Anyone use the Wheel of Change Tarot?

Belladonna said:

Not riches, but stability.

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Hmmm.......but stability as stagnation. Stability as the weight that keeps you from doing anything but sit in your stability. Not with your feet on a pentacle, but your feet stuck to a pentacle like flypaper, rendering you immobile.

But it you think of the four of pentacles as the natural outcome of the ace to the two to the three... you have a relatively strong foothold now[/B]

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Foot + hold = immobility. Stuck to the pentacle flypaper. Do you know what? Several of the 4 of Pents have a man sitting--The Secret Tarot springs to mind, and it never really hit me, but if I use this grounding reference and take it further to being stuck on flypaper it's quite a good image to use for meaning in the card.

An apple harvest can be hoarded in your basement to rot, but the beauty of the apples that come across in her cards seem to carry the message: this is sacred, this is a gift to share. Encouragement in the "right" direction rather than a warning: "this is the old stinky miser that you will become if you don't share your apples!"[/B]

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Hey, good point. The contrast between the bounty of harvest, the blossoming, and the rotting of such bounty if hoarded and not used wisely. Okay, this gets it closer anyway. I knew you'd find a way!

Sexuality... hm. I suppose in the timeline between the ace and the 10, a 4 would be coming into sexual maturity. I think I'll say no more on this subject lest I get into trouble! [/B]

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The whole deck is very sexual from what I see, or perhaps I should say that the book has many sexual references. She has a refreshingly natural way of acknowledging that humans are sexual creatures.

6 of Cups Runneth Over in the Rain

Okay, here's another one, the 6 of Cups. Holy Alternate Meaning Batman, what have we here?

A dark, roiling sky with rain and thunder over a pueblo in the desert with some broken pots and sporadic cacti. How inviting, how warm and sunny and friendly. Children, happy times, nostalgia for the past??

Turning to the book - the eternal struggle of creation and destruction, positive and negative, perfect and evil. She says this card symbolizes sadness and difficulty--difficulty of accepting change and sadness when moving on. Okay, that might tie in with nostalgia and childhood and the sweetness you don't want to let go of, which also echoes the two forces pulling you etc. BUT I don't get any of that from this particular image, it simply doesn't suggest the meaning to me. It looks more like a Tower card, or maybe the 5 of Pents or something.

So what do you think about this one?

If we recombined our DNA you could be Bellafreesia and I could be Donnaskye. We might rule the world and bake some interesting cookies dripping with chocolate.

When I first got this deck, I went through each card and wrote my first impressions of them. It was my first deck so I had no experience with tarot. Here is what I wrote for the 6 of cups then.

"There are 6 pots lying on the ground. The ground is bare except for patches of grass here and there. There is a thunderstorm. Perhaps the rain is nourishing the ground, bringing forth life. In the far background, the sky is clear. The dark clouds are rolling away. When things look bleak now, there is hope in the distance. The pots are all broken but are still beautiful. They can still hold water but not like new. Things are never useless...salvaging what you can."

Reading back on this card, I can see what you mean about the Tower. I find a lot of her cards just doesn't follow any of the more traditional thoughts in tarot at first glance.

In her book, she talks about how the corn pattern on the pots are one of the important symbol of the Peublo people and how it links them with their ancestors as well as thier future. In the of cups, it sounds like she's putting more emphasis on the symbols on the pottery patterns than I had originally noticed.

"Therefore, the corn connected the people not only with their own ancient ancestors but also with their future and with their own immortality as the ancestors of future generations."

After reading the book a bazillion million times and learning a bit more about other decks, it does makes sense what she's trying to say. But I never got that right off the bat.

hrmph.... cough....sputter, all right what do we have here?

The pots are broken, the past is gone, the hopes and dreams we carried with us then have leaked away into the ground. But this has happened because of a storm. Natural causes, act of goddess, call it what you will, but this is the natural way of things. No one can stop the passage of time. We can weep, like the rain, for the broken pots, but the sun will come out again. AND WE WILL MAKE NEW POTS.

I think the patterns on the pots represent the civilization, the art, the culture of the people who produced them. It represents the knowledge of the history of the people passed down through the generations. That doesn't disappear. The past, although gone, is still a part of us. We must let it go, but we do not erase all memory of it. It is what we do retain from the past that lets us rebuild.

