TdM
What "ihcoyc" says about the TdM as a "folk artifact" seems right to me. Perhaps no one person was responsible for creating the imagery, which seems rather to have floated up from the culture itself. Or at least if one original set of images was created somewhere it seemed to "sit right" with its first audiences and subsequent generations, so that successors found it unnecessary to make wholesale alterations. It seems miraculous that the pattern for the TdM has remained essentially unchanged for 400 years. Miniscule nuances exist between different versions of the TdM, perhaps in the same way that various pianists interpret Bach's Goldberg Variations in slightly different ways. We like to think that many of these differences came about as a result of deliberate artistic decisions by the cardmakers, but perhaps some of the changes happened accidentally as a result of technical shortcomings or a failure of sensitivity.
Less value seems to have been placed on individual expression in those days. The sculptures on cathedrals might be another example. Removing one's personal identity from the creative process seems to have been regarded as more valuable than advertising one's own prejudices and tendencies. But maybe no creative artist can resist working in tiny jokes and observations for his/her own amusement. But individual artists come and go while the TdM remains. We venerate "originality" now, but in the world of spirit perhaps that is what actually obscures deeper truths about the soul. Maybe that's what the the poet Robert Graves means when he says that to create a lasting work of art requires "a rare act of spiritual regression". We almost need to dig down to some sort of biological core in our being. That's where the archetypes live, right?
I think perhaps that is why Enrique Enriquez calls the TdM a "gestural language". The meanings we have given the cards, and which are memorised from other people's books, are merely debatable intellectual concepts. Enrique, an artist himself, perhaps wants us to experience the cards as visual artifacts rather than as receptacles for ideas, presumably because the intelligence of the eye and of the body is more profound than that of our rational mind, our ego. That's why the TdM can't be improved: the arrangement of colours and lines on the cards conveys more to us at a deep subconscious level than anything we can say about the images as symbols. However, EVERYBODY should make their own tarot deck. It helps us to connect with archetypal energies through the medium of our own life experiences. Looking at the images expands us.
Enrique's grand project seems to be larger than the tarot itself. First and foremost he is an artist who's mission is to expand our consciousness, to take us outside our established "conscious set". But just as the medium of a painter is paint, and the medium of a poet is words, Enrique's chosen medium is the TdM. Just as, say, a novelist takes bits and pieces of the world and recombines them in unique ways to make a novel, Enrique pretends the TdM, specifically Jean-Claude Flornoy's TdM, is the whole world and recombines features of the images into coherent narratives. The way he reads cards is less about predicting the future than about making us realise how at every moment much more is before our eyes than we had realised. The future has never happened yet, but an expanded awareness can help us respond more fruitfully to anything the universe has to throw at us.
Having said all that, I love the RWS and many of the modern decks that build on the beautiful ideas of the Order of the Golden Dawn. But all of those decks are dealing in concepts. Only the TdM uses a language of relatively simple shared visual motifs - pairs, standing/sitting, holding things, looking to the left or right, etc. - which enables the cards to "talk to one another." For example, since we read sentences from left to right, we tend to assume a past/present/future relationship as we move across three cards, so that a motif in card 1 that reappears in a slightly different form in cards 2 or 3 is felt to have gone through changes. That is the sort of thing that can be crafted during a reading into a mini-narrative that the clients will superimpose onto the incredibly complex detail of their own lives. The clients essentially take your observations and reach their own conclusions. It's a different way of fortunetelling using the cards.