Your Deck's Symbolic Structure...

Scion said:

.....But I wonder if even in the Tarot world we focus more on form rather than content, and if our appetite for irrelevant slickness will spread unchecked into every corner of our psyches. Obsessing over the prettiness of a tool is like complaining that your oncologist isn't a male model; it seems symptomatic of the "buy the label, eat the brand" mentality of our empty-calorie millenium....

Click to expand...

Yikes!
You're awfully quick to dismiss the importance of art here.
I have to question your oncologist/male model analogy.

If you want to call a tarot deck a tool, then it seems to me that you probably should note that it functions solely (Or at least mainly?) on its visual content. I believe it is a visual language, and conveys particular concepts via imagery, rather than written language. I don't think it's an accident that the earliest decks lacked written titles. The picture is the thing. I think that to dismiss the artwork as "prettiness" or of secondary importance is to put down the fundamental means of communication.

Perhaps a better analogy might involve something about poetry or music's ability to communicate emotion, versus a doctor's medical description of the physiological effects of a given test subject's emotional response.

Now, having said all this, I would go on to state that I don't deny the importance of what you're calling Symbolic Structure. It is, of course, the subject of the whole exercise. I'm simply pointing out that it is the intellectual content that is being delivered by the artwork, and that effective delivery is essential. Good art is generally more effective than bad.

Best,
OnePotato

Here is another symbol theme that I've wondered about for some time.

It seems to me that the historical themed decks tend to be the most popular decks among readers. Especially as reading decks.

I myself am very drawn to decks that do not have modern symbols in them, although the exception to this is Wheel of Change, and of course, Voyager. I admit that I do not use Voyager regularly anymore, but I do reach for Wheel of Change quite often.

What I have wondered about is why we as modern people continue to have this love affair with the older decks. Is it a romantic thing? Or could it be (in some instances) about the beauty of the classical artwork?

I mean there isn't any real beauty in depicting a bunch of smokestacks or showing the decimation of a forest. But wouldn't more modern symbols be more accessible to us right now, illustrating better the issues our sitters are up against everyday?

For instance wouldn't showing the Queen of Swords as a working mom and montaging her family, her commute, her nightlife in the background, be more in step with 2007 than a woman dressed in gowns on a thrown with a sword?

Why do we love connecting with antiquated imagery? Why does using antiquated symbols still work for us?

I wonder if it is indeed something beyond the symbolism.

OnePotato said:

If you want to call a tarot deck a tool, then it seems to me that you probably should note that it functions solely (Or at least mainly?) on its visual content. I believe it is a visual language, and conveys particular concepts via imagery, rather than written language. I don't think it's an accident that the earliest decks lacked written titles. The picture is the thing. I think that to dismiss the artwork as "prettiness" or of secondary importance is to put down the fundamental means of communication.

Click to expand...

Actually, no. Onepotato, you bring up a good issue, but one which goes a long way to proving my point. As you say symbolism is a visual language. But I'd say Tarot functions mainly through symbolic content, because the artwork is not the meaning. We read the symbols in the cards, and while beautiful symbols may be appealing they are no more meaningful for being aesthetically pleasing (a handmade Stop sign leaps to mind). As Bob Place would say, the idea of merely decorative art in the Renaissance would have seemed ridiculous, because people expected to deduce symbolic meaning from any art. Stained glass wasn't there to make churches pretty or bright, it gave the illiterate masses something worthwhile to read when they entered the House of G-D. Beautiful indeed, but more importantly: clear.

So too, the earliest decks lacked titles because they were rendered at a time when decoding complicated symbols was of central importance to the culture. No one needed to be told that the eagle on the shield depicted imperial power, and that in the Holy Roman empire the 2 headed eagle looked one way for Rome and the other for Germany. Or that Temperance was traditionally depicted as a woman mixing water and wine between two vessels. The game tested the cleverness and education of the players, as well as their luck.

