Structure, Attention, And The Tarot De Marseille

One of the things that draws many readers to the Tarot de Marseille is its refusal to explain itself. The images do not narrate. The pip cards do not moralise. Meaning is not handed over in the form of keywords or scenes that do the interpretive work for us.

For many, this feels like a return to something essential: learning to see what is actually on the card, rather than relying on prefabricated meanings or correspondence tables. I share that impulse. My own work with the Tarot de Marseille is grounded in attention — staying with the image, noticing pattern, movement, repetition, and tension, and allowing meaning to emerge rather than be imposed.

And yet, this raises an apparent contradiction.

If the work is about attention and perception, why use any framework at all? Why bring structure — particularly something as seemingly formal and metaphysical as Hebrew letters — into a practice that seeks to move away from overdetermined systems?

This question is not only reasonable. It is necessary.

The myth of “no framework”

There is no such thing as a framework-free Tarot reading. There is only acknowledged framework and unacknowledged framework.

Even among Tarot de Marseille students who explicitly reject correspondences, structure is still present. It has to be. Without some form of scaffolding, reading collapses into either randomness or projection.

Most Marseille readers rely on at least three forms of structure, whether they name them or not.

Numerology is one. The progression from Ace to Ten provides rhythm, movement, and relational meaning across the pip cards. Without a sense of progression, the pips would offer pattern but little orientation.

Suit structure is another. Whether understood elementally or not, the suits clearly operate as distinct domains. Batons do not behave like Cups. Swords do not resolve in the same way as Coins. This is already a framework.

The Major Arcana themselves provide the third. They form an archetypal field that conditions how the Minor Arcana are read and understood. Even when readers insist they are “just looking”, those images are doing structuring work.

None of this diminishes attention. It makes attention usable.

Structure is not the problem

The difficulty is not the structure itself. The difficulty arises when the structure pretends to be the meaning.

When correspondences are treated as answers rather than an orientation, attention is displaced. The reader stops looking and starts sorting. The image becomes an illustration of a concept that has already been decided elsewhere.

This is where many readers — myself included — experience a sense of constriction. Not because structure is present, but because it has become overbearing. It resolves the symbol before the symbol has had a chance to speak.

Attention, in this sense, is not opposed to structure. It is supported by the right kind of structure and undermined by the wrong kind.

Learning to see requires form

Attention without structure disperses. Structure without attention ossifies.

The work of the Tarot lives in holding both.

When I say that learning the Tarot de Marseille has been about learning to see, I do not mean abandoning form. I mean becoming more conscious of which forms support perception and which replace it.

A skeleton does not walk for the body. But without it, there is no movement at all.

My encounter with Hebrew letters

I studied the Hebrew letters separately, outside of Tarot, in 2020. This was not initially connected to my work with the Tarot de Marseille. I was interested in the letters as symbolic forms in their own right — as carriers of sound and conceptual movement.

When I later tried to integrate them into Tarot through the familiar Golden Dawn attributions, something did not sit right. The fits felt forced. The letters appeared to be laid over the Trumps in a way that often overrode what was actually present in the images.

Rather than helping me see more clearly, the system told me what I was supposed to see.

A framework that replaces perception undermines the very thing it claims to illuminate.

Where it clicked

That changed when I encountered the work of Michel Pérez Rizzi, particularly his book The Tree of Life of Mary Magdalene.

What shifted was not my attitude towards correspondences, but my understanding of what a correspondence can be.

In this Sephardic Kabbalistic framework, the Hebrew letters do not function as fixed labels or explanatory shortcuts. They act as form-giving principles — much like numbers do in the pips.

The letters offer orientation, not resolution. They provide a way of understanding movement, relation, and symbolic function without collapsing the image into a predefined meaning.

Crucially, they do not compete with attention. They require it.

Coherence rather than overlay

What resonated for me in Rizzi’s work was coherence rather than authority.

The Tarot de Marseille, read through a Sephardic Kabbalistic lens, emerges as part of a Christian-Hebrew symbolic ecology rather than a later occult overlay. In this context, the Hebrew letters do not dominate the images. They listen to them.

The framework does not explain the card away. It gives the reader a way to stay with the card longer, more patiently, and with greater internal consistency.

In this sense, the Hebrew letters function much like numerology. They give form to attention. They do not replace it.

Magdalene logic

This is also where the Magdalene current matters for me, not as an ideology but as a symbolic logic.

In this framework, meaning is not imposed from above. It unfolds through relation, embodiment, and lived encounter. Structure exists, but it is porous. It serves perception and receptivity rather than mastery and imposition.

The Hebrew letters, approached in this way, become part of that logic. They are not a hierarchy of secret meanings. They are a grammar that allows symbols to speak to one another to assist the seeker on their quest to become fully human.

Seeing is not the absence of form

Learning to see does not mean rejecting all structure. It means choosing structures that support perception rather than replace it.

This is why I can work with the Tarot de Marseille as a practice of attention while still finding the Hebrew letters useful. They do not answer the question for me. They help me ask better questions and hold the image open.

Attention is the bridge between the sacred and the mundane. That bridge cannot be crossed if the mind is busy flipping through correspondence tables. But neither can it be crossed without some form beneath our feet.

NB. This is not a prescription for how others should read. It is a description of what allows my own readings to remain coherent, alive, and grounded in attention rather than explanation.

Seeing still needs a skeleton.