There seems to be a fair degree of agreement that the larger figure is a dwarf. The cards were designed in less PC times. Symbolically dwarves have been associated with the Underworld. "Coming from it and remaining linked to it, they symbolise those dark forces which are within us and which can so easily take monstrous shape..... they never minced their words but spoke the naked truth..... their pointed remarks had more than a hint of clairvoyance, pinpricks deflating self satisfaction..... guardians of buried treasure or of secrets...... guides and counsellors..... generally expressing themselves in riddles. Dwarves are also images of perverted lusts." The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Chevalier & Gheerbrant. ISBN 0-14-051254-3.
Uh oh! I don't like where this is leading..... and that bright red hood [a colour which attracts children]. Thank goodness the child has heeded the warning not to take pretty things from strangers.
Aoife, since your thread has been revived, I'm taking the opportunity to review your amazing post. I'm just quoting a piece, but would have loved to quote the whole thing, and read it over and over ....
You looked into the card as though stepping into it, piercing through the screen, entering into the little world in the frame; the creatures inside start to breathe and vibrate. The cards are alive, as Crowley said somewhere. (He probably meant with the help of not-yet-illegal mind-altering substances, but the truly imaginative can do it without...).
I love what you said about the dwarf. The dwarf is, in medieval French literature, definitely associated with the otherworld, often wicked, always mysterious. It seems most cultures have a myth about a time before the age of humans, when giants and dwarves roamed the earth. The primordial time of giants is, of course, something like a collective memory of childhood perspective, where adults appeared giant and the dwarves would be children.
The medieval thinkers also, famously, compared themselves to dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. We are small compared to the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers who were giant, but standing on their shoulders, we can see even farther, and surpass them.
A dwarf is a grown up with a child's size -- a child-sized grown up, but it could also be an adult-brained child. As a child I often imagined myself not as a little girl, despite the frilly dresses, but as short man, we played "red-coats and blue-coats", the inside self image was of a short little man like the soldiers on "McHale's navy" ... strange.
Philosophers and psychologists (thinking of Lacan, and Sartre) who theorize about the dawn of consciousness in humans seem to have mostly forgotten what it is like to BE a child. Sartre thinks that when a child sees another human being, he at first thinks of that being as an object. I think it is the complete opposite. When we are beginning to perceive the world EVERYTHING has a soul. We do not always distinguish between animate and inanimate, but everything is alive. Children go toward animals as if they were people, (at least Freud knew that !) and not just a doll, but also a rock, a plastic spoon, or a stone, as you so beautifully have described for us somewhere else on this forum, can come alive.
I would never dare to declare what a card is "about" because the cards are "alive" as though living a life of their own when we are not looking at them. Next time you pull the card, perhaps the "dwarf" will not be a dwarf at all, perhaps the gift of flowers, will be "theft" of flowers; one day they could be a treacherous gift, as you suggested, like flowers, hiding Cleopatra's poisonous asp; another day they will be freshly cultivated from the mother's grave; and the day afterwards, they are a wedding bouquet, caught by the child, or the even the bouquet she wore as the flower maiden, etc.
However the childhood perspective, pantheist, suffused with love and curiosity for every tiny creature, is something I would like to remember the next time I pull this card, if I ever read again. Daring to pass through the fourth wall, and enter, not only into the picture of the card, but also into the mind of others: to feel and be with them as souls, not as objects, is something this card and your beautiful description of it make me think about today.