Interpreting Minors in Marseilles Decks

Bernice

I wanted to thank everyone in this thread for the wealth of knowledge, passion and inspiration for the Tarot de Marsailles
inanna_tarot, I echo your comments. It would be a great shame to let this thread fade into the mists of time. The amount of suggested systems for reading the marseille pips are gold-dust.

Bee
 

mosaica

Bernice, thanks for bumping up this old thread! I look forward to reading it in its entirety when I get a chance.
 

Bernice

Just giving it another bump. Admin. please don't kill me off.

Bee
 

mosaica

Lee said:
Here's a list of keywords that seems to be related to the ones Rusty Neon quoted, but these keywords also include negative attributes for each number. I got this from a numerology website: http://www.spiritlink.com/num1.html

1 Creativity, independence, originality, ego, self
2 Empathy, cooperation, consideration, over-sensitivity, co-dependence
3 Artistic expression, sociability, friendliness, superficiality, wastefulness
4 Practicality, application, loyalty, rigidity, repression
5 Freedom, adaptability, travel, inconsistency, abuse of senses
6 Love, responsibility, understanding, meddling, jealousy
7 Spirituality, mental analysis, wisdom, fault finding, suppression
8 Executive ability, management, power, materiality, unscrupulousness
9 Artistic genius, humanitarianism, romance, emotionalism, dissipation
11 Intuition, idealism, invention, insensitivity, fanaticism
22 Practical idealism, material mastery, get-rich-quick schemes, viciousness

-- Lee

Applying negative meanings to the minors is what I'm having a hard time with. Because all the pips look pretty and their designs and colors are the same or similar, I have to work harder to see anything negative in them. In a certain sense, I feel like my readings have gotten more bland and "pretty" without the "negative" pictures of the Thoth or the RWS.

But I'm willing to sit with that awareness and the Marseille decks for a while, work with it, and see what happens.

Mosaica
 

frelkins

Didn't you ever feel like the RWS was really a downbeat deck? If you use reversals the deck seems to have more "negative" meanings than positive! It's really a gloomy pack. What if "life" were fundamentally positive, not fundamentally negative as that cranky Waite & his Victorian outlook would dictate? You can tell the truth even hard ones in a gentle life-enhancing way, you know. :) Why the search for the unhappy? :)
 

mosaica

frelkins said:
Didn't you ever feel like the RWS was really a downbeat deck? If you use reversals the deck seems to have more "negative" meanings than positive! It's really a gloomy pack. What if "life" were fundamentally positive, not fundamentally negative as that cranky Waite & his Victorian outlook would dictate? You can tell the truth even hard ones in a gentle life-enhancing way, you know. :) Why the search for the unhappy? :)

I'm not searching for the unhappy. I'm searching for something that reflects life as it is, and life does hand us negative experiences, or at least our reaction to them can be negative. I wouldn't want a deck that showed nothing but happy pictures (and I personally wouldn't use reversals to make them unhappy). I don't think the TdM pips are all happy. I think they are much more open to interpretation than RWS and the Thoth pips. I guess I'm just stating the obvious -- that TdM pips are harder to read for most people. I'm used to being told what a card means by the art of the deck creator, and of course TdM pips don't give you that. That's a plus, but it's also a challenge.
 

frelkins

mosaica said:
I'm used to being told what a card means by the art of the deck creator

And that is the heart of the issue, I think, for TdM people. Who's perspective wins? Yours, in context with the sitter, or that of the remote deck artist? Of course you are down with this point of view -- or else you wouldn't have come here! :) -- but I'm just stating this explicitly. :D I find the TdM very liberating in this context: I'm not beholden to anyone but the sitter and can actually reflect our real zeitgeist at the moment of the reading.
 

ihcoyc

mosaica said:
I don't think the TdM pips are all happy. I think they are much more open to interpretation than RWS and the Thoth pips. I guess I'm just stating the obvious -- that TdM pips are harder to read for most people. I'm used to being told what a card means by the art of the deck creator, and of course TdM pips don't give you that. That's a plus, but it's also a challenge.

