My Favorite Majors: The World

So, here we are: end of the line, last of the majors to pick favorites for. I've really enjoyed going through each of them one by one, picking the cards I liked most from my collection, pondering why it was that those were the ones I enjoyed most. Also, interestingly enough, posts from this series seem to be, by far, the most often viewed ones on this blog :0

Anyway, yes, the World - a card of success and completion and fulfillment, journeys coming to an end. A lot of decks tend to hew to the same basic concept illustrated in both RWS and TdM, though with their own various takes on it. In general, its not a card I have many qualms with in most decks, though also...rarely a favorite.

I had trouble choosing two out of the three I narrowed down my selection to - and well, since this IS the last card in the series, figured what the hell, I can break my two card rule for a second (and last!) time ;]

XXI. World

Favorite:
Of all the many deck-variations on the traditional image of the woman inside the large wreath of accomplishment, I've long been very much partial to this one. I love the dynamic, sensual energy of it: the woman here isn't just standing there, but rather, seems to be dancing, celebrating. The feeling of acceptance, of confidence, of completions, success - all of that seems to be here, much more so than in other cards with similar imagery. Looking at this card, I can feel the meaning it is supposed to be representing.

Of course, the lovely use of color here certainly doesn't hurt. As my previous posts in this series probably have already made clear, I am very much a color-oriented person. The use of the yellow-gold as a background here works really well especially. Love the details in the wreath, the animals, and of course those pillars which surround all of the majors in this deck. Stained glass effect works wonderfully here.

Runners Up:
As for these two, I couldn't quite decide between them because...they are so very DIFFERENT, and yet, both have aspects to them I really like. For the Aquarian World card - well, it definitely does not have the kind of wild, dynamic energy I see in the other two, but makes up for that with...well, I must admit, I have long been very much a fan of art-nouveau and art-deco, and the application of those to this card, done so thoroughly, with such lovely thematic consistency and attention to detail...I just love it. The color scheme is lovely too - not one you see very often, but more striking because of it. I particularly enjoy how it has all the basic aspects of the RWS but...re-done, re-imagined, stylized so nicely.

As for the Thoth...I've written about this World card before, more than once. I really do love it. Naked woman of gold dancing with a snake and all that it can represent - oroboros, beginnings and ends; she is dynamic, the universe opening up quite literally behind her, intimate and public all at once. Stars, the outline of ancient structures...and that, all of that, is only the surface level of the card, my own intuition - how much more to read about, dig deeper in the other layers that the Thoth deck has to offer...yes, a worthwhile take indeed.

strength in good times and bad

The range of the moon faces on the eight of cups is the first that that caught by eye in this pair of cards. We have here four images, a visual representation of the waxing and waning of the moon cycle; we also have four face, ranging from happy to sad, alert to asleep. This really feels relevant to my week, which has been very up and down in a number of ways. The moon metaphor is also prominent in my mind for another reason: Ramadan started yesterday, totally changing the schedule and routine of things here, and that holiday is, after all, a month based on the moon calender. We have cups of gold and cups of...lead, glass, some kind of less valuable metal. Duality and balance, between the positive and the negative in life, the pleasurable and the challenging. At the bottom we see the way that one cup pours into another, the liquid the same color as the background to everything, the way this interplay fills up so much in life, one way or another.

The strength card here seems a reminder of the necessity of channeling that inner strength, the internal resources we all have, to deal with whatever comes our way. Sometimes we need that positive drive to keep going through hard times, and sometimes we need some inner self discipline to not lose ourselves in distraction during good times, and so it goes. In a way it's all a kind of dance, the way that the woman and the lion here almost seem to be dancing. The sun in the corner of the card reminds us of the success we can find when we keep at it, at least sometimes.

I was listening to a local Tunisian radio station earlier this afternoon and was quite pleasantly surprised to realize how much I understood. There was a program about, a guest speaker talking about US foreign policy in the region and the geostrategic issues around the war in Syria and I...understood the majority of it, both in terms of the gist and actual vocabulary. Later there was a program, probably for Ramadan, some kind of story about Jules Verne going on an adventure in Tunisia, and though I understood much less vocabulary wise, I still got enough of the gist to be amused and keep listening. When I first got here, not quite two months ago...that wouldn't have been possible. It's nice, this kind of tangible proof that channeling that strength, forcing myself to study and study on good days and less good days too, does have dividends.

towers and making the best of things

I had this card come up twice in two consecutive draws and well, what do you know...

