crystalball
Enrique,
You definitely have a flair for getting to your point quickly, clearly, and eloquently.
Thank you.
You definitely have a flair for getting to your point quickly, clearly, and eloquently.
Thank you.
Books vs. No books
gregory
Yes ! I find books where I desperately NEED to argue or question the writer terribly frustrating.... This also applies in other areas; you read a book and you think WHAT ? Did he really say that ? where did that come from - and there is no way to ask..... Debating here is quite different.stella01904 said:The difference for me is that the net is interactive, at least the forums are. You can question, ask for clarification, dispute a point...the other person is talking with you. It's more like a little pub than an book. The only difference is that you can find people who are "into what you are into" a lot more easily.
And I do agree with EnriqueEnriquez; I wish multiple quotes were easier here....
though the books which fuel my passion might be ANYTHING..... Very few specifically tarot books have done that.... Jonathan Strange, for instance.... those readings..... Don't tell you anything - but really pique your curiosity....stella01904
LOL! Especially when it's an author who isn't that good, but thinks they are Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Official Word-O-God.gregory said:
I'd rather read Enrique on a bad day than 99.999% of the Tarot books that are out there. He doesn't seem to be trying to BS anyone. He doesn't promise to make you an expert and then have you doing past life spreads or something of that nature that is difficult, if not impossible, to validate. He doesn't stick his picture all over everything wearing robes and heavy jewelry with a falcon on his arm. He doesn't pretend to know what he doesn't know.
Aspiring writers, take note.
firefrost
EnriqueEnriquez said:
I'm intruiged, EE - Which tarot books fuel your passion?
EnriqueEnriquez
It is a very difficult question for me because I can’t go beyond the first page in most of the books I have seen. I don’t care for card meanings, and I don’t care for occult theories. I also put back on the shelf any book talking about the connection between Tarot an other systems. So, 99% of the books on the market are out of my area of interest.
My favorite book on the Tarot is Tchalai Unger’s.
Then, I loved Jean-Claude Flornoy’s “Le pèlerinage des bateleurs”.
Tomberg’s “Meditaton on the Tarot” is always inspiring. This book, and Italo Calvino’s “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” are texts I like to savour from time to time.
Jodorowsky’s “La Vía del Tarot” was very exciting, and useful.
In English, Robert M. Place “Tarot. History, Symbolism and Divination” was good. I also enjoyed Rosengarten’s “Tarot and Psychology.” But my true favorites are the five ones mentioned above.
But there are other books that fuel my passion for Tarot:
- “My voice will go with you” and “Healing in Hypnosis”, by Milton Erickson.
- Uncommon Therapy, by jay Haley
- “The Language of Change: Elements of Therapeutic Communication” by Paul Watzlawick.
- “Metaphor Therapy” by Richard Kopp
- “Healing Fictions” by James Hillman
Are my favorite books on how to understand, and help, people.
Recently I have been very excited reading Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s books. “Narrative Medicine” is my favorite among them. “Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies, and Mysteries” by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa was also inspiring.
Best,
EE
My favorite book on the Tarot is Tchalai Unger’s.
Then, I loved Jean-Claude Flornoy’s “Le pèlerinage des bateleurs”.
Tomberg’s “Meditaton on the Tarot” is always inspiring. This book, and Italo Calvino’s “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” are texts I like to savour from time to time.
Jodorowsky’s “La Vía del Tarot” was very exciting, and useful.
In English, Robert M. Place “Tarot. History, Symbolism and Divination” was good. I also enjoyed Rosengarten’s “Tarot and Psychology.” But my true favorites are the five ones mentioned above.
But there are other books that fuel my passion for Tarot:
- “My voice will go with you” and “Healing in Hypnosis”, by Milton Erickson.
- Uncommon Therapy, by jay Haley
- “The Language of Change: Elements of Therapeutic Communication” by Paul Watzlawick.
- “Metaphor Therapy” by Richard Kopp
- “Healing Fictions” by James Hillman
Are my favorite books on how to understand, and help, people.
