In the movie Kraven the Hunter there is a small tarot scene, where the girl starts playing around with the grandma’s deck and the grandma has her choose three cards from a Tarot of Marseilles-esque deck. We were discussing this scene in a Bolognese tarot group I’m part of.

It’s probable that the deck was commissioned for the movie. What I find interesting is that while the Popess is quite faithful to most Marseille renditions and the Tower sort of resembles the old decks (though the flames have probably been remade), the Strength card is completely new. My wild guess here is that, unless there is an old tarot I am unaware of that really depicts the lion like this, the lion in the Marseille deck would barely be recognized as a lion by casual vewers: it looks like confused smoke billowing out of the maiden’s privates.

Note that the details which have been changed the most (the flames of the Tower and the lion) are the ones that used to be stylized differently in the early modern period compared with today. This is what led people like Jodorowsky to pull the “it’s actually a bird’s tail flying out of the tower” theory out of their ass, even though a cursory look at medieval art would have shown that that was how flames and lightnings were depicted.

MQS