EnriqueEnriquez
SilentBreeze said:
:-D
That is beautiful!
Marseilles Seekers Thread (Fifth Exercise)
:-D
That is beautiful!
EnriqueEnriquez
Hooked on TdM said:Hehe, quoting myself here. I see what you mean EE! In exercise three, the 8 Batons was: Interweaving 8 poles for stabilization. Here it becomes a wound healing which is a form of stabilization! I didn't even realize that I was doing this until I read what you pointed out after I finished all my exercises! It's very subtle isn't it? I can also see this being echoed in my actual readings. Now that I have each pip placement in my head it just automatically became part of the meaning! Very cool stuff here EE!!!
Hooked
I am so happy you pointed this out. I believe most knowledge regarding the tarot has to be experiential. There is no point on being given an answer for a question we haven’t asked ourselves. But when certain things ‘click’ and we ‘get’ them, the understanding of them becomes relevant and useful.
Keep us posted on your insights!
EE
EnriqueEnriquez
Excellent...
Mosaica, SilentBreeze, Bernice, Satori and Hooked,
These are great examples!
In a reading there are lots of ‘warm’ components: human interaction, undivided attention, venting, validation of pain, projective identification, subjective validation, etc... But I like to think the other person has to walk away with a strong image, metaphor, or notion, she can pocket and keep with her, like a talisman. That is what we are accomplishing here, in part. Not only we want to see things in the cards, but we want to have the possibility of arriving at a sharp, simple, message people can take from us.
I would like to go back to the work of Joseph Beuys, which we touched on our first or second exercise. According to him, his sculptures created "an almost chemical process among people that would have been impossible if I had only spoken theoretically." This goes back to the idea of metaphors being understood only at an imaginal level. We have to be there, and experience them, to see them. They can’t be explained in full. Beuys also said that he worked not with symbols but with materials. I think this is relevant because understanding the tarot as a material is extremely important. I know this notion can be hard to grasp. We are working with something that is akin to clay, or wax, or bronze; something we pour on the table so we can rejoice in the shapes it create. Within that model, the differences between trumps, courts, and pips are secondary. It is all the same material, one malleable brick of paper we get to spread countless times over a surface. What we are doing here is not far away from scrying. We spread our material over the table to see on it the reflexions of our own awareness.
Beuys also believed that the less literal the performances were, the easier it would be for the audience members to translate his message into their own lives. This has to do with what I was pointing out in regard of having a metaphorical layer always in mind when we do our readings. We work literally so we can be metaphorical, and we work metaphorically so we can be literal.
Finally, I would like to leave you for now with this quote. Beuys once said: "Art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. It produces deepened perceptions of experience. . . . Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no need of art."
You are working beautifully! I am proud of your results.
Best,
EE
Mosaica, SilentBreeze, Bernice, Satori and Hooked,
These are great examples!
In a reading there are lots of ‘warm’ components: human interaction, undivided attention, venting, validation of pain, projective identification, subjective validation, etc... But I like to think the other person has to walk away with a strong image, metaphor, or notion, she can pocket and keep with her, like a talisman. That is what we are accomplishing here, in part. Not only we want to see things in the cards, but we want to have the possibility of arriving at a sharp, simple, message people can take from us.
I would like to go back to the work of Joseph Beuys, which we touched on our first or second exercise. According to him, his sculptures created "an almost chemical process among people that would have been impossible if I had only spoken theoretically." This goes back to the idea of metaphors being understood only at an imaginal level. We have to be there, and experience them, to see them. They can’t be explained in full. Beuys also said that he worked not with symbols but with materials. I think this is relevant because understanding the tarot as a material is extremely important. I know this notion can be hard to grasp. We are working with something that is akin to clay, or wax, or bronze; something we pour on the table so we can rejoice in the shapes it create. Within that model, the differences between trumps, courts, and pips are secondary. It is all the same material, one malleable brick of paper we get to spread countless times over a surface. What we are doing here is not far away from scrying. We spread our material over the table to see on it the reflexions of our own awareness.
Beuys also believed that the less literal the performances were, the easier it would be for the audience members to translate his message into their own lives. This has to do with what I was pointing out in regard of having a metaphorical layer always in mind when we do our readings. We work literally so we can be metaphorical, and we work metaphorically so we can be literal.
Finally, I would like to leave you for now with this quote. Beuys once said: "Art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. It produces deepened perceptions of experience. . . . Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no need of art."
You are working beautifully! I am proud of your results.
Best,
EE
Satori
Using the Fournier
I decided to do some more of these with the Fournier. I admit I am getting a bit fatigued with the small cards....there does seem to be a difference for me using the larger landscape to work with. I do love the sort of primal feel to the Noblet scenes. The faces on the Majors seem very....tribal and strong.
Satori said:
I decided to do some more of these with the Fournier. I admit I am getting a bit fatigued with the small cards....there does seem to be a difference for me using the larger landscape to work with. I do love the sort of primal feel to the Noblet scenes. The faces on the Majors seem very....tribal and strong.
