscape made of symbols. It can be a physical landscape with a single character, or it can be a more global landscape, like the Moon or the Sun, which have elements of construction and cosmic elements. But the idea here is that it’s not just one symbol; it’s like a fabric of symbols. For example, the Star, or even a character like the Fool—if you start looking at the little bells on his suit, if you start wondering why his rod is red, if you start wondering why the floor changes color, etc.—everything turns into a symbolic question.

Because the iconography of the Trumps was rich, and because people like Eliphas Levi and other scholars, sometimes unconventional thinkers, contributed, it was an interesting mixture of writers, psychics, and very serious individuals alongside crazier ones. Some of them went to jail, like Marie-Anne Lenormand, who was the greatest fortune teller in the 19th century. When they put her in jail for being a sorceress and a psychic and stuff, they took her cards away and everything. So, she would start reading in pigeon poo or the way the candle they gave her to light herself was losing its wax. She would read anything. So, she’s a fantastic character. Because of the patriarchy, it’s more people like Etteilla, Eliphas Levi, Waite, and Crowley who have been remembered. But now, with this rather feminist approach to all the occult movements, first and foremost, obviously, Pamela Colman Smith, who was the artist of the Waite-Smith deck, but also figures that were considered crazy women, like Marie-Anne Lenormand, are becoming of much more interest to people who study those matters, not just people who practice the Tarot.

Marie-Anne Lenormand was probably the first fortune teller of the 19th century to work with this deck of cards. This deck of cards was available because Tarot was still in fashion in France. It was losing its wind somehow; it had been a hugely fashionable game throughout all of Europe. Some people used it just as a tool for fortune telling, while others began writing books about its origins, fantasizing about its roots in Egypt and other places. They called the series of Trumps the Major Arcana because they held such symbolic richness, and yet they remain mysterious. That’s what’s very interesting about them, because they’re both religious and profane, so each of them can be seen as both auspicious and ominous. Each of them has traits that can still be interpreted in the modern world.

For instance, The Chariot is very interesting. It has to do with action in the world, service, and victory. It has the shape of an iPhone, and he’s appearing in the square. Now, you know, Instagram and TikTok and all of that—it’s so striking because this is precisely the last card of the first octave, which is the maximum success in the world. When we look at this card, we see an allegory—a symbol that still resonates with us today. Or, you know, I don’t know how it is in the streets of the United States or England, but in Paris, there are a lot of punk beggars who have their dogs with them. That’s exactly what the Fool is. He’s like those people who beg on the streets and are accompanied by a dog.

So, it’s very interesting because it’s Arcana, not anymore in the sense that the 19th century gave to it, which was kind of Masonic, like something you have to decipher. It’s more like the sheer mystery of an image that has been resonating with, first and foremost, the imagination of the card players. The game was a huge success, and it had to be both visually attractive and complex enough to be successful. Then, when it started being—it’s been two centuries since, basically, a little less than two centuries—it’s a mirror for the psyche, for the intuition, etc. It keeps yielding inspiration, messages, and that is the great secret. How is it that something—a simple card game—can be so inexhaustible? I can only testify to my practice. I started reading Tarot, like many young girls in my generation, when I was 17. Then I stopped because I got scared of too much intuition when I was 20‘. Then I started again in my 30s. I’m almost 60 now, and it keeps surprising me. It keeps answering.

The Inexhaustible Nature of Tarot

Andrew Sweeny: I want to touch on something you said about the inexhaustible nature of the Tarot. You’ve been working with it for decades, and it still surprises you. Can you expand on that a bit? Also, you mentioned Jodorowsky and a book you co-wrote with him, which had a big influence on me. He said that what the Tarot tells you is always true.

In your course outline, you wrote something I really liked: “The profound value of the Marseille Tarot lies in its objective and humble nature, an immaterial architecture that summarizes the concrete psychological and spiritual structure of the human being, a point of encounter between our existential struggles and the law of the Cosmos.” That’s a beautiful way to put it. Objective and humble isn’t usually what people think of when they think of the occult or Tarot’s reputation. I’m a novice, but I perceive that there’s infinite value in looking at it if you approach it the correct way. There might be a way to learn how to read them that prevents us from getting too flaked out or going down intense rabbit holes of correlations, like some Crowley enthusiasts do. Anyway, a lot of thoughts there, but maybe you could respond.

Marianne Costa: No, it’s very simple. Someone who is a virtuoso can take a child’s guitar and play something that will be very beautiful, and someone who is not a virtuoso can take a Stradivarius violin and make your ears bleed. The Tarot of Marseille—which means the Tarot that has been played, it’s called the Tarot of Marseille, but it’s the French standard for the Tarot game that became the universal standard, the European standard between more or less 1600 and the end of the 19th century—so that game won the race, like Pokémon or Super Mario. It was the Pokémon or Super Mario of the time. It became the favorite card game at that time, originating from a Renaissance culture that was extremely rich in its obsession with salvation, utterly different from ours.

Today we are obsessed with becoming something like Elon Musk or one of his wives or bimbos. If you’re a man, you should be as powerful, wealthy, and arrogant as you can, and if you’re a woman, you should be forever thin and have the biggest possible mouth and stuff. This is our current global ideology. It’s where we live. It doesn’t mean that every one of us is like that, but this is the atmosphere that we breathe. In the same way, during the Renaissance, there were many people who were thieves and lazy, and even those from the aristocracy, like the Borgias, were often considered complete monsters. They would have sex, abuse and poison people, and stuff. But the atmosphere was the last of the tradition in Europe. Then the classical age arrived, followed by various revolutions, and modernity emerges.

So, the last period where the notion of the interrelation between the universe, the cosmos, and human beings was the founding idea of why we’re here, where the presence of whatever you want to call God was felt everywhere, feared or understood in a much deeper way. Still, there was a God for everybody at that time. The notion of salvation, which means everyone was concerned with what happens after I die and how I live with that horizon in front of me, doesn’t mean that everyone was a deep spiritual practitioner. Still, it means that the very question of why we are here, what we do here, and what we should do and what we are to become or reveal itself as immortal—it was right here. Now, this kind of questioning is the privilege of a very tiny minority of people who are, in general, serious practitioners in traditional spiritual traditions. So, we’re far apart from these times.

