Do the card names distract you?

I was wondering if the names of the cards themselves distract anyone here. I think they are starting to distract me. I almost wish I could unlearn the names of the Trumps, since even the name is influencing my readings. For example, I was doing a relationship spread for a woman at work. Things are going great until I get to the Justice card. I'm stumped for awhile, nothing is coming that seems right. I keep thinking of the law. "Is this person in trouble with the law or have they ever been?" "No."

I realize then that I am thinking too hard about the concept/definition of "Justice" the word and not the image itself. Finally I say to myself, "Okay, just think only of the image, not its name, not anything else." So I look at it. A woman, sword in one hand, scales in the other, sitting upright. Is she blocking something? She's guarding something? Immediately I understood her to represent a woman in the life of the man the querent is interested in. A woman who has a legal right to him. Welll...turns out he's married!

The name of the card was distracting me too much. Anyone else have this problem? At least I was able to learn a little bit more. I need to disregard the names of the cards during readings. I already disregard "traditional" meanings, and it took awhile to break that. I hadn't thought that even the name of the card itself would be a distractor.

heh. The names of the cards are what I read. Quite the opposite from a distraction to me!

Learning not to go strictly by the traditional names of the cards and the meanings set me free and made the readings start to flow. But you didn't abandon the name of the card and its implications when you gave your attention to the picture on the card. Justice has to do with legal matters and marriage is certainly a legal and binding contract with legal ramifications if one of the parties is involved in an affair.

Everything works together---the image, the details of the image, the image in relation to the images around it, the names of the cards, the colors of the cards, the spread positions---after awhile you begin to just automatically find the story using everything about the spread and about each card that's pertinent.

Justice ---> Law ---> Marriage...

Marriage is a legal issue... as in 'Justice of the Peace'... It seems to me that you just didn't correlate 'marriage' with 'law'... I bet you will now tho... and forevermore, *vbs*

As for the married guy, well, he may very well find himself in trouble with the 'law' when his wife finds out he's having an affair and drags his a$$ to court for a divorce!!! *lol*... Which is another aspect of 'Justice'...

To answer your question, tho... no, I don't find the titles of the cards distracting... they do, however, encompass a wide-range of meanings... 'Words' appeal to the left-brain, whilst 'Pictures' appeal to the right-brain... If I get stuck on one I can use the other to shake loose the meaning in that instance...

I have come to find that, over time, both the words and pictures work together synergistically to engage 'the whole' of our left-brain 'verbal understanding' and right-brain 'visual understanding' thereby providing such a wholistic mergence that one's intuition trinitizes the polarities into a unified 'knowing'...

Solitaire* said:

Everything works together---the image, the details of the image, the image in relation to the images around it, the names of the cards, the colors of the cards, the spread positions---after awhile you begin to just automatically find the story using everything about the spread and about each card that's pertinent.

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I'm in total agreement with this.

No they don't distract me at all, it all works together as everyone else has said.

I think it is just a stage of learning Splunge. When I began I clung to the card titles like a lifesaver, then there was the stage where I'd do a spread and intentionally not look at card titles like it was cheating or something...now, like the others here, they have become part of the whole.

You could always cut them completely off one of your decks and work that way for awhile. When I gave my Bohemian Cats deck a borderectomy all the titles on the pips went as they were printed in a different manner than the majors. No problem.

Oh yeah...I picked up on the legal aspect of the Justice card as it pertains to marriage, but I didn't go there until I decided to just focus on the image itself. When someone says the word "justice", I can't help but think of cops, judges, court proceedings....but mainly cops. Just looking at the image freed me up a little bit and I figured it out.

I always tend to think of "Justice" as a totally abstract concept completely independent of the law (one hopes they coincide, but by no means is that always so), as in right and wrong and fairness, so I wouldn't even need to think of marriage as law to see the connection( the guy's cheating, married or not!). Whether I'd have picked up on it in this case is anybody's guess, but usually I'm not much distracted by the card names, at least not in particular. Any one aspect of a card can occasionally distract me from what it's really telling me in a given instance. Actually I find I tend to just automatically add the tarot card meanings to the word's definition even in non-tarot contexts---which makes for its own occasional chains of weird thoughts!

6 Haunted Days said:

No they don't distract me at all, it all works together as everyone else has said.

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I too agree, it all falls hand in hand