Bernice
3rd attempt: Noblet
Three (3) Batons - Canopies at a funfair
Wheel of Fortune - Big wheel
Knight Coins - man riding away - morosely eyeing a coin.
a) Playing around. Enjoying swings & merry-go-rounds
b) Easy come - easy go. Taking chances.
c) Leaving - no cash left. Disappointed.
Just bombing along taking chances, assuming expectations will be met. But they won't, it was all pie-in-the-sky. You'll end up disappointed, and have seek another way to realize your dreams.
Or:
Playing the field - without concern for consequences - will leave him without options, and out of pocket.
Bee
Three (3) Batons - Canopies at a funfair
Wheel of Fortune - Big wheel
Knight Coins - man riding away - morosely eyeing a coin.
a) Playing around. Enjoying swings & merry-go-rounds
b) Easy come - easy go. Taking chances.
c) Leaving - no cash left. Disappointed.
Just bombing along taking chances, assuming expectations will be met. But they won't, it was all pie-in-the-sky. You'll end up disappointed, and have seek another way to realize your dreams.
Or:
Playing the field - without concern for consequences - will leave him without options, and out of pocket.
Bee
mosaica
I had a dream this morning, for which I drew some cards, but it reminded me of something that I'd like to share here. I like to record my dreams using a stream-of-conscious method suggested by James Hillman in his book "Inter Views." He suggests "taking the punctuation out" when you record a dream, and I realized that what he has to say about dreams is also important for tarot reading, especially the kind of reading that EE is teaching us:
The verbal mode of working with the image, the poetic mode of working with the image, releases their meanings that were concealed in the phonemes, concealed in the etymology. The word in the dream is not restricted to conceptual interpretation because the word in the dream is not a concept. It's an image arriving out of imagination, and the dictionary meaning, the denotation of the word, is only part....
There are lots of simple things you can do to break up the literal sense of your dream interpretations, those fixed meanings inherent in our usual language. That literalism, that dayworld rational secular commonsense has to be overcome again and again.... For instance, most people ... tell their dreams in sentences. If you take the punctuation out of the dream, so that you're looking at it the way you would look at an ancient Babylonian or Hebrew text, where you don't know quite whether that's an "ayn" or ... an "alef," you don't know what it is, you don't really know what to do, and then you get about ten different possibilities about that text. Freud used the same metaphor for the dream: an ancient text.
We're talking about animating the images, not content of dreams. This is the crucial job now.... It's not a question of ... recognizing that there are images [in your dreams] or that images are important.... All these images ... are ... tremendously significant.... [But] the imagination is fundamental.
[Freud and Jung, however,] took what they saw and didn't leave it where it was, but moved it into "this means that." ... They brought up the material and then by the translation sent it back down again.... Once you've translated the dream,... you no longer need the image, and you let the image only say one thing.... This leaves the soul unanimated. That is, unalive. The images are not walking around on their own legs. They've been turned into meanings.... Now let's leave [behind] meaning and the search for meaning, and the meaning of life.
Dreams are extraordinary, people's lives are extraordinary, unbelievable; fantastic things happen all the time ... and it's translated into the deadest, dullest, most serious, most unimaginative ... an utter bore.... Instead,... we have to let in the puer [silly, playful, imaginative, wild] aspect of what's going on in one's life.
That's what we are doing here, with the Marseille and EE. We are animating the images -- the images of the tarot, and the images of our lives.
For my dream, I drew the following cards:
Ten of Coins - a tree
Royne de Bastons - I sit beneath the tree, while a root and my husband's hand reach playfully up from below
Royne de Denier - A gift (my husband, playfulness, and imagination) that I give to myself and my children
This provides a metaphor for all the things that I want for my family: balance (roots and branches, above and below), stability, play, love, friends, and the gift of imagination. It's also a metaphor for what my husband and I each provide to that picture -- my seriousness, and his playfulness. Through him, I give something to my children that I have a harder time giving.
But I think the larger metaphor of these cards is about tarot itself. Through working with Marseille, we have come to sit beneath a very old tree. We invite the images of subconscious (the roots of the tree) to come out, to push playfully up into the light of day and give us a hand, as we work to listen to those images and present them back to the world as a gift in the form of metaphor.
(I have written more about my dream on my blog, but I wanted to share the Hillman quote and the cards that I drew here.)
Mosaica
The verbal mode of working with the image, the poetic mode of working with the image, releases their meanings that were concealed in the phonemes, concealed in the etymology. The word in the dream is not restricted to conceptual interpretation because the word in the dream is not a concept. It's an image arriving out of imagination, and the dictionary meaning, the denotation of the word, is only part....
There are lots of simple things you can do to break up the literal sense of your dream interpretations, those fixed meanings inherent in our usual language. That literalism, that dayworld rational secular commonsense has to be overcome again and again.... For instance, most people ... tell their dreams in sentences. If you take the punctuation out of the dream, so that you're looking at it the way you would look at an ancient Babylonian or Hebrew text, where you don't know quite whether that's an "ayn" or ... an "alef," you don't know what it is, you don't really know what to do, and then you get about ten different possibilities about that text. Freud used the same metaphor for the dream: an ancient text.