Those untitled decks were purpose-built for a complicated game which presupposed a high degree of symbolic literacy. To play the game of Tarot, you had to be educated enough to know not only that that Temperance trumped Strength, but to be able to quickly identify either virtue by reading the associated symbols. Pleasure might come from the picture, but the symbol structure won the game. Which is why Time's hourglass gradually became the Lamp of the Hunchback or the Hermit. The symbol was misread by designers of later decks. And the titling came later too, as the deck's use spread to areas even less familiar with the symbols depicted (i.e. where the obscurity of the symbol interfered with reading them quickly enough). Notice the one card that didn't get titled was the trump with which all of humanity is familiar: XIII.

I would argue that a better/closer analogy is a book. We don't look at cards, we read them. Like books they are a matrix of symbols from which we deduce meaning. Any aesthetic pleasure is a bonus but secondary. That is not to say that an attractive typeface or particularly clear illustrations do not make a book more meaningful, but rather that if the aim is to read. Illuminated manuscripts are no more intelligible than mass-market paperbacks or a Gutenburg Project text file. I could email you a copy of Faustus in an intellectual property format of which Marlowe couldn't conceive, and it would be Faustus. To argue that the prettiness of the font and the quality of the paper improves the experience is one thing, but as the Internet has proven, books are virtual objects, a string of codes that can be transmitted without paper or press. Augmenting the beauty of its transmission only allows it to be read seamlessly, a kind of visual shoehorn that allows us to connect more easily. Hence my comment about the modern appetite for packaging. I am depressed by shoddy artwork as much as anyone; and I celebrate beauty where I can find it, but I will argue endlessly that it is not essential to Tarot. Which is why I think symbolic clarity is central to the act of Tarot creation. The cards are supposed to mean something.

It's interesting that you use music and poetry as metaphors, and their ability to communicate emotion. I would argue that Emotion is a very small part of the meaning they can convey, and that the most beautiful music and poetry actually pushes us past the personal, towards the transcendant. Last spring I heard Rachel Pollack speak about the psychologizing of Tarot and I think that's at work here. Learning symbols is hard, so people have begun to treat them as Rorshasch inkblots which encourage projection. And maybe that's how symbols become meaningful, we glean impressions and gradually learn the "traditional" readings for the various components. Again, a perfectly valid option, but no more Tarot than any other collection of pretty pictures. We could read with pages torn from Italian Vogue, and we could build something resembling a Tarot, but isn't the symbolic choice the thing that makes it Tarot as opposed to the photography? Just ask anyone who's gone from hating the TdM to loving it.

As I said above, there are divinatory decks much more "beautiful" than the Waite-Smith. I have my own theories about why the deck became popular, but the aesthetic appeal of the images isn't one of them. The most common argument is that Smith and Waite produced the first esoteric deck with fully illustrated Minors... In other words, Pamela rendered her symbolism clearly. She didn't necessarily make the most artistically skillful choices throughout, there are glaring mistakes in fact, but she made the symbols clear and readable to the masses. I personally find her artwork radiant, but I don't believe for a moment that she was painting with decorative intentions. She was illustrating symbols: "A big job for little money." Resonant, yes. Compelling, yes. And most importantly meaningful: she was executing symbols from a given structure clearly enough for noninitiates to make sense of them.

Which gets me back to my original question: how does making choices about that set of symbols change the process of making the deck? Reading through this subforum I've found a lot about technique and skill but very little about how people decided on a structure. I think it's great when the pictures look nice, but symbol is central.

Scion

elf said:

What I have wondered about is why we as modern people continue to have this love affair with the older decks. Is it a romantic thing? Or could it be (in some instances) about the beauty of the classical artwork?
... For instance wouldn't showing the Queen of Swords as a working mom and montaging her family, her commute, her nightlife in the background, be more in step with 2007 than a woman dressed in gowns on a thrown with a sword?
...
Why do we love connecting with antiquated imagery? Why does using antiquated symbols still work for us?

Click to expand...

Hey C,

I think it may be that the symbols of the past are familiar to a larger population in a swathe of settings. If it is logical to assume that our elders will have answers, then why shouldn't their elders have even more answers and bigger answers... and so on. Our ancestors' ancestors' ancestors. Humanity tends to place wisdom and truth in a lost Golden Age which is purer and closer somehow to the source of all creation. Nostaligia for greatness and the close relationship with the gods which we supposedly lack, but our ancestors experienced as immanence.