I tend to react emotionally to the TdM differently. The TdM is exotic (hey! this ain't English!), definitely enigmatic, somewhat primitive, and for want of a better word spookier and witchier than the RWS and most esoteric decks, even Thoth. Part of this may be the result of the Grimaud cards, with their heavy black inking.

Thoth tries. Crowley's reputation precedes it. But everything about the art speaks of familiarity with Surrealism and Cubism. It's very much a product of its time, while the TdM seems an immemorial artifact. And the RWS strikes me as very much a product of genteel nineteenth century solar esotericism. Both Thoth and RWS tend to beat you over the head with symbols. They shout while the TdM whispers. You can, if you will, see the starry crown of Isis / Mary / the bride of Christ in the Empress's crown - but it is suggested, not forced. She may be someone else entirely for you.

At any rate, I find plenty of negative meanings in the TdM. Every suit contains fives, after all. But a lot of the heartbreak and woe gets moved from Swords to Cups, the suit where every card fully reverses. In the TdM, nothing prevents you from interpreting 9 of Swords as the mind and language functioning at the highest level: a perfect poem, an encyclopedia, a thesis, a fully realized philosophy.

You can also choose to recall the RWS meaning if you recall it when you think of the card. But you don't have to, and you aren't made to by the image on the deck.
 

shaveling

mosaica said:
Applying negative meanings to the minors is what I'm having a hard time with. Because all the pips look pretty and their designs and colors are the same or similar, I have to work harder to see anything negative in them. In a certain sense, I feel like my readings have gotten more bland and "pretty" without the "negative" pictures of the Thoth or the RWS.
Papus' interpretations of the numbers offers plenty of scope to the mix of positive and negative in life.

In the pips he sees the Aces as the original impetus of whatever the suit stands for. The twos introduce the "other" that opposes or complements the Ace. This are fairly common ways of seeing these cards. But Papus continues this alternation all through the pips (up through the nines, the tens are strange and different). That is, the odd numbers carry forward the original thrust of the Ace, and the even numbers offer it some sort of opposition. So mostly, the odd numbered cards are positive, and the even are negative. This wreaks havoc with the "fives are disruptive" approach.

This gets less straightforward with the swords. Papus sees swords as intrinsically negative. Since opposition to the negative is positive, you have positive even numbers in that suit and negative odd numbers. This can be hard to remember when you're starting out with his system. Also, if you're seeing swords not as weapons that kill, but as tools that divide this from that, you move back to the usual odd = positive, even = negative situation. It's this reading that can give you Nine of Swords as success in a lawsuit, or finally getting that PhD

I realize I posted about Papus earlier, on page 9. But I return to him to address the matter of the balance of positive and negative base meanings for the cards.

I should add that since 2005, I've softened a bit on Papus' simplistic approach to the suits. I haven't actually embraced his Cups=Love, Swords=Hate, Coins=Money, Batons=Work approach. But what I've read on ATF makes me think that most of the questions people bring to readers are about money, love, hate, and (in some sense) work. So, plus one for Papus, minus one for shaveling.
 

mosaica

ihcoyc said:
I find plenty of negative meanings in the TdM. Every suit contains fives, after all. But a lot of the heartbreak and woe gets moved from Swords to Cups, the suit where every card fully reverses. In the TdM, nothing prevents you from interpreting 9 of Swords as the mind and language functioning at the highest level: a perfect poem, an encyclopedia, a thesis, a fully realized philosophy.

What an interesting point, ihcoyc. I usually don't use reversals, but I think I'm going to experiment with the use of them in the TdM suit of Cups, which in some ways is the perfect suit to contain human woe.

I finally got my very own Noblet in the mail yesterday, and I've been wondering how I'm going to shuffle it without drawing reversals. Now I'm curious to let the reversals happen and see how they turn out.