The Tarot emanates from that. I don't know, and nobody knows, and no one can tell you whether it was tailored to yield this kind of message. This is Jodorowsky’s hypothesis; it’s beautiful and has a very mythomaniacal, prophetic quality. Or, perhaps it was simply that everyone has a plastic Buddha in their home, as everyone is familiar with Feng Shui today. If you draw an I Ching symbol, everybody knows it. So, maybe it just sucked from the culture a series of things that were so coherently ingrained that it was redelivered almost intact.

One thing is for certain: when the Tarot falls into the hands of the French artisans, they had a tradition that became some of the Masonry, which was a tradition of numerology, of coherence between elements of a whole, of creating very intricate architectures, whether it’s a church organ or a whole cathedral. So, they recreated the game with correspondences of details between the cards that are incredibly rich and that have a very objective and obvious coherence, both with the numerology of one to 10 and with the numerology of 1 to 7, and then 14 ... there’s a sort of coherent architecture in them which arose in that period, based in a worldview that was still had a notion of the Divine. Yet, that was also the period where, interestingly, humanism developed.

It’s precisely what happens when we become fascinated with some aspects of whether it’s some paths from India or some path in Tibet or some of what accompanies the Zen practice or any traditional knowledge, any traditional spiritual knowledge goes with a sort of alchemy that will invoke and compel the psychological labor to be exposed. Because no one who is completely neurotic can become enlightened, this doesn’t mean that you have to go through psychoanalysis to be a decent spiritual practitioner. Still, it does mean that the purification of the psyche—my background is rather more in Sanskrit than other places, but what you call chi, the purification of the psyche, is very important.

That’s why Gurdjieff also talks about conscience, la conscience morale objective, and remorse, not because it’s good or bad, but because the way through the wounds and the limitations of why Mr. Gurdjieff also talks about paying for the mere fact of being born. It means that the way we were raised, the traces from our childhood, our preferences and propensities, and how we treat others ultimately determine who we are. That is the real object of psychology. Of course, many people make other kinds of cakes with psychology because you can make a lot of money. But how do we become decent and independent human beings?

So, with this Renaissance worldview comes directly, and with the fact that the Tarot is an object, an artifact—it’s made by people who make things. You have to carve the wood blocks, make the paper, print the paper, let it dry correctly, and stencil the colors. That’s manual work and it’s with an expensive material—paper is costly. These people have a sense of discipline, they have a sense of becoming who you need to be to do things right. So, this whole psychology, this whole discipline, and the worldview—they come into the Tarot together. This is precisely what Mr. Gurdjieff calls objective art. It’s not necessarily grandiose art; it is meant to produce an effect, and it is intended to produce an effect by obeying a series of laws.

You can cook objectively. Recently, I’ve been following grandmothers on YouTube in India who teach you how to cook in their kitchens. It’s beautiful to see the hands of the women; there’s an uninterrupted chain of mothers teaching their daughters how to cook. That is objective art when it’s done with respect for what food is and who you feed, etc. So, that’s why I say that the Tarot is both humble—this Tarot, because this one and all the Tarot in the same. This is the Tarot from 1709. I’ve recently published a facsimile of it. Still, all the historical Tarots from the Marseille standard, and there are more than 36 historical Tarots known to date, plus all the reproductions and all the restorations—it’s like at least 15 decks that you can count, and probably much more. It’s very humble; it was just a game of cards, and it’s absolutely objective. No one in particular made it, so we owe it to lineages and lineages and lineages of artisans, people who tried to enrich them.

It’s interesting because each deck has minor variations. So, how do you learn to look at the standard in general, and how do you learn to play the game with the minor variations? I was showing you the Fool, for instance. This deck has been kept probably because it was a trial, so it was never played. It’s kept in the Swiss Museum. Probably the employee who stenciled the cards—there are a lot of places where the color goes out. I really love that about that deck, actually, the bleeding of the red. This is also the Arcana 13, it has few places. Probably, this deck was not sold because it was not fit to be sold, as the stencil work is usually much better. But life, the play of life, the intelligence of life—Life with a capital L—brings this particular deck whole to us. So now, let’s play the game of life. We say, okay, this is the Tarot that’s been kept, and we’re going to learn the structure and resonate with the particulars.

Exactly what we do when we meet someone that we’re attracted to—whether it’s man or woman, whether it’s monogamous or polyamorous, whether it’s hetero, bi, homo, whatever you want—you know something about the rules of approaching someone who is the kind of human being that you’d like to seduce. You know more or less how to make love. Then you play with the particulars of the relationship, of the person. That’s the way I approach teaching Tarot: both a very strong structure that’s based in history and reflection about where it comes from, and the joy, the sheer joy, of not dealing with someone’s Tarot. I don’t want to be dialoguing forever with Waite or with Crowley or with anyone—not even with Jodorowsky, and he was my root teacher in that work. I love the idea that I’m dialoguing with collective wisdom, with popular wisdom, with tradition, with the mystery of the fact that human beings have created games ever since the earliest we know of humanity, art, and games. It’s amazing.

The notion of one person signing the work of art and one person putting their seal on the game—that’s very new. So, you’re dealing with someone’s ego. You’re dealing with Crowley’s ego, with Waite’s ego, with this and that person’s ego. When you draw the I Ching or when you work with the Marseille, you’re free in front of the monument. It’s wonderful.

