Besançon Tarot

The Besançon Tarot is a variant of the Marseille pattern, made mainly in Alsace, Switzerland and Franche-Comté in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its distinctive feature is that it replaces The High Priestess and The Hierophant (the Popess and the Pope) with Juno and Jupiter, probably to avoid religious figures considered sensitive. The rest of its imagery is very close to the Tarot de Marseille. It bears witness to the regional diversity of tarot decks before their standardization.