Canadian Girl said:
Question for all you savvy and sophisticated readers of decks with pips:
How do you do it?
I just ... sit down ... um ... and do it.
Canadian Girl said:
Do you simply use meanings transfered directly from a deck with illustrated Minors to your pip deck?
I have been known to do that. It certainly was a part of my learning-process.
Canadian Girl said:
Do you create and assign your own meanings?
To some extent, yes.
Canadian Girl said:
Do you just wing it on the fly with every single reading that you do?
Yep.
Canadian Girl said:
Do you make stuff up as you go?
And that's the same as the previous question, isn't it?
To me, a more sophisticated set of words for thsoe last two alternatives would be "using your intuition" <grin>.
Like you, I struggled with and eventually abandoned my decks that had unillustrated pips back in the early 1990s, after many, many years of reading. In particular, I felt I *should* read with the Marseilles I had back then because it was so historical, but I felt I couldn't get anything out of the pips (which of course meant that as long as I felt that way, I wasn't going to get anything out of them).
Then. earlier this century, along came Luigi Scapini's
Stained Glass Tarot. By "came along", I mean into my area of consciousness, not my ownership. The latter took years and years. I desperately, desperately desired it. I went in and out of every bookshop and new age shop I knew, putting it on order - even or especially the ones I was doing readings in at the time. One of those was run by a Swedish woman with a teenage son, who at one stage told me she was going to take her boy to Sweden during the school holidays, and would pick it up while she was in Europe for me. She couldn't find it. Back then, I was wary of buying on the internet - I simply didn't want to give financial details to strangers at a distance. So more years went by, until I sold my ethics down the street and bought with my card from an online Tarot retailer. That opened the gateway - but that's an other story.
Before I received them, I had no idea the pips were unillustrated - highly decorated in evocative ways, but unillustrated, and that was a bit of a shock at first. But I had loved this deck for a long time, and wanted it for a long time. I'd be damned if something like unillustrated pips was going to prevent me from using it! Which meant that I had to find some system of learning how to read it. Hmmm ... And there was something else going on, too - pride. I'd already run a couple of courses on reading Tarot locally by that stage, and I damn well wasn't going to be defeated by a new deck.
So I came up with key-words for myself, firstly for the numbers: one might be origins, two might be balance, three might be movement etc. Secondly, from the suits: Pentacles might be "physical", Cups might be "emotional", and so forth. Then I looked at the moody decorations of the cards themselves and the words I'd associated with them, and came up with a single word or phrase for each of them, which I pencilled in the most minute writing imaginable on the cards, positioned so that they would simply disappear into the detail.
In reading, what I did was I used those words as well as the decorations as a "spring-board" for my intuition, leaping off into the card and using my technique, well-described elsewhere, of "putting my mouth into Automatic and starting to talk".
I suppose this deck was a gateway deck for me - I was so motivated to work out some kind of a system - even if it was one unique to me - that nothing short of a head-amputation was going to stop me reading the deck. And within a ridiculously short period of time, I was able to read with it very comfortably.
It was really only after I mastered that deck and my own idiosyncratic system for it, that I started buying decks with unillustrated pips, even though I had owned a couple of others before. I bought the Golden Dawn deck, which had associations with an old friend of mine, a variety of Viscontis, some 20th and 21st century decks with unillustrated pips like the Tarot of the Dead and other similar decks, and Sulis here gifted me with a copy of the Thoth which was lovely of her, and not a green one (I'm not drawn to the greenies), which was intuitive of her.
So I now have quite a stable of decks with unillustrated pips, none of which I would ever have been able to read, and few of which I would ever have considered owning, if it hadn't been for Scapini's deck. The fact that I was so motivated to learn to handle that one deck, opened other doors for me.
Canadian Girl said:
I'm half tempted to try to use my Favole deck because I love its Crosses and Masks and Butterflies and Roses for the Minor suits, but the fact that I've only ever read using decks with fully-illustrated Minors is giving me a mild case of the "freakin' pox."
Help?
<smile> Perhaps this deck will be your gateway deck into unillustrated pips. How much do you love it? How motivated are you? If the deck is worth the effort, the deck is worth the effort. I made up a system that works for me and is comfortable for me, but it may or may not work for you, and since it's bent to my brain-shape, it probably won't be comfortable for you.
Sit down with that deck. Decide on a way to handle it. Be consistent. Write pages of notes, or make pencilmarks on cards, whatever you need to do to open doors in your mind for those images to start to mean things to you. It *will* take time - it did take time for me with that deck. But ultimately it's worth it. As it happens, I haven't pulled that deck out in several weeks - but I love it and adore it, and I'm very grateful for it having taught me to read other unillustrated decks!
Now - get out there and have fun with your deck.