We're talking about animating the images, not content of dreams. This is the crucial job now.... It's not a question of ... recognizing that there are images [in your dreams] or that images are important.... All these images ... are ... tremendously significant.... [But] the imagination is fundamental.
[Freud and Jung, however,] took what they saw and didn't leave it where it was, but moved it into "this means that." ... They brought up the material and then by the translation sent it back down again.... Once you've translated the dream,... you no longer need the image, and you let the image only say one thing.... This leaves the soul unanimated. That is, unalive. The images are not walking around on their own legs. They've been turned into meanings.... Now let's leave [behind] meaning and the search for meaning, and the meaning of life.
Dreams are extraordinary, people's lives are extraordinary, unbelievable; fantastic things happen all the time ... and it's translated into the deadest, dullest, most serious, most unimaginative ... an utter bore.... Instead,... we have to let in the puer [silly, playful, imaginative, wild] aspect of what's going on in one's life.
That's what we are doing here, with the Marseille and EE. We are animating the images -- the images of the tarot, and the images of our lives.
For my dream, I drew the following cards:
Ten of Coins - a tree
Royne de Bastons - I sit beneath the tree, while a root and my husband's hand reach playfully up from below
Royne de Denier - A gift (my husband, playfulness, and imagination) that I give to myself and my children
This provides a metaphor for all the things that I want for my family: balance (roots and branches, above and below), stability, play, love, friends, and the gift of imagination. It's also a metaphor for what my husband and I each provide to that picture -- my seriousness, and his playfulness. Through him, I give something to my children that I have a harder time giving.
But I think the larger metaphor of these cards is about tarot itself. Through working with Marseille, we have come to sit beneath a very old tree. We invite the images of subconscious (the roots of the tree) to come out, to push playfully up into the light of day and give us a hand, as we work to listen to those images and present them back to the world as a gift in the form of metaphor.
(I have written more about my dream on my blog, but I wanted to share the Hillman quote and the cards that I drew here.)
Mosaica
mosaica
I finished going through the whole deck today, and I feel enormously grateful for such a valuable exercise that allows me to do so, again and again, as often as I wish. No longer do I have to wait for someone else to give me the opportunity to read for them. Even without a question, I find that these exercises work my imagination in the way that I seek.
What is it about tarot cards that satisfies a need of the mind? I need my daily "reading high" just as much as my body needs its daily "runner's high" or "strength training high." I am in imaginative heaven with the Marseille.
What is it about tarot cards that satisfies a need of the mind? I need my daily "reading high" just as much as my body needs its daily "runner's high" or "strength training high." I am in imaginative heaven with the Marseille.
Satori
Nice stuff Mosaica.
I love stream of consciousness writing, and yes I usually do it without the punctuation. I think the most freeing thing for me, the gift of this program for me, is that I used to think that until I studied the O'neill book or spent years sifting thru medieval texts and iconography that the Marseilles was sort of a closed door. Diana introduced me to the Hadar, and so I've always flirted with the idea that I might get to the place where I could say that I can read the TDM. Well, guess what? I'm pretty sure I can now say, I can read the TDM.
I love stream of consciousness writing, and yes I usually do it without the punctuation. I think the most freeing thing for me, the gift of this program for me, is that I used to think that until I studied the O'neill book or spent years sifting thru medieval texts and iconography that the Marseilles was sort of a closed door. Diana introduced me to the Hadar, and so I've always flirted with the idea that I might get to the place where I could say that I can read the TDM. Well, guess what? I'm pretty sure I can now say, I can read the TDM.
mosaica
Satori said:
Yay, Satori! It feels like such an amazing accomplishment, doesn't it?
(I want a Hadar next. I need a second TdM that I really like for when my Noblet is tied up in exercises or readings. Maybe I just need another Noblet.)
Who's O'Neill? I'll have to look him up, just to satisfy my curiosity. I don't think I'll feel the need to read his book though. Not only can I read the TdM, I feel free of tarot books! (Except EE's writings, of course, which is in another class altogether from the run-of-the-mill tarot book!
)lark
Exactly how I used to feel.Satori said:
I couldn't understand what anyone was talking about...did I have to know that possibly this symbol came from this cathedral???
Or this might have to do with the bible and this might have to do with the trade embargo...on and on it went...who cares...I just wanted to read the darn things.
And I got the distinct impression sometimes that some of the people most invested in TdM held the belief that they weren't for reading with at all.
And so any "how to read them" questions got swept along in other issues.
Well now I feel like I can read with them and there is more than a glimmer of hope that they will become an actual working deck.
And it is so easy the way EE explains it...so natural.
And it fits in effortlessly with the way I read tarot in general.
So the Dodal is not going up for sale.
