My RWS hate/hate relationship

[Egypt Urnash]

So... does the system underneath the meanings matter? Or does it only matter that the system you use generates a wide variety of meanings and images, that covers most of the emotions and situations people find themselves in?

If your target audience is steeped in the existing cabbala/astrology/numerology systems, perhaps it does. If your target audience isn't, does it matter that you have a new system based on, oh, I dunno, assigning things based on modern particle physics and the arcane grammar of a programming language? (Which would be pretty awesome if you could pull it off. "The 4 of Gravity corresponds to the Charm quark, the Higgs boson, and a linked list...")

How far do you think you can bend the structure of "tarot" before it snaps and becomes something you're not comfortable calling "tarot" any more? How far away are you from the RWS when that break happens? I don't think this is something you'll ever find a consensus on. Some have it embedded deep in their minds and like it that way, some have another system deep inside, some are ready to play with lots of systems, many outside the mystic circles just have a vague impression of RWS or Thoth.

As a creator who's learnt their craft well, slavish imitation is boring. You can only tell the same story in the same manner so many times before it becomes a prison. Creation is driven (for me, at least) by an urge to create something new; sometimes from whole cloth, sometimes from building on diverse influences. If you need to leave the RWS behind, then do it and see where this takes you. Maybe you'll come back to it refreshed; maybe you'll leave it behind forever.

 

[firemaiden]

Egypt Urnash, that was a beautiful post.

 

[RiccardoLS]

So... does the system underneath the meanings matter? Or does it only matter that the system you use generates a wide variety of meanings and images, that covers most of the emotions and situations people find themselves in?

This is a point, indeed!
Then again, what are the answers?

And, another question, does the system cover "covers most of the emotions and situations people find themselves in"?

I'm not sure of that.

 

[baba-prague]

And, another question, does the system cover "covers most of the emotions and situations people find themselves in"?

I'm not sure of that.

I think that most well designed decks do potentially cover most situations, simply because the meaning of the cards is so open to interpretation according to how they fall, what the reader sees in any particular reading and so on.

It's something I've asked myself but I've never really done a reading in which I've thought that there are no cards to cover the situation. Though it may take more than one card to make up a particular meaning.

I'm glad that this thread is carrying on

 

[jumaja28]

Ric, I completely understand your feelings about the RWS. First, I really just hated it, but thought I couldn't get away. Then, I deliberately sought out decks that departed from the RWS considerably. Over the years, as I've learned more about the systems and symbolism involved in the RWS, I have come to appreciate and understand it more. But I still don't like it.

It's not just the aesthetics, as I initially thought. It's the system. I am neither a member of the Golden Dawn nor a ceremonialist of any kind. Nor am I an alchemist, nor a Kabbalist. There are many tarot readers, collectors, and creators out there who would say the same. So why are we bound by these systems?

Oh, I hear you now. No, we are not technically "bound" by them. Of course, an artist might create a deck completely apart from these systems. But, realistically, how easy would it be to publish such a deck? And how many would complain that it is not a "real" tarot deck?

Please note that I consider tarot structure as something completely separate. I'm perfectly okay with the idea that, to be tarot, the deck should have a major and minor arcana, plus courts, and at least 78 cards total. I would even be willing to accept a more or less standard set of trumps, as they far predate the RWS and are common to all decks. I've seen a few decks that include the common 22 trumps and then add a few of their own at the end. I really like this practice, as it offers something new but allows the reader to decide whether or not to actually use the new archetypes.

Back to the original topic... We have developed, over the last several decades, a really complex and fluid set of meanings for each card. This is not based entirely on the RWS or even the Golden Dawn. I think it is reasonable to use these meanings as the foundation for a deck, while expressing the ideas uniquely. One of my all-time favorite decks (and a very popular one, at that)-- the Fey-- does a great job of this. While there are occasionally elements of the RWS imagery included (4 suits represented in The Magician, tug-of-war in the 5 of Wands), most of the images are something entirely new. The Magic Realist decks also come to mind. Because of their use of pre-existing art, many of the cards have little recognizable RWS imagery, yet they are still able to convey our common interpretations. And they are also wildly popular. This kind of deck often adds new meanings to our repertiore and depth to our old ideas.

So perhaps this new kind of tarot is possible, but should be undertaken more gradually. As we add to the vocabulary (both verbal and visual) of the tarot, we become more accepting of variation. We can only try. The more decks that successfully depart from clone-ialism, the more options us mere mortals who cannot even draw stick figures will have.

 

[Mojo Twin 2]

Hey Ric - thanks for your response.

I do agree that the imagery of the minors is pretty much open territory. I'm pretty sure that Waite used the general understanding of the combination of decans to come at a "scene" that would come across as something that communicates to people what the attributions mean, without having to get into complicated explanations and memorization.