I woke up feeling really, really sick yesterday. I haven't felt that completely unwell in quite a while. Because I knew I wasn't contagiously ill, and because I am stubborn and my criteria for staying home sick are rather high, I still dragged myself to school and class and participated, but it was really a struggle at some points.

Feel much better today, though still not completely well/back to normal. Like the Tower card would indicate, the sickness, though brief, rather disrupted some plans and just my inner routine/schedule in general since, besides physically forcing myself into my class, I didn't really get ANYTHING done yesterday. I love the stained glass effect of this Tower card, because it just really adds to the jumbled and disjointed feeling and that is so apt...

In truth though, like most Tower events, the getting sick thing was probably a rather necessary reminder/message from my body to my brain. I haven't really been on top of things recently in terms of taking care of myself physically as well as I should, and well: all actions have consequences, and all that.

There's a lot of background to that, and not all things I can really or fully or immediately change, but I think this 4 of cups, which came up with my second tower draw, offers a useful message. Sometimes it's really just about doing what you can to make the best of things. Making a conscious effort not to get sucked into the mindset of 'If I can't fix everything, why bother?' In truth, even small steps in the right direction can make tangible, positive improvements in your life.

Here we have the two angels, one of them holding up that candle, the other presiding over or perhaps blessing the cups. There is a nice, warm pink background to everything. And yes, one of those cups isn't upright, is spilling out, and perhaps that is a rather serious problem. What really strikes me about the scene though, is how unbothered the angels are by it. So it goes. Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes plans don't unfold the way you thought they would. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you fail, cannot do or make yourself stop doing something. Sometimes a tower event -large or small - appears and suddenly everything seems a jumbled mess.

But what good is it, to dwell on the spilled cups, to nurture (fours, that empress association) negative emotions like frustration, disappointment, hopelessness, helplessness. Better, instead, to focus on making the best of things, in whatever way - again, small or large - that you are able.

page pondering

This page of wands has shown up in draws twice in as many days... a phenomenon I generally take to mean that I should pay attention to the message here.

The thing is, I actually had to double check that a page was, in fact, what this card is. It's a bit funny, for a page card - a deeply androgynous figure, bearded with a a wise, old-man type gaze and yet youthful and sprightly in posture, build. Instead of clothing or armor it appears the figure is made of wood...a tree become human? It carries a rod, but far too long and bendy to be of much use as a weapon...so a walking stick then, but with a head, a child's head, growing out of the top.

Behind the figure we see a background of leaves, green. That goes with the generally woody appearance of the figure, the growth theme. So we have trees, leaves, someone neither man nor woman, neither young or old...

What insight does that offer, then, in considering this card through the lens of the knowledge of what a page of wands is 'supposed' to mean? New beginnings which we should approach with a certain flexibility, energy, openness of mind and spirit but also...the wisdom of your past experiences...openness without naivete. Let the external details fall away, focus only on what really matters. Let new things grow from what you already have; don't be afraid to sculpt them into what you need them to be.

Why Do I Collect Decks?

So I wrote a post response to a question on AT, and I liked what came to mind enough to want to expand on the idea here so....

Collecting Decks

So I have some 30+ tarot decks at the current moment, which I do not think is a particularly notable number by the standards of Aeclectic membership but which is, by the standards of the wider world, quite enough to be called a 'collection' and to qualify me as someone who can reasonably say that I collect tarot decks.

And I suppose I do, though for various reasons I don't really think of myself as a Collector the way some people are: I keep all my decks in simple bags in a large sack (after fire last fall, I like the idea of being able to quickly grab and take them all in an emergency), and care about boxes not at all - the only reason I keep those these days is for possible trading purposes, as other people seem to like keeping their decks in proper boxes with proper LWBs. I don't care about keeping my decks in 'mint' condition, even some of the rarer, OOP ones - if I think it will look better trimmed, I trim away, and gilt them too. I do not keep decks I cannot or do not want to read with, no matter how pretty or rare - all of my decks must be reading decks, working decks, because what the hell do I have them for, if not to read with?

And yet, nonetheless, I have enough that one might reasonable ask: why so many decks? Couldn't you read just as well with one or two? Does anyone ever need over thirty tarot decks? And to be fair, no I do not need them. And yet I am an INTP, and there is some underlying logic with which I justify my purchases. It comes down, I guess, to that one great love of mine in life - the love of learning, of gaining knowledge, expanding what I know and how I can think about the things I know of.