The codicil to that is that symbols get streamlined over time... the unnecessary bits get knocked off. Death is primal and the symbols for death in the West are pretty coherent across cultures. But more abstract or culturally specific things (Prudence, Faith) are less immediately identifiable so the symbols get muddled as they pass across borders. Myths and fairytales lose little details that aren't central to their telling, making it easier for us to hear them even if we aren't familiar with their culture of origin.

Many cultures have castles, but used symbolically they aren't depicted realistically because not all castles are the same. Still, what other image manages to convey royalty and military defence and stability and human achievement and patronage and wealth and power and prestige and fairytales and and and and... a castle. Bang! By placing the symbol in the past we quickly sidestep personal associations the inevitably accompany familiar images. Castle becomes a kind of shorthand because although castles still exist as concrete objects, very few people experience them personally, and in fact even the physical buildings have become largely symbolic.

In a way, you're talking the nature of communication and (as Baba was saying) the difficulty of creating a matrix of symbols that can be quickly understood by a wide population. How can you get a thought from your head into someone else's? How can either of you be sure it's the same thought? How is a thought changed by being encoded symbolically? Let's go back to castles... America is not historically situated to have castles as such; so why not get rid of castles for something more symbolically American? If you use the image of a sleek high rise in place of a castle, it might convey many of the things that "castle" conveys. But what happens when you use two identical highrise towers next to each other? What about using a photo of the actual World Trade Center? Is the symbol still clear in its meaning? Does it have the same meaning to every person who sees it? This makes me think of all those 1980s romantic comedies set in NYC that end with glorious shots of the Towers crowning Manhattan; suddenly the image doesn't look all glamorous and hopeful and life-affirming to modern viewers. One of the reasons the Towers were attacked was because of their symbolic value and impact.

This is where I disagree with OnePotato above, emotion can be conveyed by symbol, but only with extraordinary skill and care. Often symbol gets hijacked by emotion and vice versa. Wagner's Teutonic pride in the Fatherland scooped up an unwanted meaning after Nuremberg. I think placing things in a remote past is a way of handling volatile meaning safely. It's the reason Shakespeare used the Scottish Play to talk about the Gowrie conspiracy in James I's lifetime or used The Tempest to explore themes of aging, art, and the relationship between creators and monarchs. "Once Upon a Time" and "Faraway lands" are safe turf for wrestling with big issues without getting too personal.

As for the lack of a "modern" set of symbols, we live in a symbolically oversaturated culture. There is just too damn much to make sense of and we are too close to it to detach and see the universal in the specifics. If you use images of a working mom commuting and hitting the town as the Queen of Swords, will someone in Idaho see it the same way that someone in New York would? How about in Canada or England? How about rural Ecuador or Baghdad? You've brought up something central here, obviously.

I've seen a couple threads expressing the desire for a modern deck because readers want something that's immediately useful to them without symbolic friction or effort. And rather than waiting for someone else do do the work for you, you're rolling up your sleeves and building the Claudia Tarot. Meditating on the symbolic matrix that IS Tarot and finding ways to express it in immediately in readable images. That's exactly what the Golden Dawn wanted its members to do. And Crowley encouraged it as well. And the BOTA. Each of us should create our own deck because it forces us to interact with these symbols personally and viscerally. It's just that not a lot of people have the time or inclination. And because we live in a world of mass production, one person's deck can be reproduced 10,000 times. Robin Wood's personal vision of the Book T symbolism represents not only her vision, but a symbolic reading of that tradition that resonates with a whole population of neopagans. Karen & Alex, Bob Place, Zach Wong, Sidhe/Emily, Kat Black... all of these folks started out making something purely and intensely personal.

