I'm reviving this thread because I think some interesting questions got raised here that no one really answered much: what are the problems, structural and otherwise, with the RWS and other tarot decks, that make some of us keep searching for alternatives?
For myself, learning about tarot has been a process working from intrigue to mild enthrallment to dissatisfaction, causing me to want to create my own deck, one that I can finally read with and be content spending years getting to know. In the beginning, I suspected that I might have to draw my own version in order to really know tarot, but I didn't realize at the time that I'd have to change or rework a lot of the structure and content, too.
(By the way, I see a number of people who are bored with all the RWS clones, which I understand if the underlying structure doesn't work for you. I see them all as personal reworkings of the symbolic expression of RWS, which I would expect from people who find it useful but need to make it their own. It doesn't make me want to own or use them, but I am glad that there are so many who feel drawn to it and want to honor it with their own version.)
Some of my problems with RWS:
-Too much repetition. If you only have a vocabulary of 78 symbols (as opposed to 40,000 words or so in English), you'd think that Waite would have wanted to limit the overlap. But compare the 2 of Cups with The Lovers; the 4 of Swords with The Hermit; the 8, 9 and 10 of Swords; the 9 of Pentacles and The Empress, and more... it's not that the cards are exactly the same, but they're redundant enough to make you question why we need, say, the three different shades of suffering in the 8, 9 and 10 of Swords and not something else in keeping with the element of Air, perhaps the joy of solving a problem (I am aware that Waite probably viewed the characteristics of Air differently in his time than we do in ours, but still).
-The pip cards often tell too much of a story for me to find them really useful. Take the 6 of Swords, for instance. There's the element of a journey, and also leaving troubles behind (maybe solving them, maybe just running away from them); being guided by the ferryman, and whether or not the people in the boat are being unburdened or continuing to carry their troubles. It's just a lot of components to choose from. Many RWS clones exacerbate the problem by creating and telling even more complex stories for the characters in the cards. Some people are perfectly happy choosing one or two elements in the card to focus on; for me, I find it specifying too much. Aside from this, the minor arcana cards, on the whole, aren't widespread symbols that are interpretable in many ways, in opposition to many of the Major Arcana, such as The Star, Moon, Sun, Lovers, Emperor, Hermit, Death, and so on.
In general, I haven't investigated other traditional tarot systems (Thoth, Tarot de Marseilles) because there are other problems they share in common:
-Being rooted in the Medieval/modern Christian mindset. Most of the archetypal content of the tarot has been heavily filtered through Christian ideas about the world; some of these are subtle (such as the imperialist Empress somehow being the symbol of the natural world, and the natural world being very low down in the progression of the trumps), and some of these are blatant, such as The Devil. There is useful symbolic content behind both of these cards and others, but the Christian spin is not one I care to engage.
-Some of the cards in the Major Arcana aren't actually symbols (such as the cardinal virtues of Strength, Justice and Temperance): they are the objects of symbols. But Strength doesn't much stand for anything but strength, even if there are many different kinds and expressions of strength. Crowley just added to this in the Thoth deck with Lust and Art. Also, some of the symbols are simply poor for what they are supposed to represent, such as the aforementioned Empress, or the Tower: the meanings assigned to them aren't what anyone (in this age, a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago in Europe, much less anywhere else in the world) would think beforehand, given what we know in our everyday world of empresses and towers (even the story of the Tower of Babel is about retribution for hubris, and not really about general radical change).
-And, of course, they're generally parochial enough to make me gag.
The point here is that these are the things that don't work for me. If other people can use them well, I'm not one to complain that they "shouldn't" be used (and I can't stop anyone from using them in any case). But I'm posting this not just to sound off, but to hear what other people think about the traditions of tarot. Does anyone else have critiques of the traditional systems?
