Martine Beauvais: The Tarot of Marseilles: Key to the Prophecies of Nostradamus

November 5, 2023 by traditionaltarot 1 Comment

Translator’s Introduction

Previously, we have published the only substantive account in English of the Surrealist artist and alchemist, Maurice Baskine and his Tarot deck, as well as an enigmatic diagrammatic representation of the structure of the Tarot trumps. To add to this small but important body of work, we present the following article-interview of Baskine and his research on the works of Nostradamus, in relation to the Tarot. No more than his works on the Tarot, Baskine’s writings on Nostradamus were never published in his lifetime, and we have been unable to determine what has become of his written legacy.

This article was first published in V, 11th June , 1950.

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The Tarot of Marseilles:

Key to the Prophecies of Nostradamus

Martine Beauvais

If he studies the past, Baskine is also a seer. He has rendered the four elements of the atomic age into a paranoiac sculpture.

A corner of the suburbs of Paris. An old abandoned park there has become the refuge of lovers in search of solitude, and an unexpected playground for the kids of the neighbourhood. A small cottage in the park. A strange character lives there: Maurice Baskine, last of the alchemists.

In his house surrounded by thorn bushes, the solitary man accomplishes a round in Infinity (Baskine spells Infinity as Unfinity*).

A round that is not that of a dreamer. Head accountant, Maurice Baskine had had to verify, and to credit, the strange accounting of Nostradamus. (*)

Nostradamus. A prophet?

– “No, replies Maurice Baskine. The Centuries of Michel de Nostre-Dame, alias Nostradamus, are an alchemical treatise.”

Chance was to place within his hands the two documents which would enable Maurice Baskine to decipher the centuries-old mystery of Nostradamus.

In 1927, Pierre Piobb (*) produced a facsimile edition of the 1668 edition published by Jean Janson of Amsterdam, considered by researchers as being the editio princeps.

– “I am an autodidact, says Maurice Baskine, everything I discovered was revealed to me…”

“The war of 1914 forced me to stop my studies. At the age of 14 I was working in the Crédit Lyonnais. All the while working hard to earn a living, I was slowly climbing the steps of initiation, until the moment in which I found myself in possession of the work of Pierre Piobb.”

“Using the sciences I have studied, it is possible for me to see future events. Yet, it would be impossible for me, just as it would be for anyone else, to condense them into a poetic quatrain as Nostradamus did. And the work of Nostradamus has 944 of them! If a few hundred of these verses have been applied to events which have occurred throughout history, no one has ever been able to decipher one that was to occur in the future. From there to think that the work contained something else, there is but one step. I took that step.

For Baskine, the work of Nostradamus is but a treatise of experimental philosophy: the Palace of Mirages.

Maurice Baskine enjoys relaxing by the columns of knowledge.

– “Nostradamus created the fiction of a little world: the “microcosm”, analogous to the wider world, or “macrocosm”, in which he has his characters evolve, and to which he assigns certain events. The little world evolves on a map: a part of Europe, Africa and Asia Minor. The events therefore occur in different European States. But the battles and massacres of the work will be, in the final analysis, but rounds of checkers and chess.”

It is in the Tarot of Marseilles that Maurice Baskine was able to find the keys which enabled him to crack open the locks to the Nostradamic cryptography.

A curious thing, it was at the very moment that the facsimile edition of the Centuries was published that Mr Paul Marteau (*) of the Grimaud firm (the major playing card publisher), found in the archives of a factory he owned in Marseilles, an edition of the cards which was more accurate than the one he was then printing. He stopped printing the defective Tarot.

It was due to these two documents: Piobb’s document and the Tarot of Marseilles, that Maurice Baskine was able to little by little enter into the work of Michel de Notre-Dame and was able to restore it.

Nostradamus cursed his work. The curse is contained in the sole Latin quatrain of the work, placed above Century VII. (*)

Since Maurice Baskine has undertaken the monumental research for which he was destined, he no longer counts the avatars and the calamities which have rained down upon him. Everything that is contained within that accursed book has turned against the denouncer of evil forces, until the day when the enigma will be completely pierced.

– “The work will soon be liberated, proclaims Baskine. Nostradamus has allowed me to pierce the mystery of his message issued forth to man of the twentieth century, a message which today has become “disintegrated.””

– Martine Beauvais

Translator’s Notes

• Unfinity: Baskine spells the French word for infinity using the homonymous prefix UN – or ‘one’.
• On Nostradamus, one will be able to consult a vast amount of material in both English and French.
• On Pierre Piobb and his thinking on the Tarot, see our series of articles starting here. Piobb’s edition of Nostradamus is available here.
• On Paul Marteau and his contribution to the world of Tarot, see our extensive series of articles, starting here.
• The sentence in question, “Qui aliter facit, is ritè, sacer esto“, is in fact a more or less direct quotation from the work De honesta disciplina by the Renaissance scholar Crinitus.