In addition to the symbols of the Tarot, it is useful to study the symbolism of the eleven colors present in the deck of Marseilles tarot cards, which we will use for practicality in this online tutorial.

Every culture, every religion, and every tradition has its own version of the symbolism of colors. Yet, there is a common basis: the struggle (or dance) between light and dark generates color.

The range of colors depends on the predominance of light or dark. In classifying the colors, it must be recognized that the Tarot presents them in all their diversity, without suggesting a precise order, unlike the structure of the cards which provides us with numerous clues about the numerology and orientation of the Tarot.

Each color classification must therefore be considered relative; colors, in fact, are always ambivalent: their symbolic meaning changes according to the culture and, once again, one cannot claim to reduce it to a system of rigid equivalences.

The suggested tracks are therefore open proposals that do not claim to exhaust the study of colors.

• Black color. It refers to two opposite and complementary concepts. On the one hand, the idea of emptiness: the total absence of light, no color. Zen monks wear black robes. We must reduce ourselves to emptiness, disappear, stop thinking and enter into nothingness. And yet, black is also the creative magma that contains all the shoots of life, the raw material: the alchemical nigredo, an amorphous mass of putrefaction which is the humus of purity. Chaos where order begins: all life, in principle, germinates in the darkness.
• White color. On the contrary, it is the luminous union of all colors, a realization in which everything reaches perfect unity, purification. It is the antithesis of flesh pink and black. From a negative point of view, white also refers to the deadly cold of the snow, of fear. It is the color of God and of death.

Black and white determine the extremes between which all other colors unfold. The flesh pink color could be placed in the center.

• Flesh pink color. And the specific color of human skin in the western customs area where the Tarot is born. The flesh pink represented here is the color of living flesh, it evokes the present life. Black can talk about the past just as white can talk about the future, if you like. It cannot be said that this color is positive or negative: it takes on all the psychic forms of the human being, good and evil. It is ambiguous par excellence, in us there is heaven in hell, violence and peace. All opposites come together in flesh pink.
• Green color. Vital color of exuberance, it evokes the predominant Nature, the eternal birth, the perpetual transformation. The Prophet Mohammed chose it as a symbol of eternity. Green is an explosion of life on site: plant life acts only where it has taken root. For this reason, green can also mean absorption, deepening. In the unconscious, green will symbolize attachment to the mother. If mother nature gives us life, she can also keep us bound, depriving us of freedom, and sink us.
• Red color. It could represent the active part of the earth: central fire, blood, heat. It is the color of activity par excellence. From a negative point of view, red evokes the violence of spilled blood, the danger, the prohibition. If the blood is outside it means death, while if it circulates inside the body it represents life.
• Blue color. It is the reception color par excellence. As color of the sky and the ocean, it also evokes the attachment to the father. Its negative dimension could be immobility, asphyxiation: when the blood is not purified by oxygen, it becomes blue.
• Yellow color. Light of intellect and conscience. It has been compared to gold, a symbol of spiritual wealth. In alchemy, the philosopher's stone transmutes all metals into gold. Its downside may be dryness.
• Purple color. This color is a mixture of red, the most active, and blue, the most receptive. The union of the two extremes represents supreme wisdom. When Jesus Christ begins to speak to the disciples, he wears red; but he is crucified dressed in purple, in full wisdom. Yet, purple is also the color of sacrifice: it is identified with mortuary rites. But, in reality, it is about the death of the ego. Purple is rarely found in the Tarot because it represents the greatest secret: dominating the ego to achieve impersonal life.

Different color groups

In the Tarot, we find eleven colors: black, dark green, light green, red, flesh pink, orange, light yellow, blue, light blue, white and some purple spots. How to organize them among themselves? In every human culture, since the beginning of intelligence, there has been the concept of the universe. In this concept man lives between heaven and earth.

Currently, the tradition we live in tells us that the earth is a mother and the sky is a father. But in other, more ancient cultures, in Egypt and Africa, the opposite concept existed.

So man places himself between these two instances, of which he is the result, to separate them or to make them enter into communication.

In our tradition, which is that of the Tarot of Marseilles, Heaven is the symbol of spirituality and the Earth of material life. Man is halfway between one and the other. Black, white and purple are colors without shades.

As for the colors red and flesh pink, they have an interesting relationship: in a certain sense, flesh pink can be considered a lighter variant of red. Red is animality, it is purely terrestrial and active, it is spiritualist in the flesh pink that symbolizes the human. But you can also consider these two colors as complete entities.

Then a group of five "frank" colors would be obtained, without shades, light and dark, which would be black, white, and red (the three best-known colors of the alchemical work), flesh pink (the human) and purple (the impersonal, the androgynous).