Tarot as Folk Art and Psychological Tool

Andrew Sweeny: There’s a lot there that I’ll chew on. The fact that this came out of the Renaissance and that it’s a sort of folk art, rather than a grandiose display of European arrogance—I think that’s beautiful. I’m curious about the psychology of it and how it relates to—let’s say, you talked about psychology and spirituality. It seems to me that in the West, psychotherapy has become the spirituality of people, and that’s kind of a problem because it feels like it has a limited result, even though it can be very rich at the same time. That was one insight I had. I’m wondering, you’re going to teach a course on this—how would you approach it in terms of psychological insight or healing or that kind of thing?

Marianne Costa: It’s very simple. Experience teaches us that when someone comes to consult the Tarot, basically, they want to know something about their action in the world—projects, work, essentially that, or their creativity if they’re artists. They want to know about their love life or their relationships. They sometimes want to know about their survival, like a question about their health or something. Sometimes, people want guidance on their existential path that takes a more spiritual direction.

I am initially a Freudian, you know. My psychoanalysis was with a Freudian psychoanalyst. I am not a psychoanalyst; I don’t claim to be a psychologist or anything, but I think it’s very sound and solid to remember that Freud said that people came to psychoanalysis to become able to love and work. So, most people want to be able to love and work because that is our existential path—relationships and the notion that we have accomplished something. When I say 'work,' it can be a person who has decided to stay at home and take care of their children, because that is the most beautiful and honorable work you can imagine. It’s not necessarily making money; it’s just: did I do anything purposeful in this life, and how are my relationships?

So, we have to be able to draw from the Tarot the very concrete aspects. It’s not easy to do it just with the Major Arcana, so if enough people are interested, we will probably organize a course with the Minors. They’re much more adapted to the specific details of psychology and practical applications. But the thing is that the 22 Major Arcana summarize the rest of the Tarot. They play as mirrors with the court cards; they integrate elements of the pip cards; they have the same numerology. So, it’s a bit of a betrayal to use the Majors as elements of concrete and psychological answers. It’s a good exercise, though.

Andrew Sweeny: Betrayal—why is it a betrayal? Is it sort of too overarching an archetype?

Marianne Costa: I’m sorry to be such a Hindu today—but it’s because Tarot is more or less structured like the koshas in yoga. You have the four suits, and these represent the body, or annamaya kosha, which is built from food. Then they will represent the energy, pranamaya kosha, that’s the Wands, whatever is connected with our impulse to move towards and away from. Then you have all that’s associated with manomaya kosha, which are the imprints, which both embrace the Cups and the Swords—what Mr. Gurdjieff would call the lower emotional and mental center, which is the “I-me-mind” world, both emotionally and intellectually. Then you have vijnanamaya kosha, which is the more logical, pristine, and true-to-the-truth kind of level, which would be closest to what Mr. Gurdjieff calls the higher emotional and intellectual center, which is the intelligence of the heart and the clarity of the mind. Then you have the anandamaya kosha, satchitananda, the sheath that is the last one, the most subtle, before the wonderful, great, neutral everything and nothingness. That is a sheath made of Truth (sat), Consciousness or awareness (chit), and Bliss (ananda).

That is the level at which we should be able to read the Major Arcana, and we must never forget that. But when you see a spiritual teacher who’s established in satchitananda—the last one I saw, who passed away a bit over a year ago—this is someone who was obviously established in absolute peace. He was perfectly able to tend to the questions of the kitchen, to laugh at someone, and to make jokes. He loved to receive because he said that human beings are busy with their little toys while God is calling. So, everybody who would visit him would bring silly toys, like a monkey that plays the cymbals or something, and he would laugh, laugh, laugh.

So, the Major Arcana is like that. It can look at everyday life and the practicalities of everyday life. It can help you with your mommy-daddy problems. In Westerners, we are so messed up that we still have to look at mommy-daddy problems because we have become so sophisticated in our functioning that the basics of human decency are completely forgotten in our upbringing and our surroundings. I’m a Parisian; every time I take the metro—and that happens several times a week and sometimes several times a day—I’m horrified. Whoever has to take the metro to work and come back, struggling, how can they even have the availability to love their partner and raise a child? This whole emotional wisdom that can grow in a human being in a context that is favorable for that—it’s horrible. Then I go visit my mom in the south of France; she’s very ill now, she lives in a village, and everybody is smoking dope, getting drunk, getting angry at each other because people are glued to their computers. We are completely crippled emotionally in general, as a civilization. So, you cannot not take psychological elements into account when reading the Tarot, but you shouldn’t play shrink when you’re not. You could just kind of point something, ask very gently, maybe draw from whatever little wisdom you’ve gained. It’s always a suggestion.

Anyway, when I teach it, and especially when I teach online, I mostly teach self-readings in the beginning because—sorry, I’m going to be a bit inappropriate here. Still, you know that normally a healthy child starts to explore their body and masturbate at three years old. When we haven’t done that in our childhood, it means that we were in a toxic environment. It’s very important because, from the point of view of physiology, it teaches the body to flex. Then we have the period of latency, and then when the sexual organs develop further at the beginning of adolescence, we start to explore them differently because they’re mature for that. It’s the same thing with Tarot. If you can’t play with yourself, you can’t play with others.

That’s why also, by applying this commandment to myself—because at some point Jodorowsky, who is quite a character, decided I was out of his life forever, so I didn’t have someone to play with to grow in the Tarot. I had lost my main sensei, so I had to become my own sensei, and that’s how I became even better than him. I had to do readings for myself in very honest situations when I didn’t know where to turn, even sitting in front of my altar and the picture of my teacher. My mind was like, I said, okay, let’s try with the Tarot. Of course, if I did it the habitual way, I would get no answer, so I had to develop a way of self-reading that makes me worthy of being a teacher of teachers, like I am in many countries in the world. Of course, 95% of my students, unfortunately, they go the other way because everybody’s so happy to share on Instagram publicly, and I can’t do anything about that. Everyone is free. But this notion of reading for oneself—not to publish the reading of the month on Instagram—that does not exist when you work with reading by yourself. It’s like writing poetry; it’s an act of self-exploration. It’s an act of struggling with the laws of gravity, of struggling with the limitations of being human. That’s one of the ways I know. I can teach a lot about that to people to become ready, little by little, to maybe try to bring that into a conversation with someone else and then become someone who can read other people’s Tarot without any agenda of being seductive, making money with it, being good at it, blah, blah, blah, which is all absolute crap. That’s not what it’s for.

