The Three Wheels

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 14 Nov 2003, and now archived in the Forum Library.

pan	14 Nov 2003
pan, I am interested in this three wheels image that you mentioned. What is this pattern and the number of cards? ------------------------- okay let me start with the basic facts we do have. There are three types of cards. These are numeric, face, and "trump", Aka minor arcana, face, and major arcana. Face cards are generally thought of as being part of the minor arcana. The minor arcana is clearly divided into four elements. Four element divisions such as these occur all over the world in all sorts of shamanic societies because they are so fundamental to the human condition. In the context of the bards and the use of oral histories, mnemonics were used to encode information in ways that seemed self evident to those doing the encoding. the encoding of tarot is a description of the entire universe...archetypes and laws and functions... its all a way of thinking about and ordering and organizing the total universe or world view. Its really not that big of a streatch to think then of the face cards as describing archetypes of personality, the minor arcana as describing archetypes of setting and scene, and the major arcana describing archetypes of evolutionary sequence. as there are 12 or 16 personalities, 24 events, and 40 places, the wheels fit rather nicely actually together with the places being the most exagerated forms of the polarities and thus being more enumerated and placed further apart, and the persona being the inner circle; as if they are all gods living on mnt olympus and sharing a common center; from which they move and evolve and interact with the dynamic polarities around them, and probably make circuits around the wheels as descriptions of the heroic journey. i hope that this clarifies ?

jmd	15 Nov 2003
If I read your post correctly, pan, you are suggesting that the Tarot may be drawn as three circles sharing a common centre, each with a different radius. Each of these may be seen as a wheel, with, presumably, the appropriate number of 'spokes' - or inter-spoke spaces. The smaller inner wheel would contain the Court cards - which you suggest may be either 12 (reflecting the zodiac?) or sixteen; The next wheel has the Major Arcana - which you number as 24 instead of the more familiar (& I would personally add 'correct' if describing Tarot) 22; And the outer wheel reflects situational world events, divided into forty sections...

Lee	15 Nov 2003
It would be interesting to do a layout using this scheme... one might lay out the entire deck that way, the Courts in a circle in the center, then the Majors in a circle around them, and then the 40 pips in an outer circle. To read them, one might then connect the cards in lines radiating out from the center... One could also do it with smaller numbers of cards, for instance choosing five Courts, ten Majors, and twenty pips, and arranging them in the concentric circles... -- Lee

firemaiden	15 Nov 2003
But.. why stop at three wheels? Why not six? Major Arcana Court Cards Fire Water Earth Wind Actually, why stop at six when you could have eight wheels? Major Arcana phase 1 Major Arcana phase 2 Major Arcana phase 3 Court Cards Fire-spirit Water-soul Earth-body Wind-mind Actually, if you divide the court cards into masculine and feminine personalities, you could have yet another wheel... but then you would have nine... You could group the nine wheels into three groups of three... hmmm ... then what. Who's driving? P.S. I like Lee's idea of laying out the cards this way to see what corresponds , - especially as inner wheel, middle wheel, outermost wheel, as jmd has described, rotating perhaps in different directions against eachother like the a fortune wheel to gamble on...

Lee	15 Nov 2003
Quote: Originally posted by firemaiden [...] I like Lee's idea of laying out the cards this way to see what corresponds , - especially as inner wheel, middle wheel, outermost wheel, as jmd has described, rotating perhaps in different directions against eachother like the a fortune wheel to gamble on... Oh, that's a lovely idea... one could do the reading, then do a series of permutations, where after the first reading, one could rotate the center wheel clockwise one position, leave the middle wheel where it is, and rotate the outer wheel counterclockwise one position, and see what new combinations occur in the radiating lines. I suppose one would need to develop concrete meanings for each of the radiating lines, similar to position meanings in a normal spread... And so as not to get too off-topic from pan's original post, we should read the layout using his differentiations of Court cards being archetypes of personality, the pips as describing archetypes of setting and scene, and the major arcana describing archetypes of evolutionary sequence. Or, more simply, Court cards being personalities, Majors being events and pips being places. -- Lee

Mystic Zyl	17 Nov 2003
I really do not like is deck, it is the Merlin deck. The author Stewart has renumbered the cards in the Major Arcana and has put the cards in 3 Worlds or spheres. Interesting concept, but it is not to my taste; as it breaks tradition.

pan	19 Nov 2003
i find that there is a mandala in my mind a single whole pie; the spinning of the tao. Yin and yang polarizations... and then there is the knife to cut that pie the sword or knife itself symbolic of the mental processes of discernment understanding and mentation. The Tarot is one possible way of cutting that pie, just as the I-ching is a different way of cutting that pie. Both based on elemental polarities archetypes which balance each other across a gap if even one card is out of place, the balance of polarizations falls away a wheel with a dent or a bulge is produced that wobbles as it spins these wholly improbable wheels are not the one there in the mind of the psychic; the collective unconscious psyche and all of symbologies and epistomologies. These wobbly wheels are merely the guessworks and patchworks of mortal minds who don't know the wheel. And in the search for truth beyond possible scholarly quests, find there within a fragmented dream that one wheel; whole, a perfect sphere tarot a description only of that wheel slightly wobbled from so many non-lucid remakings and iterations; fixing the wobbles a matter of discerning simple balance of archetypes across the gap for the truth is perfected in its roundness polarities finding their homolillies and the whole singing meldies octaves dancing harmonies three wheels and three wheels only and alone; space, person, and time. setting, personae dramatae, and plot the oldest and only story in the universe all other stories variations on its themes for within its bounds all tales are told; the truth of the human experience manifold

The The Three Wheels thread was originally posted on 14 Nov 2003 in the Talking Tarot board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Talking Tarot, or read more archived threads.