I think symbols are by definition "antiquated," because to carry meaning they must in some sense exist outside time and space. A skull still means one thing practically anywhere you go. The more transparent a symbol, and the longer it survives without losing its meaning, the more useful and powerful it is. Nevertheless as symbols evolve and abstract, they are changed by passing through time and space. Remember the bizarre KKK debate on AT about the Medieval Scapini? Some folks got angry because they were offended by one possible interpretation of that deck's Queen of Swords based on ignorance of medieval religious history? And because the LWB's English translator may have been similarly ignorant. The world gets smaller daily, but a swastika means something different in Mumbai than it does in Jerusalem. Communication is a magical, impossible process, and difficult at the best of times.

As I typed that I just had a vision(!), of artists throwing symbols like stones at their intended targets (meanings) in these great arcs across countries, across centuries; the person who catches the symbol on the other end of the arc isn't holding the meaning, but they can discern the target by the sweep of the symbol's trajectory. Eventually all symbols fall short. But the art is in the throwing.

Scion

I find it very difficult to answer your question and thats probably why I voted structure, what structure...
As research for my deck I use references of Mathers, Etteilla, Waite and Crowley and try to merge those into one single image. This synthesis is I suppose very personal and it is as yet impossible for me to define a definite structure. There is the exploration of opposites, of dark versus light, male versus female, left versus right etc. but I use all of that mostly subconscience. The symbolism I end up using is integrated in the composition and atmosphere of the cards and probably best apreciated by an intuitive and meditative reader. If asked directly I can talk about my individual images for ages, about what they represent and why I used a certain pose or composition, even the realtionships between the cards are clear for me. But on my decks structure my mind just goes blank...

Hey Temperlyne,

That's a terrific answer and completely clear. Doesn't sound like a blank to me! If you assimilated Mathers, Etteilla, Waite and Crowley (which Revak has proved pretty convincingly are interrelated) then that is your structure: a riff on the Book T symbol set. And your use of those meanings guided you through each card, which as you say you can talk about endlessly.

Fusing all that data would have to be intensely personal and idiosyncratic, which is why decks vary so widely. And it makes sense that your intuitive work with the symbols yielded an intuitive deck. Thanks for taking the time to answer... Did you find that you collected images and then adapted them to the meanings, or did you start with a sense of the meaning you wanted to convey and then rendered its symbols?

S

Scion said:

Last spring I heard Rachel Pollack speak about the psychologizing of Tarot and I think that's at work here. Learning symbols is hard, so people have begun to treat them as Rorshasch inkblots which encourage projection. And maybe that's how symbols become meaningful, we glean impressions and gradually learn the "traditional" readings for the various components.

Click to expand...

Phew! Scion - that's a lot of thoughts to catch up with! Thanks for a really good thread.

However, for now let me just throw the ball back on this one. I actually disagree with your interpretation of what Rachel is saying. Well, hmm, I mean perhaps that I think you miss part of what I understand her to be saying. I think she is talking about the exclusion of 'divination' nowadays, not just the exclusion of agreed (in some ways standardised within a culture) symbols. They aren't quite the same thing, though they may overlap at points. Rachel means, I think (I could be wrong) that we have walked away from divination and magic - because we are embarrassed by it and want to say that tarot is simply a bit like a visual form of therapy.

Personally I believe in the magical side of tarot - whatever that means (and yes, I know the whole Freudian argument about this - and I've just been reading Justine Picardie's hilarious and wonderfully touching book about her attempts to contact her dead sister's ghost - marvelous book). I think we psychologise and rationalise tarot at our peril. But then, magic is perilous too, and always has been.

Now... personally I believe that you can divine with a tarot that does NOT have a lot of formal symbolism, but rather is very emotive in terms of art and imagery. And I totally agree with OnePotatoe that the quality of the art matters - good art is powerful because it moves people - and that's crucial to a working deck.

Scion said:

Did you find that you collected images and then adapted them to the meanings, or did you start with a sense of the meaning you wanted to convey and then rendered its symbols?

S

Click to expand...

During the first stage of my research I stick with trying to merge the traditional definitions. After I have made my mind up about what meaning I want my card to radiate, I start browsing images, mosty fine art and historical imagery. Once I know which card I want to paint next, I see the entire world through that referance frame. I try to see an aspect of the card in all I do and see untill an image just "comes to me". I instantly know that is the pose I need to use to bring my message across.
So first I wrap my mind around the definition, then my gut feeling decides on an image.