The Ethics of Tarot Reading

Andrew Sweeny: I guess one of the things you could appreciate about Jodorowsky is that he never charged money for readings, apparently. Is that correct, or maybe not?

Marianne Costa: I have to grant him that. For years, he sat every Wednesday night in a shitty café and read people in a row for free. He did do that, and, indeed, he was never someone who made money from the readings. Then, of course, being the huge star that he is, he has been charging insane amounts of money for just talking about the Tarot to an audience for a couple of hours. But yes, he did encourage a practice of free or donation-based readings, and I’m working in that sense also. The ethics I derived from that was, because I teach people who make a living out of reading Tarot—those are the people who ask us for guidance, not everybody is a wonderful curious person who wants to deepen their knowledge, but the truth is, especially in Latin America, that people make a living off it—so what I try to convey is: do not derive more than a third of your revenue from the Tarot. That’s my principle. For me, it’s the same for friends who are counselors and shrinks and stuff. If you are not independent from helping people, they either become your parents because they feed you, so you can’t help them, or they become your herd of cows because you milk them, and you can’t help them. You have to be independent from people. That’s why most of the reliable spiritual paths I know work on donation, of course.

Andrew Sweeny: That’s the question of the sacred, right? I think what you’re saying, in a sense, is that not only are they a form of folk art, but there’s also a sense that they need to be held sacred in some way. I think they could be easily made profane, or maybe I’m making too much of it.

Marianne Costa: It’s just a question of energy. Money is energy. So, I should be able to charge €100 for a reading, which I’m perfectly capable of doing, and I should be able to spend two or three days doing readings for free, depending on how much energy is needed from the person in front of me at that moment. I must be, as a philosophical eye, completely independent from the tool in terms of my survival, which allows me to charge a ridiculous amount of money if it feels right to a person who can afford it in a situation where it’s needed, and which makes it perfectly right to work on donation with other people.

I don’t do a lot of readings, but I’ll give you one example. A young man contacted me from a faraway country that isn't a very wealthy one because he saw something on my very basic Instagram that he liked, and he asked for a reading. I don’t do that, but for some reason, I said, okay, €150, which was a huge amount of money for him. I wanted to test the guy; he was like 24. He paid for it. So, I did that reading for that price, and I realized he was a spiritual seeker connected with a very traditional spiritual school. He said, Can I see you again? I said, yeah, and you pay whatever you want. ‘ This is more like how I work. If I’m honest, Jodorowsky—that’s not that I learned it from him because my spiritual teacher in that sense was not Alejandro Jodorowsky—but Alejandro had understood that much, and he was perfectly able to donate or to charge for a session.

Andrew Sweeny: That’s great because that means it’s an individual and intimate relationship between the person getting the reading and the one giving it, rather than a standardized fee or something like that, right?

Marianne Costa: It’s not a profession. Whichever way you take it, it’s just not a profession to interpret a game of God to help someone. That’s a crazy action that we keep repeating and refining. At best, it’s an art form.

The Parallax Academy Course: A Journey Through the Major Arcana

Andrew Sweeny: Okay, so in terms of this course, maybe we can talk more about that. What are we going to do in the course, and what are we going to—I don’t like to say get out of it.?

Marianne Costa: You’ll get nothing out of it. That’s a good answer, a good Zen answer. No, it’s just, I don’t know how to ask that particular question; it’s not really transactional; it’s something else. We met through a friend, and we did our first podcast. I wasn't aiming for any kind of action. Then you suggested that we could do a course. This is basically how it works for me. I operate from the principle that there is some benevolence or wisdom in the egregore or spirit or general group spirit of the Tarot. So, when something is asked, I think of it, and if it feels right, I go for it.

There is a cultural divide in the world of the Tarot because Waite and Pamela Colman Smith designed that deck in 1909-1910. It became very famous just because the names were in English, and that’s the moment when the English-speaking world really became the empire. At the cultural revolution in the ‘60s, even before the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s, the Rider-Waite deck and the Crowley deck and the English-speaking decks, but the model of the Rider-Waite became the Tarot for the mind of the people who are more acquainted with the Anglo-Saxon culture. I think it’s a pity because that means a huge part of the world is missing out on some actual information and wisdom about something that is a deeper root.

One of the reasons is that the Golden Dawn had a secret and magical document called the Cipher Manuscript, which is essentially a rough, hand-drawn copy of the Marseille Tarot. So, one of the reasons is that I feel it’s really time, if there’s curiosity among people who speak English, to explore this matrix that is the Marseille Tarot. I think you can only emerge from that revived and refreshed for your practice with any other Tarot. A great example of this is the painter Leonora Carrington, who lived in Mexico and studied both the Marseille Tarot and the Rider-Waite Tarot. She created her own Tarot, taking out the best of both, and it’s the one Tarot painted by an artist that works, that answers, because Leonora Carrington was an amazing witch. She had a connection with the upper worlds, but also because she was a pioneer in mixing the two decks.

What’s super lovable about the Rider-Waite deck is its feminism, but the Marseille Tarot is not machista; it’s queer. The Marseille Tarot, because it emanates from a time where the feminine and the masculine were much more peers than they became in the 19th century. It’s paradoxical because Pamela Colman Smith was a feminist, and some of the drawings she did for the Rider-Waite deck are incredible—her Empress, her High Priestess, etc. But then she died in poverty, and until recently, she was never credited. On the other hand, the Marseille Tarot has, for instance, three masculine court cards and only one feminine, but if you look in the Major Arcana, there is an absolute equity between masculine and feminine characters, and there are queer characters. I mean, the Fool has no gender, the Star has no gender, the World has no gender. So, there are very important characters that are beyond gender.

