Can the Major Arcana be divided into feminine and masculine?

[JackofWands]

I was reflecting on this question earlier today. Can the 22 cards of the Major Arcana be divided into 11 pairings with polar masculine/feminine energies? It seems like this should be doable, because there ought to be an even balance of the two sexes in the Trumps. Has anyone tried this before?

I sat down with a pen and paper and scratched out a division just based on my initial thoughts. This is what I came up with, in decreasing order of confidence (feminine cards on the left):

Empress / Emperor
High Priestess / Hierophant
Moon / Sun
World / Fool
Star / Tower
Justice / Hanged Man
Strength / Hermit
Temperance / Devil
Judgment / Magician
Lovers / Chariot
Wheel of Fortune / Death

But there are some issues with this division that leave me scratching my head. For one thing, I don't know how well the Judgment/Magician pairing works; it's just what was left after I'd paired off all the other cards. For another thing, some cards just seem sexless. Like the Lovers, or the Wheel of Fortune.

But some instinct nags at me that a polarization of the Major Arcana should be possible. Duality is built in to the Tarot, and it seems weird to me that it wouldn't work here.

Thoughts?

 

[Etene]

there ought to be an even balance of the two sexes in the Trumps.
there are some issues with this division that leave me scratching my head.
a polarization of the Major Arcana should be possible.
Thoughts?

My thought is that the archetypes that the Majors represent are simply what they are, and any sense of gender extracted from them is a cross section, the residue from forcing the archetypes through a filter of gender stereotype and cultural predisposition. Thus, your "issues" reveal a bias in assignment, not in the nature of Nature.

Although exploring how some of the Trumps may together make a sensible pair of a masculine and feminine expression of a similar concept, attempting to force the entire suit into such pairings will require either distorting the archetypes or distorting the method of assigning gender to them.

Rather than trying to force matters, perhaps it would be better to permit some of the trumps as without gender or as variable according to context. We see this in astrology, where four planets are masculine, two are feminine, and one is variable. Remembering the efforts that have been made to coordinate astrology with Tarot, if doing so is valid then a little of Mercury's adaptability ought to be accommodated.

 

[bonebeach]

I mean, you can. You can absolutely make a method that works for you! And it will probably work great, because you made it for yourself. And I think personal approaches are awesome!

Personally, I'm mostly with Etene here in that I wouldn't. I would spend more time questioning that order than using it. Like we have this Western idea that the sun is strictly masculine, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaterasu

There's more than one *solar* goddess out there in the global pantheon. And that's just off the top of my head. My concept of Death is male, but then there's La Santa Muerte, etc., etc.

More practically connected to tarot, I don't read the difference between Emperor and Empress as based on gender. I read the Empress as more persuasive and subtle, sure, and the Emperor as more obvious in his authority...but if the trumps represent people in a reading, a female person I know can easily be the Emperor rather than the Empress, and it wouldn't be because I thought she was masculine. Stuff like that. But I'm a lady with a wardrobe divided into "femme fatale" and "bad boy" sections, so my biases are pretty obvious.

 

[Grizabella]

I don't really know why it matters. How would it make a difference? I'm not being disdainful, I really don't understand why it would matter. All people are a mix of traits. Women can have traits that are more thought of as masculine and vice versa.

Is there some reason why you'd like to make this division of masculine and feminine in the Trumps?

 

[Saskia]

I'm with Griz: you can probably do it but why? What's the purpose? What does it add to your reading? There is no person existing who is purely masculine or purely feminine and the majority of people are a mix around the middle point of these two polar extremes anyway. What exactly are you trying/planning to achieve with this division? This is not an attack, just baffled curiosity.

 

[Padma]

There are some issues I see already - a very quick scan gives me: Star (androgynous) Chariot (dual sexed) World (androgynous) Fool (androgynous) Lovers (dual sexed) Death (sexless, gender neutral) so...um. That whole gender thing? Yeah.

If it works for you, go for it! You may also want to tackle this subject (with research to back you) in tarot history - might get more of an answer there! If it has been done before, others there will know, and can inform.

 

[danieljuk]

I think the first 3 examples can be, they can be "paired" but the rest of the pairs don't really fit together so well! Personally I am trying to open up tarot and not use perceived genders in the cards because it's starts to become limiting. How many people post in AT that they got a court card of the wrong sex for the sitter who was the opposite sex and how does it fit? I don't really see the Majors paired too much when I read

 

[JackofWands]

Thanks everyone for the replies.

First off, with the idea that gender is a construct. Of course gender is a social construct, and is not objective in any sense. But it's a construct that was firmly entrenched in the Western European culture that shaped Tarot between the 15th and 20th centuries, and gendered ideas are present in much of the rest of the deck. Danieljuk mentioned, for example, the genders that are typically assigned to the Court cards. Another example would be the suits of the Minor Arcana; Wands and Swords are generally taken as masculine, whereas Cups and Pentacles are generally taken as feminine.

This is, of course, flexible. I'm male, but I used the Queen of Wands as my significator for a period of several years. But it's the sort of loose symbolic structure that underlies much of Tarot because of the time and place that Tarot developed.

Because of this, I was interested to see whether this structure applies to the Major Arcana as well, especially because some of the Trumps are very clearly part of this duality. Those Trumps have many, many other shades of meaning, and I would never dream of pulling the Emperor and telling the querent, "This means a man." But that the Emperor is traditionally depicted as male, and that many of his other potential interpretations are closely linked with traditional cultural stereotypes of masculinity, is difficult to deny. It struck me as odd that some Major Arcana would fit into this framework and others would not.

This is not something I would use in a reading. This is just a matter of curiosity. If you like, you can replace the words "male" and "female" with "active" and "passive", or (may the gods of cultural appropriation forgive me) with "yin" and "yang". Understanding, of course, that there's no such thing as essential masculinity and that being male and being active are not synonymous, etc. But what I'm driving at here is a loose structuring based on the cultural lens of the place where Tarot originated--as a matter of personal curiosity, and nothing else.

 

[Padma]

Jack, this site pairs the Majors for divinatory purposes, but, you (and others here) may get some use out of it in the sense of seeing how one major can affect the other. I hope you find it interesting (I am not affiliated to the website, btw.)

http://billheidrick.com/works/tarotdiv.htm

 

[rwcarter]

One way to divide the Majors into Masculine and Feminine energies is to use the Elemental Associations of the cards. Fire and Air are active while Water and Earth are passive. "Active" energy would then be "masculine" while "passive" energy would be "feminine." The only issue with doing this though is that there are more active associations than passive, so you won't get 11 pairs.

Active Majors:

• Fire

• Emperor
• Strength
• Wheel
• Temperance
• Tower
• Sun
• Judgment

• Air
  • Fool
  • Magician
  • Lovers
  • Justice
  • Star

Passive Majors:

• Water
  • High Priestess
  • Chariot
  • Hanged Man
  • Death
  • Moon
• Earth
  • Empress
  • Hierophant
  • Hermit
  • Devil
  • World

So there are 12 active Majors and 10 passive ones.

Rodney