Recently I have been very excited reading Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s books. “Narrative Medicine” is my favorite among them. “Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies, and Mysteries” by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa was also inspiring.
Best,
EE
firemaiden
Wow, Enrique, I have never heard of "Metaphor Therapy" -- but that is absolutely what we do, isn't it?
Sophie
Exactly!EnriqueEnriquez said:
Lewis Mehl-Madrona's "Narrative Medicine" sounds fabulous. I am a great believer in the power of stories to heal, transform, create and encourage.
Foucault
Enrique - has anyone translated Tchalai Unger's "El Tarot" into English?
Graham.
Graham.
EnriqueEnriquez
firemaiden said:
In a way, YES! The book defines very specific techniques to LISTEN to people and use the metaphors they bring up in a conversation as healing tools. The way I see it, this is no different from the idea of “as above, so below.” The metaphor you “fix” at a cognitive level by reshaping or correcting, can evolve into a solution for a problem at a practical level.
With the Tarot, when people pick a few cards, their unconscious is talking to us. When we look at these cards, we are “listening.” I find the analogy useful.
fudugazi said:
Well, Madrona shows a very specific and direct way to do this.
I liked “Coyote Medicine” since it is his first book and he talks a lot about the Native American healers who influenced him, and about how he came to be the kind of healer he is. But the techniques can be better perceived in Narrative Medicine.
foucault said:
Sadly, no. This book was originally printed to accompany Grimaud’s Marceille, but in Spanish it can be found as a separate book. It can be found in French.
Best,
EE
Formicida
I've been thinking about this issue again lately, so I hope nobody minds if I bring this thread up again.
I think at least some of the confusion and hard feelings around this comes from the fact that when we ask, "Does study make you a better reader?" we're actually conflating something like three questions:
1. Does reading books specifically on the Tarot make you a better reader?
2. Does studying esoteric/occult subjects make you a better reader? (Astrology, Qabalah, etc.)
3. Does exoteric/general study and life experience make you a better reader? (Being a plumber, studying macroeconomics, watching Friends...)
To me, the first question (Tarot books) is the least interesting, and it's also the one that most people seem to think the question means. For some people, most if not all Tarot books are a crutch or a hindrance. For some of us, they're useful at the beginning, but we end up growing out of the vast majority of them.
I'm going to skip to the third question here, because I think it's going to help me answer the second. I think the vast majority of us would argue that yes, at least some types of general knowledge and life experience help us be better readers.
Imagine a person who's been locked up in the proverbial prison cell, with nothing but a deck of Tarot cards for stimulation, for his entire life. Would he be able to read the cards? I don't want to say no--after all, he has nothing else to do but work with them. At the same time, I don't think his style of reading would be very recognizable from our perspective. He wouldn't know what a flower is, other than that it's a symbol that occurs in this, that, and the other cards. All of his conclusions about the symbols would have to derive only from the contexts in which they're found in the Tarot.
So from that perspective, it seems obvious to me why you would want to know things--anything!--to read Tarot. The more you know, the more you expand your repertoire of symbolism/metaphor. If you're a plumber, you might see a little pattern in a card that reminds you of pipes, and then your task would be to expand that to relate to the situation in question. And the more things you have in your mind that you could be reminded of, the more possibilities you have for the reading. This is where "glorp" comes from.
But the limitation of that kind of general knowledge is that there's nothing inherent to Tarot to favor one thing over another. If you wanted to become a better Tarot reader, would you be better off studying plumbing or macroeconomics, or just sitting on the couch and watching every episode of Friends? There's no inherently greater value to any of those--in fact, if anything, Friends would be more beneficial because it's about immediate human relationships, which Tarot readings also tend to deal with. (Also, your querents would probably prefer it if you said, "Your situation is like this episode of Friends" rather than "Your situation is like the S-bend of a toilet"!)
So then, the reason to study esoteric subjects is that they are privileged in the world of Tarot. Most deck creators have, more or less intentionally, put occult symbolism into their decks. So by studying those topics, you're not only expanding your symbolic repertoire, but also bringing it in line with the symbolic repertoire of the deck itself. Any resemblances to S-bends or Friends is purely coincidental, but connections with Mars or Netzach are often intentional and planned.