Andrew Sweeny: I always thought of that as androgynous, but I never thought of that as queer. That’s a new perspective for me.

Andrew Sweeny: Androgynous is a patriarchal way of talking about queer, you know. I love the notion of queer more in the 1990s sense of the infinite possibilities within the field of polarity. I’m not young enough to enter the new queer movement, which goes a little bit far for me, but it’s queer in the sense that it allows the possibility of spaces and beings that are beyond gender. This character has a beard, but it also resonates in a feminine body. Do you understand what I mean?

Andrew Sweeny: I don’t quite get that. Can you explain what you mean by it resonating in a feminine body?

Marianne Costa: What I mean is that it’s socially a male because, at the time, whoever was a wanderer and a buffoon was generally a male person. But the essential energy of the Fool can possess a completely feminine body. So, that means it’s also divine madness in the form of the Shakti or whatever you want to name it. It’s the same with every card of the Tarot. So, the first benefit: if you are English-speaking and you don’t know the Marseille Tarot, you will finally know.

The first thing is to get an overview of what is closest to the matrix of all modern Tarots. Then, I think I can brag that I have a good understanding of the intricacies of that deck, so it has a lot to say and a lot to support. The Tarot becomes a kind of blueprint in our imagination, in our creativity, and it becomes one of the maps we can orient ourselves with. It’s highly compatible with a lot of different research, right?

Currently, I’m working with a choreographer in contemporary dance, I’m working with artists, and I’m working with storytellers. I often read to friends who are serious spiritual practitioners, some of whom have high responsibilities. I have witnessed the fact that the Tarot can accompany a very sophisticated level of self-inquiry in a human being. That comes from all the series of coherence that it carries. There is the decimal numerology—10 is the number of fingers we have, and the numerology in 10 is the one that we use—so it has a very interesting quality. If you start to see it reflected in the Tarot, it was put in the Tarot as a numerology of development in existence.

But the Tarot is also abiding by the septimal numerology, numerology in seven. I’ve been researching that for years and years; no one has ever written anything of substance in the Tarot world about that. I’ve ended up bowing to Mr. Gurdjieff’s teachings, which must be lived and experienced to be even minimally understood. It’s incredible because Mr. Gurdjieff says that the law of seven is the law of phenomena from the top to the bottom of the cosmos and vice versa. It’s really the vertical. It’s not an unfolding; it’s more like an acknowledgment of the laws. The Tarot also has a fascinating septimal numerology, and what’s interesting is how they interweave, because at every moment, our horizontal life interweaves with our vertical life.

Andrew Sweeny: Can I ask a clarifying question? Is the vertical the seven and the horizontal the 10? Because in the Sephirot, the Tree of Life, there are 10, and people are always making that correspondence, which perhaps is not a good one. But there seems to be a 10 in that particular system.

Marianne Costa: I’m not a specialist of the Sephirot; obviously, I know of it, but everything I’ve read and studied about the Sephirot and the Kabbalah doesn’t work. It’s like Cinderella’s sister trying to fit inside the shoe. That is very simply because the Tarot is not a Jewish artifact. Some people conceived Tarot as being based on the Kabbalah, which is more contemporary, and these are very interesting because they’re really meant to interact with the Kabbalistic structures. But the Tarot of Marseille responds way better to the law of three and the law of seven in Mr. Gurdjieff’s teaching because they have the same cultural root, which is Christian esotericism.

Andrew Sweeny: Wasn’t there a big crossover between Christian esotericism and Jewish mysticism?

Marianne Costa: Of course, and also with Arabic alchemy, and you can say that Jesus was formed in Egypt. But to put the Judaic wisdom, like esoteric wisdom, or the Egyptian symbolism, or even alchemy—even though Tarot does have resonances with alchemy—before the properly Christian esoteric paradigms... In French, we have a saying, which is to put the plow before the oxen. It’s a bit like that. Let’s just look at things the way they are presented in our culture. What happens is that when the Tarot got out of fashion and stopped being a game and started being studied by the occult movements, that was the moment when Christianity was at its worst. It had become completely eaten up by the bourgeois world, by abuse, by hypocrisy. So, no one wanted to see that tradition in the Tarot. They started daydreaming about Egypt and Kabbalah. It’s not just daydreaming because all these things are interconnected in the Renaissance world, but first things first, you know.

The aim, and it usually works, is that people become able to perform meaningful readings for themselves after, you know, it’s going to be like maybe 10 to 15 hours of teaching because you always go a little bit longer than you’re supposed to. That would be the equivalent of a very intense weekend. Habitually, unless someone has a huge block that you’re not responsible for, it’s really like learning a language.

Andrew Sweeny: Do you think some people can swim in that kind of water and other people who don’t? I’m thinking of people who, in the Zen tradition, don’t like symbolism; people have resistance to symbolism on some level. I’ve always loved it; I played around with it. But people think symbolism is a kind of lesser thing.

Marianne Costa: I judge less and less, so I wouldn’t say what’s higher or what’s lesser. What I witness is that people are drawn to the Tarot because they feel some beauty that’s calling them, whether it’s formal beauty—oftentimes people have a sensitivity to the cards themselves—or whether it’s the kind of taste that they feel. Because I don’t advertise myself at all, because I’m not looking for students, I have the privilege that people come to what I do just attracted by the material. When they are, then it’s very simple: it’s like someone who wants to play the piano. Anyone who wants to play the piano will end up playing the piano if they find a teacher who can teach. It’s very simple. I think the attraction, the love, and the affinities are not to be toyed with. I haven’t seen anyone who fell in love with the Tarot and couldn't read it.