See, we all call it 'tarot reading' but in many ways that seems to be mostly a metaphor, figurative language. Do we really think of it as the equivalent of reading a newspaper, a book? And yet, the more I think about it, the more I want to say...perhaps yes. What is written language, after all? From the earliest pictographs to modern, current alphabets in a way, if you think about it broadly, writing is about visually representing abstract concepts. We have these little symbols we call letters, and we string them together this way and that, and suddenly that MEANS something to us, because we have been trained to automatically interpret them as such. So when you come across DOG, you do not see random squiggles: your mind automatically brings up the image or the idea of a certain canine animal. And when you learn other languages, you apply the same concepts. PIES brings to mind the same animal for me, because my mind has been trained to make that associated. So does كلب because again, written language acquisition is about training the mind to correlate visual symbols with sounds with abstract ideas.

Reading tarot is, in a lot of ways, is just the same. You have 78 cards with distinct images, and each card has a range of meanings attached to it - the exact details depend on which system(s) you follow, whether you read intuitively or whether you are deep into studying historical esoteric symbolism or whatever, and so on. In any case though, its a recognizable system with widely applicable card meanings, and as you get more experienced with working with the cards, and more familiar with them, the process of eliciting messages from the cards becomes easier. When you first start off, you draw a card and look at the picture, and maybe you have some vague concept of what it could maybe mean, but you aren't quite sure, and so you check in the LWB or whatever book you have, and you read the keywords and then you kind of stumble along, in broad strokes, trying to make some kind of connection that makes sense to you. The image and the abstract ideas are still separate and you are trying to bridge that gulf.

Later on, it just comes. I draw the 6 of cups and I automatically think of nostalgia, of childhood, of looking backwards, of longing, of people you used to know and things you used to do. I draw the 10 of coins and I think of houses, of families, of the people you love and the people you are tied to, of responsibilities and duties and burdens. A draw an Ace of Wands and I think of opportunities, of growth, of creative energy ready to be channeled, of new projects, of starting thinks, taking the plunge, boldness. I do not have to sit there and struggle to remember - it simply comes when I look at the image in front of me. The images of the cards you see, have been married to a whole range of concepts in my mind. It really is quite analogous to reading, except that what you are reading is a deck of cards...

Which brings us back to the idea of why so many decks? If you have a deck with which you have grown familiar enough to have that kind of connection, isn't that enough?

But you see, to me it does make a difference that what you are reading is not words but images, ART. Art, which can be created in so many different styles and mediums, which is both so inherently personal and so universal...Having many decks means working with the same core concept represented in a plethora of different ways. It really does broaden the scope of your knowledge, the pool of meaning from which you draw when you read. You'll see a card you feel you know so well drawn in a different way and it will trigger something in your mind, another way that you could approach the idea. It adds nuance and shade. Working with the Thoth so much recently has been doing that a lot for me - it really isn't so far removed from the RWS meanings, and yet it comes at them from different angles and perspectives and it makes me really THINK. It widens how I see the cards. Like Aeon instead of Judgement opened up that card for me in a way I never really got just from the standard christianity-based images of the Angel blowing the trumpet and resurrection. Or the post the other night about the Wheel of Fortune and the idea that life is made up of many wheels - wheel of career, wheel of love, wheel of emotional health - that all move at their own pace. These are ideas that would have never occurred to me if I had just been working with the ONE deck, and which once they do I can internalize and apply to all my future working with tarot, regardless of which deck it is that I happen to be reading at the current time.

And yeah, in a way each deck is also it's own 'dialect' because each one has it's own artistic take, little details that you can pick and pull apart as you interpret. Sometimes the answers the cards give can be QUITE literal, and that staircase or the hat or whatever in the deck you are working with happens to be exactly applicable - it wouldn't be there in another deck, but its here, in this one, an answer just for you.

Besides that, decks draw on all kinds of influences - each other, early 20th century occultist groups, ancient mythology, various cultural practices, astrology, numerology, qabbalah, various animal groups, whatever, and they do so in various ways and proportions and so, having many decks can also be a nice way to become at least a little bit familiar with other ideas or systems or whatever which for me - well, more learning is always, always a plus.

And so that is my overly long explanation about both what I think tarot is and how I justify spending all kinds of money on tarot decks when, one might argue one or two would be more than enough :D