Should The Star And The Moon Be Reversed?

Abrac

As I was looking through my RWS deck it occurred to me that maybe an arrangement of 18, 17, 19 would make more sense.

In a typical model of the planetary spheres, the Moon comes first, then Mercury & Venus, then the Sun. I've heard a lot of people say The Star corresponds with Venus, but it seems to me it could equally correspond with Mercury. In either case, the proper order for the Tarot cards (in my way of thinking anyway) should be Moon, Star (Mercury or Venus), and Sun.

This may be an old theory but the idea just came to me so I thought I would toss it out for discussion.
 

Tarotphelia

Well, that's one way of looking at . But if you look at Star, Moon, and Sun as reflecting a natural order such as conception, gestation , and birth it won't work.
 

Abrac

True, that's a good point.

I was thinking more in terms of a progressive spiritual illumination, with cards 1-7 representing conditions and issues of a material/intellectual nature, 8-14 moral, and 15-21 spiritual. In this system, cards 15-21 would represent an ordeal of spiritual initiation. First the temptations of The Devil, followed by the gradual breaking down of the ego through the various trials and hardships of The Tower, then the initiate must make their way through the murky and illusory world of The Moon, until the gradual awakening of The Star begins to dawn and The Sun brings the illumination of Truth which sets the initiate free, leading to salvation from the death of illusion and ignorance (The Judgement), and Union with God/Nirvana (The Universe).

You could probably still make it work with the cards in the regular sequence, but it wouldn't work as neatly.
 

Tarotphelia

Abrac said:
You could probably still make it work with the cards in the regular sequence, but it wouldn't work as neatly.

That's the problem with the tarot , isn't it ? The more we try to impose our systems on it , the more imperfect a fit our systems are . There's a little of this , and some of that , but maybe never the complete whole . Unless we take it apart and redo it . And then we have our tarot , but maybe not The Tarot .

Then too, we can think the about the tarot being unnumbered originally , and then sequence goes right out the window . Throw in something else like - what if some cards are missing or were purposely taken out in the distant past ? The questions are endless . The answers are murky . We are stumped , and The Tarot wins again .