Then, some people are more verbal than others, so they become more competent in reading for others because they have a good language, but they’re not necessarily the most valuable readers. Some people have a stronger sense of shapes and colors, so they tend to look for words more and stumble upon them, but they will also find and see wonderful things. In general, when I’m teaching, when I’m with a group of students or in a study group or something, just the basic intelligence of the human being, resting on the cards with a little bit of structure in the background so that we don’t go—you know, for me, the worst thing that can happen, and which happens a lot in the Tarot world, is just someone going into their own delirium. I hate that. I have met some of the world's top specialists on the Waite deck, so I asked for readings because I’m supposed to be their peer, or something like that. Oh my God, it didn’t make any sense; it was just blah-blah-blah.

So, I love going back to the mathematics of reading: what do you see, in which direction do the eyes go? It has to do with learning to see; it’s a kind of vision quest, in a way.

Practical Engagement with the Marseille Tarot

Andrew Sweeny: I’ve got your book here, and I think the book is very beautiful. Also, the cards are incredible. The trouble is, it’s written in French, and we’re trying to get English people to come. I think it’s worth just buying the cards.

Marianne Costa: You know what’s wonderful with the empire now is that, in a couple of years, translators will completely disappear. You will be able to run a book through the AI and not even have to correct it. Finally, my work will be in English because the main problem is that the book is 500 pages long, and paying €10,000 to a translator would be too much. If it were written in English, it would already be published in English. The problem is the empire: anything, any crap that’s written in English, gets translated into the whole world. I’m sorry, that’s just the truth. A lot of valuable niche work that has a lot of value requires sacrifice from someone who will do three months of translation work without getting paid. That’s one of the reasons why I praise that, in other ways, very ominous and very dangerous tool, which is the AI. So, if anyone buys it and then wants me to send the PDF so they can translate it, in class, I can send them a PDF of the text so they can run it through any translator.

It’s the same stuff that happened with the music companies, agents, publishing companies, this whole thing of bestsellers and stuff—it’s going to go. For anyone who’s not a writer in English, it’s excellent news because we’re up to here with Hollywood and American bestsellers and stuff. Enough.

Andrew Sweeny: My experience with Tarot was, in the beginning, kind of pushing it away. Then I read a book about the Marseille Tarot called Meditations on the Tarot, which is a Christian book. It’s a very Christian book, but it’s a massive book with all kinds of stuff in it, and it was so rich that I went out and bought the Rider-Waite deck and played around with it. I played around with Crowley’s deck and wasn’t sure what to do with Tarot until I read your book. I thought it was kind of cool and interesting, but what was great about your book with Jodorowsky was, finally, I can use these damn things. And I saw that there’s a lot of flakiness in the Tarot world.

Marianne Costa: Meditations on the Tarot is a good book because it was almost the first of its kind, but essentially, it’s one person with depth who’s looking at the cards and just pouring their own life on paper. So many books about the Tarot are written from that matrix. At some point, I was fed up with that because I was like, it’s appropriation. Go and read the book by someone who looks at the cards and tells you what they see. So, I designed a book that’s only in French, Spanish, and Italian—it’s not in English—but it’s more like a vade mecum, a book of practice, where I have designed questions for the cards. You have the card in black and white; you can even color it differently on one page. Then you have a series of questions that work for every card, which are like prompts for observation. On the next page, you have a series of questions and propositions connected to this card in particular.

Of course, we can’t go through the whole book in five sessions; that would be a little too fast. But I will take a lot of the exercises from that book, and we will be practicing them. Then you will realize that you take the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, and you can write a book like this in five minutes. Ouspenskii wrote a book on the Tarot and it’s crap. It’s complete crap; there’s nothing in it, nothing you can use. You will be able to make your own Tarot book after we work together.

Andrew Sweeny: I’m very embarrassed, Marianne, to say that when I started going over them, I wrote a little book. I didn’t publish it, so thank goodness, but it was just improvisations on the cards. So, what you’re saying is true; you can write anything from them, basically, right?

Marianne Costa: Absolutely. My teacher’s teacher, Swami Prajnanpad, talked about living deliberately. For me, it’s so essential: what am I doing, why am I doing it, what am I doing it for, how am I going to do it? For me, it’s like the basic decency that you need to have if you’re going to teach people anything is to guide them through these steps. So, if I’m going to interpret the Tarot, why am I doing it? Because I love the Tarot and because I want to know myself, first and foremost, and the Tarot better before I start pouring myself into someone else. What am I doing it for? I need to figure out what my goal is with the Tarot. Maybe it’s just for the art; perhaps I want to become able to read... Why, what for? And then the how is very important: how do I look at the cards?

I’ll give you an example that I always give because I was so shocked. I was giving a workshop, and a woman was asking a question about her life, and she had a reading. What do we see? We see three men. You start like that. We see three male figures, and the woman is asking about herself. So, what’s her relationship to these three male figures? A woman is asking about herself, and she could have pulled three versions of herself or whatever. She pulls three dudes with beards.

Andrew Sweeny: So, what would you tell her as an interpretation?

Marianne Costa: The way I read and the way I teach to read is step by step. That’s why my book, the one I wrote by myself, is called Tarot Step by Step. It’s also a little joke because the one with Jodorowsky was called The Way of Tarot. So, how do you take the way step by step? I start like that: she’s a woman, she’s asking something that has to do with her development, her life, and only masculine figures emerge. Before anything, I need to ask her: do you see yourself anywhere in that spread? Do you see yourself? Because if I start interpreting without knowing if she is identifying herself to one of these characters and why, or the three of them, it’s an incredible, useful reading if she goes like, yeah, I’m nowhere here. Okay, so how come you ask a question about yourself and you’re nowhere here?

Andrew Sweeny: Would you say that the cards are telling her that she’s... the voices in her mind are not hers, they’re other people’s coming through?

Marianne Costa: That would be too presumptuous. It can be so many different things. It can be that she’s looking for external validation, and that’s the only way she thinks of herself. It can be that she’s been asked to behave like a man, and she’s completely fed up with it, but she doesn’t know how to shed the costume. It can be that she’s trying to please her father. It can be anything. It could be that she needs to develop her masculinity, or if she were somewhere in there, she’d be...

Andrew Sweeny: Oh, okay, gotcha.

