LWB or not
personaly i don't like LWBs. in my view the magic of the cards is in the images. for this to work, i should look at the cards and let the meaning and the story emerge from the figures, not turn my gaze away and fix my eyes and brain on a list of words in small print. still, i understand that people may need some "grounding" in words to feel confident with a new set of Tarot. so i prepared a "suggested interpretations" text to accompany the cards.
initially i did not plan to sell many decks of this edition of CBD Tarot outside israel, so i made a short interpretation page in hebrew and let people download more detailed texts from my website. this is what i sent initially to people that ordered decks from abroad. then i translated to english a page for the 22+4 cards and sent it with the cards. now i have a 3-pages (A3) text for all the 78, although very condensed, that i put in the decks i send now. for those who didn't get it, and others who may find it useful, here it is in pdf that you can print at home:
http://www.bendov.info/tarot/cbd/cbd-interpret.pdf
for a fuller text - i have just signed a contract with a translator to translate into english a 300 pages book i wrote on the theory and practice of tarot reading using marseille cards (including CBD) and what i call "open reading". i will make the text available in electronic form when ready - a matter of some months. in a short form what the book says is: look at the cards and let them speak to you. let them also teach you how to read them.
i did not want to intervene at this stage in the very interesting discussion about methods of reading which goes on in a different thread, because first i wanted to learn what other people are doing, and also because i still dont have the relevant texts translated. but basically, what i suggest is to start only with a basic spread of 3 cards out of the 22 majors, from left to right, and let the meaning emerge without pre-defining what each position in the spread represents, or what each card symbolises. i learned this from jodorowsky - i know him for almost 30 years now, i never saw him reading in minor suits except for the aces which he uses as psychomagical icons. and with 3 out of of the 22 i saw him changing people's lives, they are that powerful (and so is he as a reader). also i understand that many tarot readers in france do the same - read only with the majors.
unlike jodorowsky i do use the minors sometimes, i feel that if they remained in the deck for centuries there is some reason and purpose to it. my main method is to put them as background behind the 3 majors of the basic spread. so i start at the left (first) position of the spread, take the cards one by one from the shuffled deck, put them on top of each other. when i reach a major card i put it on top of the previous (minor) cards, and pass to the next position. finally there are 3 majors in front of me, with a varying number of minors under them. then i read the minors of each position as a storyboard leading to the major. if there are none, then no story: what you see up front is what there is. if there are many minors, then it is a complex story behind that card. an ace underneath is energy and impetus given to the major card over it, in a direction that corresponds to the suit. many figures are many people involved, or many faces in the situation. etc.
i also believe theat the four groups of cards in the deck should be used in different ways because each has its own graphic language (the 22, the 4, the 16, the 36). so i put them in this order on my deck for the first impression when opening the deck.
for example, sometimes i start reading for people i dont know by putting the 16 court figures exposed, and ask them to choose a card which "speaks to them", and then discuss what they see in the card and why they chose it. then i proceed to a reading of 3 from the 22 majors. the reason is that the 16 are more "human on earth" than the 22, and they fit a projective work like that. with people that i feel are more open, i first let them stare on the "blank frame" card which i put in the deck. it turns out that many times this changes the question they wanted to begin with. a kind of zen exercise.
as i said i hope to have a fuller text ready in a few monthes.
also, for those who think about ordering the CBD deck - i am going to visit temples in south india during the whole of february, so anyway i will not be able to ship any more decks until the beginning of march.
hope you find it useful.