Major Tom
Lee said:In a recent post somewhere by Rusty Neon (I'm going by memory so hopefully he will forgive me if I misquote him), he mentions that most Europeans who read with the Marseille don't even use the pip cards.
It would certainly solve a lot of problems!
In her book Jung and Tarot, Sallie Nichols describes her reading method. She leaves out the pip cards, 2-10, so she has a 42-card deck consisting of the Majors, the Courts, and the Aces.
I realize it's a bit of a stretch for most of us who are used to reading with 78-card decks. But, for those of us who learned to read with illustrated pip decks, it might be less of a stretch than trying to work without the scenes.
I can't speak for European practices, but in Britian we tend to use a full deck.
My first tarot book, the one I used to learn to read tarot, The Magick of the Tarot by Melita Denning & Osbourne Phillips, now unfortunately out of print, taught me to read using only the majors. I read with only the majors for more years than I care to remember.
I didn't learn the minors until I came to Aeclectic. Now from what I've learned I right here, I would have to say you can read successfully, by which I think I mean meaningfully, with any number of cards you wish. R.T. Kaser, in his book Tarot in Ten Minutes (as misnomer if there ever was one
) uses trumps I - X and a single suite Ace through 10 for many of his exercises. He calls it stacking the deck. Works a treat. I suppose I could read the Marseilles trumps and aces without any further study and might just have to give it a try. I always found the trumps to give a more intense reading and I would suppose adding the aces wouldn't alter this quality by much.
I still want to learn to read the pips and courts in the Marseilles and plan to do it at the rate of one card per week.