Marianne Costa: It’s just one silly example, but you have no idea how many times I ask advanced students to tell me, okay, what do we see? And they start, and I’m like, no, no, what do we see? Very simple exercise of: what am I seeing? Then, what do I project in what I am seeing? What have I learned about those cards that automatically sets itself into motion because something in me thinks I need to interpret them? All these layers or sheets are together—layers of projection or layers of objectivity. Then, to be able to set your imagination to run, let your imagination run free, let your projections run free, because sometimes when you relax into projecting, you really do—you don’t pretend to do anything but project—intuition is born from projection.

The thing is, people want to read the Tarot; they’re so caught up in their superego that everything gets so cramped, and it’s so sad, and it becomes so boring. I’m also actively trying to help people develop strategies for their readings, so something true and useful comes out, because otherwise, we’re wasting precious years of our lives. Both my parents are in their final years of their lives right now; one of my best friends died a bit over a year ago; another person who I love dearly right now is seriously ill. I take it very, very seriously not to waste my time, other people’s, especially when reading the Tarot.

I think the art of seeing without filter, the art of contemplation, especially, but also the art of seeing myself being carried away, because that’s part of the job. As soon as you do it deliberately, okay, let’s go crazy with this card: what is it that I hate about this card? Just vomit it. So useful to work like that. Every time you do that, you pick up a new meaning of the card that comes to enrich your vocabulary. At some point, in a reading to yourself or someone, boom, that will come out; it will be the answer.

Andrew Sweeny: An example. I was thinking about the Pope today and my relationship with teachers or masters. There’s something about it I don’t like because it’s like somebody above me trying to tell me something, and it provokes some sort of rebellion in me against that Pope, that figure of power. I hate to be one of those little people who are bowed down in front of the Pope.

Marianne Costa: But if we look at the card, I don’t think I’m transgressing a huge secret—you are with your children right now because it’s a school vacation, right? So, one of the aspects of the Pope is also a father or a grandfather to the children. These people are smaller because their bodies are actually smaller. You can look at the Pope in terms of what you just described, which is kind of a stagnant hierarchy where someone is always at the top and is always crushing the others. You can think about it in terms of a legitimate hierarchy where there are people or children or people who need to grow, and there is someone who knows the direction for them to grow.

I love this phrase by Jane Heap, who was a very important student of Mr. Gurdjieff, and she said, “Roll your triangle.” You can think about it in the law of three, as the notion that anything that is at the top of the triangle can become the side of the triangle and then can become the other side of the triangle. The true hierarchy is to see the sequence as an evolving energy. This card goes towards the dissolution of hierarchy, but you need to go through a hierarchical phase so that the hierarchy can be dissolved. I’ve lived in Ibiza for four years, and all the attempts at community by people who have no sense of hierarchy whatsoever—it doesn’t work. You want to run away from that as much as money and sexiness as they can invest in that; it’s just horrendous.

It’s very interesting because if you look at the numerological and evolutionary point of view, if you look at the Tarot in the way it develops from one number into the other, you have four, which is self-stability, to be seated in something, many other aspects, but that is there. Then, once the number four is stable, you have five: okay, what do I do with the others, with the society? I hierarchize. Why? Because I can’t jump from this to that. What’s interesting is that if you look at the element above, at the same height in the card, you have first a helmet that is almost like a war helmet. You have the tiara, the crown that touches the border of the card, whereas he doesn’t touch it—something is trying to reach him, but he doesn’t touch it. Then, what do you have at the same space? The Sun, and inside the Sun, a baby angel, because that’s how community or equality begins—having to deal with the childish stuff, and on and on and on like this.

So, it’s extremely coherent. When you have that frame in your mind, of course, the Pope has to do with your relationship with teachers and stuff, and it has to do with your dharma right now, which is taking care of the kids. It has to do with maybe something that wants to be understood in you so that you can switch in some aspects of your own life from a hierarchic and pyramidal point of view by rolling the triangle into something that opens up. The next stage would be the Lovers, because the Lovers is an opening, right? The Lovers is the mess that happens when you put people together. Look at how ugly they are; it’s a mess. But it’s an opening. They’re insanely ugly, and look who’s beautiful—just the little angel.

Andrew Sweeny: I always thought the one on the left was the pretty one.

Marianne Costa: If you look at the historical Tarot, that’s not true. That’s already an interpretation of Tarot from the 19th century. So, what the historical Tarot is telling us is, whatever you do in your love life, there’s always going to be something ugly—whether it’s with your parents or your sisters and brothers or your lover or in your marriage. There’s always going to be hatred mixed up with love, envy mixed up with benevolence, etc., because the human heart alone is unable to love. But remember, you are a baby, and that angel is the baby for that. So, you came into this world with a heart that can become the vehicle of undying, unconditional love. Now, get to work. That’s the meaning of the Lover, and that’s why it’s not called the Lovers in French but the Lover, because the Rider-Waite one was kind of more romantic. It was all about Romanticism and 19th-century Romanticism.

Marianne Costa: Don’t make me talk about this, please. It’s just a completely different level of understanding. It’s nice because, yeah, we want to know if we’re going to be able to hump that person, but it’s just a low-level view of things, you know.

It’s so much more interesting when you’re in the middle of falling madly in love with someone to wonder: when am I going to show my monster, and when is their monster going to show, and what are we going to do with that? How is it that I’m intimate with this person, and thus, if I become more and more intimate, they’re going to be able to hurt me like no one else can? How ugly is that going to be, you know? The monstrous—there’s a monstrous aspect to the cards, is there not? I mean, like, again,

Andrew Sweeny: I’m sorry to compare the Rider-Waite and the Marseille deck. The Fool in the Rider-Waite deck is like a happy, goofy, free 19th-century romantic who is kind of about to jump off a cliff, whereas the Fool here is this ragged, beastly kind of fierce character.