OnePotato said:

I'm simply pointing out that it is the intellectual content that is being delivered by the artwork, and that effective delivery is essential. Good art is generally more effective than bad.

Click to expand...

I hope you will forgive me for going off topic... but I am sincerely interested in what makes art "good" not in the least to better judge my own work and be able to improve. So what defines "good art".....?

baba-prague said:

I actually disagree with your interpretation of what Rachel is saying. Well, hmm, I mean perhaps that I think you miss part of what I understand her to be saying. I think she is talking about the exclusion of 'divination' nowadays, not just the exclusion of agreed (in some ways standardised within a culture) symbols. They aren't quite the same thing, though they may overlap at points. Rachel means, I think (I could be wrong) that we have walked away from divination and magic - because we are embarrassed by it and want to say that tarot is simply a bit like a visual form of therapy.

Personally I believe in the magical side of tarot - whatever that means (and yes, I know the whole Freudian argument about this - and I've just been reading Justine Picardie's hilarious and wonderfully touching book about her attempts to contact her dead sister's ghost - marvelous book). I think we psychologise and rationalise tarot at our peril. But then, magic is perilous too, and always has been.

Now... personally I believe that you can divine with a tarot that does NOT have a lot of formal symbolism, but rather is very emotive in terms of art and imagery. And I totally agree with OnePotatoe that the quality of the art matters - good art is powerful because it moves people - and that's crucial to a working deck.

Click to expand...

You're right of course. I LOVE that angle in her argument, but I was taking a germ of Rachel's thought to make a point about the recent emphasis on "intuition" as something directly opposed to "study." I didn't go into full detail because I was worried about throwing another big idea on the fire. Nevertheless, I think adding the embarassment component to my rambling holds up under scrutiny, because I'd be willing to bet that occult embarassment is one of the reasons people are more comfortable creating decks intuitively; everyone is worried that they're going to somehow get the magical stuff "wrong." Sort of a "who the hell am I?" anxiety. As if Levi and Mathers and Crowley didn't invent systems from scratch, albeit after lifetimes of scholarship and esoteric experiment. As if Pixie wasn't grinding out a series of illustrations similar to her work in children's books, or Lady Harris wasn't just doing another series of paintings because her wealth and position afforded her the opportunity. That is not to in any way take away from the genius of their work, but rather to contextualize it.

And I know I'm rhetorically overstating the "Case against Beauty" because it gets so much emphasis everywhere: in deck reviews, in these threads, in marketing. I do find feeble artwork and ugly pictures distracting and empty; they make me keenly aware of my mortality and the banalities of life. People sometimes forget that the word Art originally meant skill, but the word (symbol!) has acquired strange baggage these past 50 years: sentiment and sloppiness and self-indulgence.

As you say, you can read anything intuitively. I try to read everything! LOL Beauty is powerful and inspirational and challenging. Still, at which point does that reading stop being Tarot. I'm just not sure why you'd adapt a centuries-old symbol set and try to remove the things that distinguish it. I'm not summoning the "Tarot Police" that hovered spectrally over Major Tom's thread on the nature of Tarot, but there seems to be a point where we're exiting the realm of Tarot asymptotically, eternally receding from those uncanny, upsetting, complicated symbols but never quite getting getting loose. No matter how people wriggle around, we're still looking into these pieces of paper like they hold the future and the past... And amazingly they do. What is so weird about that proposition? So do books. The right symbols in the right order and you can transform the world.

I think maybe you're forcing me to re-articulate my initial question... to undress it in public. What is the Magic you are working as you create your Tarot and what is the Magical heritage upon which you draw? But as you say, the word Magic spooks people. And maybe Magic has become so personal that people are losing the ability to discuss it in a meaningful way. Magic is perilous because it is powerful. And whatever component makes a deck readable, whether it's shape or color or Alchemical emblems, is Magic because it allows meaning to slip between the bars of the cage. I'm just thinking about how it happens and when and why.

Scion