More similar than you think....
Thanks Rodney , for now ill just stick with what i have . But one thing to add . The aces of each suit , i wonder if that also changes from a deck creator to another ?
Oh, yes. There are changes from book to book and source to source on every one of the 78 cards. This isn't to say, by the way, that there's no agreement. As someone who did a lot of research on such differences when writing up my own such book, I actually found that the books have more agreement than you might think. For example, they all agree that the Fool is about beginnings...but the way they phrase it may make it look like they're not talking about the same thing at all. Especially when you're just starting out. One book talking about the Fool as "cosmic egg" doesn't quite jive with another book taking about not looking where you're going and being likely to fall off a cliff.
As you get to know the cards better, however, you'll find that what seems like different interpretations are often similar at a deeper level. You just have to find that deeper level. For example: 5/Pents. So you read in one book that this is about poverty. But then you read in another deck that it can stand for an affair. Well, those two don't seem to be the same at all do they? But if you delve deeply into it, turns out they do have something in common. 5/Pents is, at it's core, about society locking someone out—or someone who proudly refuses to be part of society. That can be the usual image of the poor person who hasn't money to be on level with his peers (unless he/she takes charity), or it can be someone who is having an affair and therefore not approved of by society. So, you see, those two very different meanings are the same at their core.
It gets to be really quite interesting to look through very different decks and say, "How can this very different looking card refer to the usual definition? What is below the surface here?"
But that's for the future. For right now, as Rodney said, stick to one book of meanings and just learn your cards. You'll find, for the most part, that what you learn in this or that book is probably not that far off, and you can have a discussion with us about it without feeling like you learned some radically different meanings that have nothing in common with ours.
