Bernice said:
Have you formulated different 'elemental' assignments for this particular model/layout?
I've never really thought about elements for this system. Elements are useful for the pips and courts, since they are basically empty tokens of play
without clear meanings. Assigning elements to them empowers us to give them meaning.
The trumps however are all fairly common allegories. The meaning is already there - Love, Death, Justice, Fortune, etc. Much of the confusion of we moderns have in understanding some of the trump images, is that the allegories are
15th century, and not currently in use. In the 15th century Italian states, these allegories would have been known to all. There was nothing esoteric or occult to it. Athough the sequence as a whole, I believe, holds a larger allegory, as I speculate in post #64, which may not have been immediately obvious to your common Italian.
Based around this larger allegory, I drew the positive, negative, passive, active, or neutral correlations.
The Chariot is positive because of its basic allegory and this is supported by its position
before Time and
Fortune, and it is passive because it is subjected to the power of
Father Time and
Dame Fortuna.
Since we can speculatively deduce the 'goodness' of each card, and whether or not it is active or passive based on the actual allegory, assigning elements, whose main purpose is to determine the 'goodness' of each card and whether or not it is active or passive, would be redundant.
If we have a way to determine:
- Dignity - Whether the card is good or bad.
- Activity - Whether a card is passive or active.
Then we can judge both an answer to a question, and even elaborate.
Short Example Reading
The Querent asks:
"Will Sally go out with me?"
Card #1 (The Querent) = Pope
Card #2 (The Quesited) = Empress
Card #3 (How they interact) = Love
Judgement: We can deduce from the general positive nature of the cards that this is a 'Yes'. From the activity we can see that the Empress is passive. The Pope is active, so he
must make the first move, or nothing will happen. I really don't know what the Emperor is going to think about this though!