If you want to stick with the Golden Dawn attributions you can illustrate it pretty much any way you like. There seems to be an understanding that 3 swords indicates a sorrow - a betrayal of some kind. Saturn really bringing a major bummer to the upbeat Libran energy. So you can take that general - feeling, gist, gestalt - and translate it into an image - any image that could convey to a reader the general meaning of the card. I'm pretty sure that's been done to a greater or lesser degree in some decks.

Waite/Smith chose to illustrate this attribute as 3 swords piercing a heart. But you can use anything you want that would illustrate this conflict. As a matter of fact, I've been a bit put off by decks that really mimic exactly the RWS deck with just different artwork. I like World Spirit deck because there is enough of a break from the tradition, while keeping with the spirit of the traditions of the Tarot.

As to the "Universal Mind" thing - eh - I tend to romanticize things - especially things that pertain to a spiritual or metaphysical nature. The twentieth century seems to have brought a curtailing of the predudices towards practices that some would deem "anti-christian" (sic) like Magick and Tarot. This has given us the ability to access these Arcana much easier than it was a century ago.

Well, now I'm rambling. This has been a fun thread so far!

alec...

 

[RiccardoLS]

Hi think I understand what you say about the Universal Mind. It was beautiful.
I'm not sure I agree, but neither that I disagree.

The point of *structure* is not... (I'm no artist so that's a reason I focus on that) the way I portray a meaning, it's the meaning itself.
So we have "sorrow" in the three of swords, and we have the freedom to portray it in any way we desire. The Art, the imagination, open so many road we can follow to create new images of that meaning, each of them, with its own subleties.

My question is: "why is three of swords *sorrow*?"
Because of a Sefira, a Planet, a Sign and an Element...
And because Three of Swords as sorrow is recognized and accepted.

Then, the Tarot we know today is considered to be able to "map", to "compose" (the same way as a language) all possible experiences we are going to work with.
Is that true?
Is that because the Structure behind it was so cleverly done to truly map the whole of the human being?
Is that because Astrology and Cabbalah really are the fundamentals of the world?
Or is just that we can find all of those experiences despite structure?
Or maybe structure is not what "maps" the meanings, but rather a confortable way for us to translate and organize the meanings, that someway are already there.

Possibly the question should be different: what is structure?

 

[Egypt Urnash]

Thanks, Firemaiden. *grin*

IMHO a large part of why the intuitive reading method works is because of the variety of images dictated by the underlying system - and because of the nature of these images. It's very rare to see "something happening"; either something has just happened, or something is about to happen. The cards provide a bunch of fragments of a story, and we tell one about ourselves. All the esoteric correspondences give us reason to include weird, incongruous details across multiple cards that a searching eye can find and connect: hey, I never noticed there's a jackal on both of these cards, and that seems significant today.

It's the job of the author/artist to provide these. The structure is a tool they use to provide these; there's some obscure bit of attribution that you choose to represent as a jackal. The author says 'this card centers on X, and should also include P, Q, and R'; if the artist has the notes on the structure they might draw S and T based on it as well as what the author dictated. How you build your underlying structure doesn't matter as long as it's multidimensional: most of the 3s in RWS are joyful because 3 is a happy number, for instance, but here's the 3 of Swords which is miserable and horrible because of the Cabalistic and astrological layers.

The multiply-layered structure provides nuance. "Happy" is refined into "mental, active happiness", reflected through a dark mirror into "sorrow", and then hung about with markers of the air. Each layer in the system adds another refinement; some small, some large. If the layers precess against each other, if they don't advance in perfect step with each other, you get these complex interactions. Simple iterative systems give complex, fractally-detailed results.

The reader conspires with the author/artist to create meaning in the cards they are given. That jackal correspondence becomes linked to Anubis and death, or to that guy who's always scavenging dead projects, or to your buddy who keeps greyhounds. Hunt up a copy of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" and read through it, especially the parts where he talks about panel transitions and "closure"; it's the same kind of thing.

We are the apes that tell stories about ourselves; a Tarot deck, in my eyes, is a tool for telling these stories from an angle we normally wouldn't take.

things I wanted to mention but didn't find room for:"dissociated press", cut-up theory, the cryptic narratives of Edward Gorey, chaos magic...

 

[cbfdoll]

Hi Everyone!

This is such an interesting thread, Ric I have a question that I'm hoping someone here could help to answer:

It seems significant that the tarot deck consists of 78 cards, as it could indicate that the underlying system it was originally based upon consisted of 12 things (signs, houses, ...?) with each card then representing a one-time interraction between them (in pairs & alone), which would come out to 78 exactly. But if that wasn’t the original intention for the deck, either as a game or memory device, than why were the cards standardized to 78 over some other number?

cbfdoll

 

[rwcarter]

It seems significant that the tarot deck consists of 78 cards, as it could indicate that the underlying system it was originally based upon consisted of 12 things (signs, houses, ...?) with each card then representing a one-time interraction between them (in pairs & alone), which would come out to 78 exactly.

12 x 6 = 72. 13 x 6 = 78. I'm not sure your hypothesis holds unless I'm missing something.