Unlike the tower, this card is not about the vulnerability of our ego when all that makes up our identity comes crashing down around us. The identity is very strong in the 6 of Cups, especially how it relates to the past, it depends on who we were in the past, whether in childhood or as a culture. But we are not children anymore. We must come to terms with our emotions in that respect, and build new dreams for our future.

What do you think about Judgement?

Blocked in a Tidal Pool and Wanting to Light a Candle

Here are two more that puzzle me : the 5 of Cups and the 5 of Wands.

The 5 of Cups shows four abalone shells and a starfish in a living tidal pool. Really pretty card and reminds me of mucking around at seashores looking at things like this when I was young. Even freshwater pools with iron deposits were fascinating--like the pool in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis that turned you to gold if you touched it. Water is mysterious.

Disappointment, regret and loss? Trouble releasing the past? Doesn't immediately jive to me. She says the shells are dead but life goes on, there are other living things in the pool. Okay, that ties in. You cling to things like the starfish. Okay. It doesn't seem to have the same impact, that feeling of loss that the R-W has although the idea of water/emotion as nourishment seems good. Now that I write this is doesn't seem like such a stretch.

BUT.....

The 5 of Wands shows five different coloured candles. White in the centre symbolizes unity, and the other four the four directions and elements. Also four ribbons showing the colours of the four tribes of mankind. Ritual shedding light on life, insight, formalizing rituals and using them to grow and experience life more fully. Connecting to that which is foreign to you and opening yourself to it. Ritual to achieve goals (????)

Yikes, this seems horribly restrictive to me. Far from opening the world it would seem to compartmentalize and label it. Where is infinity??

Our classic meaning in this card is confrontation, maybe even the fun of mock battle. Competition, contest, challenge, friendly rivalry.

It's almost as if she's taken the classic meaning and written the resolution to it. My idea of a card is to represent something and then the surrounding cards would lead to the resolution or fuller meaning of what is going on, the solution, the way out, the whole story. She's written the way out right into the card seemingly.

Or perhaps she is delightfully subtle?

I'll get back to you on Judgement, I want to think about that one a bit.

Awakening vs. Reckoning

Belladonna said:

What do you think about Judgement?

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Where to start on this? Two weeks ago I didn't like it. I think of Judgment with the classic Marseilles imagery and the Christian connotation. So this was very earth motherly and Empress-y and I first thought "Oh come on."

I see a young man stting in a garden with arms upraised in joy or greeting, celebration. At first it looks like a garden, but then it seems it could be a simply cemetery plot with a fence and stones to delineate it and a profusion of lovely flowers. The path leads through a gate which reminds me VERY much of the simple wooden doorway in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle where they walked through to go "farther up and farther in" to heaven or hell. The light of heaven leads to two mounds--duality, heaven and hell, they both look about the same. The light seems very peaceful and bright.

It wasn't until I read the book that I realized she has also drawn it to look like birth. The two mounds the breasts of the woman and the vaginal tunnel where the boy plops out ready to go; the flowers her pubic thatch of hair. I like that because he could be going either way--the first way I saw it and then birth, the opposite way.

A feeling of the day-to-day, not just a "last" judgment, but an everyday telling of good and evil just like we all experience. Also this feeling of rightness either way you go--birth, death, infinity, back and forth. Definitely a sense of harmony and contentment. I don't quite get the feeling of responsibility for your actions and relations with others I might expect, it's seems a tad on the happy side. More of an awakening rather than a reckoning card. Not sure if I like that, it doesn't seem to pinpoint the negativity of the card, the darker aspects, the warning signals I might otherwise see.

Wow, Freesiaskye! You give me a good workout. (I'll need one after those cookies) I love it! I'll be back tonite with some juicy stuff, but I hope others will pipe up with their interpretations, questions or observations. This is fun. Belladonna

Wow! You guys are forcing me to think again. I've had this deck for almost 2 years now & have been trying to understand it better off & on. I think this study group is going to be a big help getting me going again. I'm going to think about the Judgement card some more before posting.

On a side note, in general, people say don't follow the book that comes with your deck. But I'm finding that it doesn't hold for the WOC deck. It has to be used together...deck and book. At least for me, anyway.