Technically Tarot
Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 04 Dec 2004, and now archived in the Forum Library.
| Sulis |
04 Dec 2004 |
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Very good article - well done Jeanette. Thanks for the link Aoife :)
Love
Sulis xx
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| Aoife |
04 Dec 2004 |
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A while ago I said that I had arrived at a personal working tarot classification:
Tarot deck = essentially Marseille; Tarot-derivative = RWS, Thoth; and; Tarot-inspired = those decks not obviously following other ‘systems’.
At the time it helped in my search for an understanding of Tarot... and it obviously revealed my growing belief that Marseille expressed the essence of that for which I was searching.
More recently, during a tarot-hiatus my attention had been drawn back to the broadly psychologically based usage that had been my earlier interest.
And then confusion ensued.... I simply couldn’t reconcile the historical Tarot with the evolutionary developments [particularly those from a feminist perspective] that have been so valuable.
And this is where Jeannette’s article is for me so compelling. I’m still assimilating and maybe I will conclude that I will continue to be drawn to both [possibly irreconcilable] “traditionalist” and “expansionist” views of Tarot. No matter.... Tarot is likely to remain a frustratingly fascinating enigma.
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| firemaiden |
04 Dec 2004 |
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That's an intelligent article, Aoifie. So when are you going to publish an article, eh? eh? eh?
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| Cerulean |
04 Dec 2004 |
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"Tarot is a body of tradition, which seeks to describe the divine nature of the universe, and our place within it. It allows the student or practitioner to explore and understand essential concepts through a system of precise symbols (and/or procedures). These symbols are valid and useful because they are rooted in an established history of correspondence and metaphor. Deviations from the standard symbologies are not recommended, as they pose a risk of leading the viewer to adopt false conclusions..."
"Up to 20 years ago..." (implication of the above view was mainstream among tarot writers up to twenty years ago).
Odd to me, as I thought from the very beginning, such fluid styles of tarot from region to region in it's gaming context--that is, if one accepts Italian Tarocchi as part of the tradition.
And I thought throughout Italian art tarots from the 1840s through 1920s, experimentation in regional tarots designs were still fluid. I found allegorical tarot art to be a reflection of the times. And historically, I thought there were more links of young women of using the tarot for creative gaming or other purposes or being used in allegorical context from even the early Italian times...Bianca Maria as Sforza's excellent soldier-wife-matriach in the Visconti Tarocchi as a heroine of the Chariot was in the spirit of the time. If I recall, this was from a supposedly historical story of her defending her home against enimies...
And while there was a reaction to the Etteilla experiments as too far beyond traditional tarot, that was the only reaction of discouragement that the English/Swiss other occultists were commenting on...that I can think of historically--my impression was the Christian Mystics suggested that too many fortune-tellers worked from the Ettilla derivations, so it strayed beyond what Milanese-Marseilles symbology was understood. Yeats in the Golden Dawn times used an Italian Dotti Milanese variation for meditation.
I also found experimentation, people evolving and drawing/painting/experimenting with tarot images to be a norm if I read through History of the Occult Tarot (Dummett and Decker) up to through the early 1900s when the Swiss (Oswald Wirth) and English (Theophists and Christian Mystics) and Americans (Knapp-Hall). So I found the historical tarotist to be a delightful variation from stodgy thinking, as well as somewhat unfortunate and questionable as times (Madame B.) in choices of association.
Just my thoughts...
Cerulean
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The Technically Tarot thread was originally posted on 04 Dec 2004 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.
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