AUTHOR'S NOTE: Along with pictorial iconography and suit-and-number theory, color symbolism plays a major role in our interpretation of the Tarot de Marseille cards, and some TdM authors have gone on at length about the significance of the different pigments used by 17^th Century printers. I decided to stick my oar in the water.

The metaphysical implications of the primary colors Red (desire), Blue (emotion) and Yellow (intellect) are well-known to most students and practitioners (although a few postmodern authors get cute by proposing that the real primary hues are cyan, yellow and magenta, from which all other digital variants are derived). Black (dense matter), white (pure spirit) and some degree of "flesh-tone" (human carnality) also contribute to the dominant palette, but here I'm going to explore the secondary colors of Purple, Orange and Green that - with a few exceptions like the Classic Tarot and the Gassmann - are used more sparingly.

I'm ignoring all ramifications of tint and shade in this population (no "light blue," no "indigo," etc.), as well as the less-prevalent "tertiary" colors like tan and the occasional highlights of gold that pop up. Psychologists would probably argue the point, but for the purpose of ordinary divination there is only so much useful narrative detail that can be squeezed from color analysis. I've noticed, however, that this rather narrow scope didn't stop writers like Paul Marteau, Yoav Ben-Dov, Alejandro Jodorowsky and others from trying to prove otherwise,

In the description of the Waite-Smith "Lovers" card in his book Tarot Master-Class, Paul Fenton-Smith notes that Purple is the color of compassion and Orange is that of enthusiasm; Green is absent from the image and he doesn't mention it, so I will draw my own conclusions. I think of these as the "colors of compromise" since they are generated by mixing primary hues and thus sacrifice some of the original intensity.

Purple combines the comfort of Blue with the passion of Red into an amalgam of both that he sees as "compassion" (literally "com[fort] blended with passion" into sympathetic warmth toward those who require solace), while Orange is a cross between the exuberance of Red and the rational tempering of Yellow in the form of "intellect," producing what I interpret as "restrained ardor" (like a banked fire) that flows in more controlled channels. Green - a fusion of Blue and Yellow - is explained by some TdM writers as the color of the natural world and thus an expression of non-sentient organic life as an outgrowth of Blue (rainfall) and Yellow (sunlight) with its roots in the undemonstrative soil that Omar Khayyam characterized as the "all-obliterated Tongue" of "common Earth." Black and White make perfect sense as Matter and Spirit, respectively.

These ideas play well with the simplicity of the TdM images, but more artistically-sophisticated decks tend to downplay the chromatic message and focus on creative exploitation of the medium employed by the artist; I view these decks as "painterly" rather than graphically concise in their execution. There is a place for both types, but as a one-time graphic artist I'm partial to the TdM when it comes to color interpretation because as a block-printed artifact it foregoes the predictable intrusion of the painters' refined aesthetic vision (or, put more bluntly, the desire to show off their mastery). Thus, TdM decks are long on eloquence and short on nuance in their color symbolism, which makes all the difference when it comes to ascribing meaning to the cards in that specific sense.

To be fair, the Waite-Smith tarot (and particularly the Albano-Waite version) does make use of symbolic primary colors in its backgrounds (e.g. the solid yellow backdrop of the Magician as a paragon of Intellect); its handling of representative clothing such as the red-and-white of the Magician's garb; and the repeated appearance of red roses and white lilies, but this is not consistent throughout the classic edition, which tends to default to iconographic conventions like the budding staves of the Wands rather than color-corrected presentation.

Regarding the Thoth cards, while Aleister Crowley was certainly versed in the principles of occult color usage, their coloration is often biased more toward the impressive artistry of Frieda Harris than it is beholden to the exacting metaphysics of Crowley, even though a few like the Chariot with its prominent blue, red, yellow, black and white successfully unite both. He professed to be inspired by the "Medieval editors" in creating the deck, but (as did Waite with Smith) he gave Harris some leeway to inject her own artistic sensibilities, and we can all be thankful that he did so.