Marianne Costa: He’s both. He’s at the same time a court jester, so impossible to pin a meaning on him, and he’s the punk beggar with the dog, and he’s the beggar saint. He is the Wounded Healer—that’s part of what we’re going to do in the course. I’m going to talk a little bit about the history and hagiography behind the cards because the Tarot cards have absorbed, little by little, some of the hagiography. For instance, the legend of Saint Roch in Italy and southern France. He was a man during the Great Plague who was able to heal the plague. However, he then got sick. Fortunately, a dog saved him because he was ready to die. The dog, from a nearby castle, brought him some bread. So, it’s not that the Fool is just the jester or just the... because the red shoes and the bells in France of the 16th century—the lepers had those shoes and those bells so that no one came near. So, it’s very interesting because it’s a bit like Chiron in astrology or like the Wounded Knight. It’s this very paradoxical figure that is both extremely energetic because it goes through everything, and both the Healer and the plague, and both the Fool and the wise man. Each card has this kind of ambiguity, which is why I don’t read the cards reversed, which is why, with me, you won’t study any negative cards or positive cards. Every card can have a stagnant or a fluid meaning, and your art is going to be able to determine whether it’s one or the other. Obviously, for baby steps and training wheels, you start by saying, okay, what is the stagnant aspect in this question, and what is the fluid aspect? You begin practicing; you need training wheels. Then, little by little, the language becomes more and more fluent and elaborate.

Andrew Sweeny: Stagnant and fluid, okay. Not necessarily negative, because often you pick up a card and it feels either positive or negative, right? You think, oh, this is good news, or this is bad news. ‘ I resist that, but it’s kind of a natural...

Marianne Costa: The Tarot is an art of relationship. So, if you pick only one card, it will have to relate to something. By itself, the allegory screams its multi-purpose, symbolic meaning in the cosmos. What happens is that when you pick only one card, it’s usually going to relate to something you want, don’t want, hope for, or something else. So, it’s very useful, the practice of picking one card, because it makes you see what the Trump, the Arcanum, is inside of you. This is why I work a lot with the like and dislike kind of approach. We want to go beyond like and dislike, but you can’t go beyond something you haven’t visited. You have to go through to go beyond.

One way the Arcanum relates—I’ll give you an example. During years and years when I was picking the card of the Moon, which is supposed to represent the sacred feminine and the Universal Mother, I was like, oh no,‘

Andrew Sweeny: Me too. I get that feeling when I see that card.

Marianne Costa: It was such a koan for me. Because I was supposed to teach Tarot, I was supposed to teach equally about all the cards. My mother has been pretty good, so I don’t really have mommy issues, or not in the sense of the Moon, anyway. But my mother has suffered from the fact that her mother was overwhelmed, but the psychology wasn’t enough to resolve it. Little by little, with the help of the septimal numerology and Mr. Gurdjieff’s proposition about the law of seven, suddenly it struck me: the Moon is the only card that doesn’t have a human being in it. I can’t say the only one because there’s also the Wheel of Fortune, but at least in the Wheel of Fortune, the animals are dressed, so you can say it’s a caricature of the human being. There’s nobody on the Moon; the only face is in the cosmos. So, as long as you haven’t reached, or at least touched, a state of being where you can feel absolutely loved by what’s above, this water is going to be icy cold. It’s not going to be the north of Peru with the phosphorescent plankton and something you want to go and swim in.

Andrew Sweeny: There’s a kind of beast in the water too, right?

Marianne Costa: It’s not a beast; it’s a crab. Nice crab. Crabs are good; you eat crabs. Anyway, it’s very interesting to work in terms of like or dislike. I’ve done different things; I’m not just a Tarot expert. I’ve worked with focusing and somatic expression a lot. It’s very interesting to note the first taking in of the body when you look at a card and just stay with it and just go into it and organically visit how your body is responding to the card, because seeing and kinesthetics are both of the right brain. So, it’s a way to have your right and left brains, the mythology of today, communicating together because you are willing to pay attention and give meaning to something that is completely from the other side of your being. It’s very interesting.

I think the kind of stuff that we could talk about for the Zen people and the minimalistic practitioners who love the silence—it’s actually the same action, just with images and words. But Tarot does bring you into an altered state, a meditative state. I mean, we’ve been speaking for an hour and a half right now; it’s a lot. This is exactly what Tarot does. When I was a beginner, when I was still studying with Jodorowsky, I had a timer when I was able to go on a reading and stay for four hours, and the person also would, you know. Then I learned a little bit about Ericksonian hypnotherapy and stuff, and I realized that it was the same kind of zone. You had your chaotic time or something, a different kind of time that isn’t so measured, which comes from the connection of the two brains. When the two brains are connected, there is no fatigue; your body is present. It’s the fifth dimension in the cosmos; it’s the dimension of inspiration. But we also need to time our readings and our podcast.

Andrew Sweeny: We need to stop at a certain point, sure. I just wanted to thank you also for the Moon, because I think I have a new perspective on the Moon card now, which you offered me—a new dimension of the Moon, which I like more. I kind of think of the Buddhist notion of emptiness or something when you were talking about it.

Marianne Costa: That’s exactly what I aim at. First, offer a structure that works, that’s really like a skeleton of how this symbolic universe is organized, that’s coherent with our Western education and history, and even DNA. That’s one. The other is to provide a possibility to keep opening up the view, keep opening up our availability to the Tarot in a way that doesn’t go into the thinking mind and doesn’t take us into the labyrinth, that brings us closer and closer to the reality—whatever reality is at that moment, whatever reality is in us right now, whatever the reality of the deck is. I come from Advaita, my yoga, where the essence of this path is that it’s a step-by-step process from relative reality to more relative reality to, hopefully, the absolute reality. I really do—it’s not that I believe in it; I know that process, and I know how much it has changed me and the people around me. So, I apply that to working with the Tarot, and it’s beautiful because it expands the connection with what’s present.

Andrew Sweeny: Awesome. It’s been really a huge pleasure. Thank you for taking all this time.

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