Dogs&Coffee
I'm in with the Norisan Bird Tarot, and spirit de la lune still.
Hello friends !
Thank you VG for the link to this new thread, I love that.
I am going to spend one more week with the Oriental tarot.
I am in love with the delicacy of the illustrations, the thin ink drawings and the soft watercolors.
I am also re-discovering the pleasure of a Marseille style deck. As much as I love illustrated pips, I also love the space of interpretation given by non illustrated pips. I had not worked with a non scenic pip decks in a while, probably two month.... though I really enjoy to do it (but I also have a lot of scenic pips decks that I love, especially RWS style, and you can only work with not that many deck at a time ! )
A reason why I enjoy non scenic pip decks is that I feel as if Marseille style decks give me two contradictory things : freedom AND order. I will try to explain :
The fact that pips are non scenic, gives me a lot of freedom, and opens wide the door to intuition. I am not "bound" by the way the artist puts their own interpretation on the cards. The pip cards become an open door to whatever interpretation I feel will suit the card best.
But in the same time, not having an illustartion forces me to be very precise, "technical" in my analisys of the card, or else it would lead to nonsense or imprecision. It forces me to remember what little book knowledge I have of tarot, and to rely on suits and numbers even more than when I deal with a RWS style deck. It is an intellectual exercise as well as an intuitive one.
This mix of wide freedom and precision, I enjoy it a lot.
And, this Oriental tarot, it is SO beautiful ! The whole deck gives a soft, light energy. The light airy cardstock is part of that light energy, and the images... I love it.
I am saying it is a Marseille style deck because of the pips, and of its italian and french origins (it seems that Foudraz was french and spent part of his life in Turin ?), and the fact that initally the illustrations are anterior to the RWS and Thoth (I hope I am not mistaken here, please correct me if I am wrong !)
But it is also a lot different from the traditional Marseille deck, in that the majors are designed with more liberty. You recognise each major extremely easily, but the traditional symbols found on Marseille majors are sometimes different or absent.
In that way, this Oriental tarot is made on a TdM structure, with much liberty given in the illustrations.
It makes me travel to China in my head, a little... but mostly, it doesn't transport me in Asia per se, but it makes me think more of the big "Exposition Universelle" in Paris in the second half of the XIX century, when Asian art and culture was celebrated in Europe. To me, it shows Chinese characters through the lenses of a European illustrator of the 1850s. For that reason, I find that it has a sort of naïveté that touches me a lot.
I hope you all have a great weekend, and I hope you have time to use your decks of choice ! Much warmth ot all of you !