The DAL Tarot

The Concept

The DAL is an original eighty-card tarot: twenty-four Major Arcana and four fourteen-card suits of Minor Arcana — Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles. It neither extends any existing tradition nor invents one from scratch: it brings them into dialogue. On one side stands the Tarot de Marseille, with its enigmatic figures handed down almost unchanged for centuries, where every detail — a colour, a number, the position of a hand — carries a meaning that must be earned. On the other stands the Rider-Waite-Smith, with its narrative scenes, where each card tells a complete situation that can be grasped at a glance. The DAL does not choose between these two languages: it treats them as two witnesses to the same symbolic reality and, from them, composes a third reading — coherent with each, without merging into either.

This third reading is not a compromise. Each DAL card is designed to stand on its own, with its own internal logic and its own density of meaning — while also holding its place within a larger whole. For the DAL is not a collection of eighty independent symbols: it is a narrative work. From one card to the next, figures return, objects are passed on, postures echo one another. A gesture merely sketched on one card finds its fulfilment ten cards later. A gaze turned toward the unknown in one figure turns back toward the road already travelled in another. Nothing is explained head-on: the thread reveals itself card after card to those who take the time to look rather than merely consult the deck.

To open the DAL, then, is to accept entering a story before seeking an answer. The Major Arcana follow a journey; each suit of the Minor Arcana tells its own trajectory, carried by a figure who moves through it as one moves through a life — from the Page’s first impulse to the full mastery of the King or Queen. What the DAL offers is not a closed system in which each card carries a single, definitive meaning, but a symbolic space dense enough for the same card to speak differently according to the question asked, the spread in which it appears, or the moment in life when it is encountered. It is this tension — between rigour of construction and openness of interpretation — that gives the DAL its coherence and invites us to discover it card by card.

The Double Octave

Traditional tarot stops at twenty-two Major Arcana, from The Wanderer (0) to The World (XXI): a complete cycle, closed in on itself. The DAL respects this cycle without reopening it — but it does not stop there. After The World come two additional cards, The Fool (22) and The Magician (23), which, together with the first twenty-two, form a second octave. With the fifty-six Minor Arcana, the deck contains eighty cards in all.

The image of the octave is not decorative. In music, a higher octave sounds the same note, but transformed by the distance travelled. The Fool is not a second Wanderer: he is the Wanderer himself, returned to the same starting point after having travelled through the entire first cycle. Where The Wanderer (0) comes from the past, open and without memory, looking toward a future he does not yet know, The Fool (22) now carries the conscious memory of the road travelled: he looks back, bearing what experience has left within him. Same momentum, different depth.

The Magician responds to The Juggler according to the same logic. The Juggler (I) is still uncertain potential: a hand discovering its tools without yet knowing how to use them, more a game with chance than mastery. The Magician (23) is its fulfilment: he no longer submits to chance; he acts with full awareness of what his will brings about. What The Juggler sensed, The Magician achieves — which is why The Fool and The Magician display their own positions in the deck, 22 and 23, in their cartouches, rather than repeating the 0 and I of The Wanderer and The Juggler. Their interpretation differs too greatly from that of their counterparts for them to be confused, even though the bond between them remains at the heart of their meaning.

This second octave is therefore not a restart. A restart would mean travelling the same path again from the same point; the second octave, by contrast, takes up the same note from a higher point. It reminds us that a completed cycle erases nothing of what it has passed through — it carries it forward and sets out again, transformed by what it has learned. More than any other structural choice, this architecture gives the DAL its depth: here, the Major Arcana do not trace a straight line, but a spiral.

The Author

The DAL bears the signature of Didier Landois. It is not a project conceived in a few months to meet a market demand: it is the culmination of several decades of reflection, pursued free from any publishing deadline, around a set of questions that gradually converged — tarot and its traditions, of course, but also symbolic systems more broadly, psychology, the mechanics of narrative, and, more generally, the way imagination builds knowledge rather than merely decorating it.

This work was not a matter of choosing an iconography and dressing it in new texts. Card by card, two demands had to be held together: a demand for internal coherence — every visual detail must have a reason to be there, nothing must be merely decorative — and a demand for symbolic accuracy, betraying neither the Tarot de Marseille nor the Rider-Waite-Smith while refusing to submit to either. Creating eighty cards that each stand on their own and that, together, tell a continuous story required years of research, writing and composition rather than months.

The DAL is therefore presented here not as the work of an author who needs to be placed in the foreground, but as an object capable of standing on its own: a construction conceived as a whole, in which every choice — a card number, the position of a book, the colour of a garment — serves a precise intention connected to all the others. This site is not meant to recount a personal journey; its purpose is to give access, with as much rigour as possible, to what this construction makes visible. The name that signs it is only its most visible trace.

The Grimoire

The same object runs through almost every card of the DAL, without ever being named directly on any single card: a large Book, sometimes visible, sometimes hidden, sometimes closed, sometimes wide open. Within the fiction of the deck, this Grimoire is the Tarot itself — the text that each figure carries, consults, ignores or passes on, without always knowing what it contains.

On The Wanderer, it hangs outside the satchel, almost invisible: the figure does not even know he is carrying it, yet it already shines toward whoever looks at the card — the treasure travels before it is recognised. In The Juggler, it is finally held, closed, clutched against the body: a first possession, but not yet a reading. The High Priestess opens it for the first time in the deck, but what it reveals remains partly veiled — knowledge does not give itself entirely to those who have not crossed the threshold. In The Empress, what the Book shows remains unfinished: writing that cannot be read, a work still in gestation. The Emperor no longer holds it: it rests on the ground, closed, bristling with bookmarks — one no longer consults what one has become. The Hierophant sets it upright, wide open, facing those who listen: knowledge no longer kept, but given.

Further into the deck, the Book continues to change status. In The Lovers, it is actively consulted, and what it yields are the cards themselves. The Chariot carries it closed, exactly at the junction between two worlds. The Hermit no longer carries it at all: he levitates balanced upon it, literally borne by what he has learned. Elsewhere, an ancient copy waits forgotten on a circus lectern; another, engraved with a white rose, remains the one thing a spectral figure cannot make disappear.

This progression is nowhere explained didactically: it reveals itself by observing the cards one after another and noticing how the same detail changes status from one card to the next. The Grimoire does not move from ignorance to knowledge in a straight line — it is carried, forgotten, partly opened, closed again, passed on, found again — but its overall movement traces a clear path: knowledge ceases to be an external promise and becomes a lived and integrated experience. Simply noticing where the Book is on a given card is already a way of beginning to read the DAL differently.