Barleywine
Lately I've been getting a lot of mileage out of Joseph Maxwell's observation that the odd-numbered cards are active (seeking balance) and the even-numbered cards are passive (maintaining balance). This seems to have a lot to do with his analysis of the unitary and binary forces at work in the tarot. In reading a post by Tony Willis on the auntietarot blog, it struck me that this duality might be directly observable in the Marseille pip cards. So I laid them all out and took a big-picture look.
I noticed that 12 of the 16 odd-numbered pips (excluding the Aces) have a central suit symbol that bisects the rest of the symbols, looking like a kind of fulcrum that seeks to both counter-balance and mediate between the halves of the set, a kind of "go-between" that carries the flow from one half to the other. The main exceptions are the 3 of Cups and 3 of Pentacles, in which the symbols have an equilateral relationship reminiscent of a cam or rotor, the 9 of Cups which has three equivalent rows of three cups each, and the 7 of Pentacles in which the intervening "odd" (unitary) symbol looks like it's "seeding" the lower binary four.
In the even-numbered pips, equilibrium of the suit symbols is paramount, with only the 10 of Wands, the 8 of Cups and the 10 of Swords having a central binary pair that demarcates the two halves of the array. The 10 of Cups is an outlier from all of the other pip cards, both odd and even, because it has one disporoprionately large cup set across the top of the orderly 3x3 set of nine, seeming to both dominate and suppress the rest.
I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with this yet, but it seems to be a potentially useful addition to my Marseille interpretive "bag o' tricks."
I noticed that 12 of the 16 odd-numbered pips (excluding the Aces) have a central suit symbol that bisects the rest of the symbols, looking like a kind of fulcrum that seeks to both counter-balance and mediate between the halves of the set, a kind of "go-between" that carries the flow from one half to the other. The main exceptions are the 3 of Cups and 3 of Pentacles, in which the symbols have an equilateral relationship reminiscent of a cam or rotor, the 9 of Cups which has three equivalent rows of three cups each, and the 7 of Pentacles in which the intervening "odd" (unitary) symbol looks like it's "seeding" the lower binary four.
In the even-numbered pips, equilibrium of the suit symbols is paramount, with only the 10 of Wands, the 8 of Cups and the 10 of Swords having a central binary pair that demarcates the two halves of the array. The 10 of Cups is an outlier from all of the other pip cards, both odd and even, because it has one disporoprionately large cup set across the top of the orderly 3x3 set of nine, seeming to both dominate and suppress the rest.
I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with this yet, but it seems to be a potentially useful addition to my Marseille interpretive "bag o' tricks."