Which is not to say that one type of connection is inherently better than another in the context of a reading. If it's an S-bend you see when you look at the card, then you don't have to--in fact, most of us would argue that you shouldn't--sit back and say, "Wait, that's silly. The REAL correspondence of this card is to the planet Saturn, so it actually means..."
Will studying any of this improve your reading immediately? Probably not. If it's improvements in your reading you want, you'd probably be better off with practice rather than going off and studying anything at all. And maybe you could be a Tarot-reading plumber all your life and never once see that S-bend in any cards. But with most things, and especially with occult subjects that are coded right into the cards, I would guess that they'll find their way in sooner or later.
I think at least some of the confusion and hard feelings around this comes from the fact that when we ask, "Does study make you a better reader?" we're actually conflating something like three questions:
1. Does reading books specifically on the Tarot make you a better reader?
2. Does studying esoteric/occult subjects make you a better reader? (Astrology, Qabalah, etc.)
3. Does exoteric/general study and life experience make you a better reader? (Being a plumber, studying macroeconomics, watching Friends...)
To me, the first question (Tarot books) is the least interesting, and it's also the one that most people seem to think the question means. For some people, most if not all Tarot books are a crutch or a hindrance. For some of us, they're useful at the beginning, but we end up growing out of the vast majority of them.
I'm going to skip to the third question here, because I think it's going to help me answer the second. I think the vast majority of us would argue that yes, at least some types of general knowledge and life experience help us be better readers.
Imagine a person who's been locked up in the proverbial prison cell, with nothing but a deck of Tarot cards for stimulation, for his entire life. Would he be able to read the cards? I don't want to say no--after all, he has nothing else to do but work with them. At the same time, I don't think his style of reading would be very recognizable from our perspective. He wouldn't know what a flower is, other than that it's a symbol that occurs in this, that, and the other cards. All of his conclusions about the symbols would have to derive only from the contexts in which they're found in the Tarot.
So from that perspective, it seems obvious to me why you would want to know things--anything!--to read Tarot. The more you know, the more you expand your repertoire of symbolism/metaphor. If you're a plumber, you might see a little pattern in a card that reminds you of pipes, and then your task would be to expand that to relate to the situation in question. And the more things you have in your mind that you could be reminded of, the more possibilities you have for the reading. This is where "glorp" comes from.
But the limitation of that kind of general knowledge is that there's nothing inherent to Tarot to favor one thing over another. If you wanted to become a better Tarot reader, would you be better off studying plumbing or macroeconomics, or just sitting on the couch and watching every episode of Friends? There's no inherently greater value to any of those--in fact, if anything, Friends would be more beneficial because it's about immediate human relationships, which Tarot readings also tend to deal with. (Also, your querents would probably prefer it if you said, "Your situation is like this episode of Friends" rather than "Your situation is like the S-bend of a toilet"!)
So then, the reason to study esoteric subjects is that they are privileged in the world of Tarot. Most deck creators have, more or less intentionally, put occult symbolism into their decks. So by studying those topics, you're not only expanding your symbolic repertoire, but also bringing it in line with the symbolic repertoire of the deck itself. Any resemblances to S-bends or Friends is purely coincidental, but connections with Mars or Netzach are often intentional and planned.
Which is not to say that one type of connection is inherently better than another in the context of a reading. If it's an S-bend you see when you look at the card, then you don't have to--in fact, most of us would argue that you shouldn't--sit back and say, "Wait, that's silly. The REAL correspondence of this card is to the planet Saturn, so it actually means..."
Will studying any of this improve your reading immediately? Probably not. If it's improvements in your reading you want, you'd probably be better off with practice rather than going off and studying anything at all. And maybe you could be a Tarot-reading plumber all your life and never once see that S-bend in any cards. But with most things, and especially with occult subjects that are coded right into the cards, I would guess that they'll find their way in sooner or later.
