baba-prague said:
But the Emperor recovers! What he had to learn is that natural things are sometimes better than artificial/man-made ones. After realising that, he presumably goes on to have a happy, and much more balanced, life.
Argh!
As a child of an ethnic German, I was always told the story that the Emperor, instead of dying in pain and torment, died in peace and happiness listening to the song of the living bird outside his window.
Which works, too, in a tragically poignant way.
baba-prague said:
I think this story is a beautiful parable about the problems when rationale/artifice/control-over-nature over-reaches itself. It tells us that we in fact can't cage nature - nature has to be free to go its own way.
Absolutely.
baba-prague said:
It's very much a story for our times and to me, it works beautifully as an Emperor card that asks us to think about the sensible and workable limits of power, control and technology.
<ruefully> I can see that. I'd be humbled in the face of your Superior Thinking - except that I don't take kindly to being humbled at all <laughter>. I suppose I'm too used to seeing Emperor after Emperor in the peak of their power, not one who has used all his up and been withered away by its depletion.
Sorta like my old friend Dorothy's "Temperance" card in the Whimsical deck, also based on childhood stories, where Jack and Jill are tumbling down the hill intemperately: Temperance features by being exactly absent from the image.
baba-prague said:
As with all the cards in this deck, it's really important to read the whole story - the image on the card can only show one scene, but what's represented is the entire tale. I think the deck works at its best when the stories are well understood by the reader (i.e. this is a deck that demands quite a bit of work, but that really does give back if you can put in the reading and study time).
Of even if you don't, the deck works really well.
I was having a bit of a Tarot-fest with a real-world friend of mine, a perfumer called Ambrosia, recently, who so far knows your decks only from the three represented in my collection (although I think she's looking forward avidly to getting her hands on one or two of her own); and she made a very perceptive comment about MRP decks in general, based on having seen my copies of the Fantastic Menagerie, the BB-kitties and the Fairytale: she said the reason why she was drawn to your decks is that in each of them, each individual card seems to contain many, many potential stories. And now in the exchange circle threads I've used all three of them, and found that they easily accommodate themselves to a huge range of stories - which is exactly what Tarot is supposed to do.
(Except the FM Star recently has been quite inappropriately reminding me of a certain forum-member every time I see it! -
)