Intensive Deck Study Reboot!

BlueDragonfly

OctoberGwen,(I'm being lazy and not quoting and deleting everything), I think posting in the Daily Draws threads of the Your Readings forum is an excellent idea.

And really, what difference does it make if anyone reads or gets tired of it, this is your study! :D
 

Herzog

where would be a good place to start posting IDS?
 

BlueDragonfly

HerzogIsGod said:
where would be a good place to start posting IDS?
It depends on what you want to do.

I'll be posting daily draws in the Your Readings forum's Daily Draws thread, individual cards in the DruidCraft Study Group threads, and readings etc., in my blog. You can do any or all of these things.
 

alec

Here we go.

Hi Zan,

Thanks for sending out this invitation to participate. What an excellent opportunity to participate with, be encouraged by and hopefully encourage others.

Reading your Thoth journey thread has been an encouragement/reminder to get moving with the Thoth myself. The deck has been murmuring to me for quite a while now. Honestly I have felt intimidated by it. A few months back I trimmed a large, and feel now's as good a time as any to dig in with an IDS. As OctoberGwen said so well, "I'm a little nervous so please be gentle with me, guys."

OctoberGwen, I also like your idea about 3 months, and will join you for this.


Here's my pledge:

I WILL:

* Use the deck for daily readings Monday through Friday.
* Study the Duquette book on the Thoth
* Learn to identify each card by image only (important as now there are no printed titles)
* Memorize the titles and astrological attributions
* Continue through December 31st with the option to recommit at that point

(Plus these uber-encourging ones from BlueDragonfly:)
* I will not become discouraged if 'life' throws my study plans a ringer, but get back to it as soon as I can.
* I will come here for support and encouragement and commiseration and will gladly offer the same to my fellow IDSers!


If I can be of help to anyone, please feel free to ask.
Alec

P.S. Zan, great choice on the Fantastic Menagerie. Beautiful and seemingly under-appreciated.
 

Le Fanu

Great news alec. You will LOVE the Thoth and life will never be the same again. And remember; the Thoth will greet you as an equal wherever you are in your journey. I really believe this. Do not believe that until you have all the kabbalistic correlations and astrological associations, the Thoth wil be somehow emptier. The images themselves will influence your thinking as you slowly get to grips with it. And it is a lifetime journey, but in a few months you can make the Thoth your own tool. You will love it. I know you will! However...
alec said:
* Learn to identify each card by image only (important as now there are no printed titles)
* Memorize the titles and astrological attributions
Can I just say, I'm not sure this is a good idea. The titles are good to have. I think for someone learning, the titles are good to have (can you unsnip those cards and re-border them? :bugeyed:) The titles are so intrinsic to reading, and can contribute so much and I (personally) don't think there is any need to remove the titles. Aesthetically pehaps, the cards may be more inviting but in terms of studying, it's good to have the titles. They helped me enormously and continue to do so...For example, it struck me a while back "Interference" as a title. How interesting this was. I was thinking of wartime, when the deck was created, radio message and morse code, the interference of messages and this title influenced my reading... Some of these titles can have subtlely double meanings...

I have a trimmed Thoth but I use it very rarely. More for meditative moments. Also, I would let the astrological associations sink in naturally. they are all on the cards anyway so you don't need to "memorize", and memorizing can be a bit overwhelming. But the symbols are there. You can look at a card and see the Mars in Capricorn symbols. With time, you'll pick up what this means. I'm not sure "memorizing" is so essential. But that's just me. Sorry to be butting in; Im not telling you how to do things. This just struck me when I read your post...

Just a thought...
 

kabang

Pondering a recommitment... But what deck?? It was so hard to choose the Medieval Scapini last time, and I loved it, but I feel a little ho-hum when I look at it now.
 

Master_Margarita

Master_Margarita's IDS History

zan_chan said:
If you were previously, or are currently, an IDS participant, please post to let us know that you're still going strong with your deck, to update us on your progress so far, and to join in the REBOOT spirit :) Thanks!
I think of myself as a grizzled veteran of the IDS wars.

I kind of fell into the whole concept of the IDS accidentally. During a period when I was largely inactive on AT I spent over two years on an IDS (didn't people used to call it a "One Deck Wonder"?) of Bob Place's Buddha Tarot, a deck for which I retain a surpassing fondness.

My reason for what in retrospect was my first IDS was that although the artwork and concept of the Buddha Tarot greatly appealed to me, I found the deck inscrutable and cold. The concept of the deck--the Major Arcana mapping remarkably neatly to the life of Gotama Sakyamuni n/k/a the Buddha, the Minor Arcana expressing a number of other mostly Tibetan Buddhist concepts--is utterly, utterly brilliant. I knew something of Buddhism already, but not so much about Tibetan Buddhism, and this made it hard to "crack the code" of the deck. It took over two years of doing a daily draw every single day (some posted to the Daily Draws thread, most not, but all recorded in my journal), doing occasional chakra readings, the full deck meditation, taking the deck with me on silent meditation retreats, and studying the excellent companion book, before the deck became a trusted adviser and friend. It looks like I did virtually nothing, however, with the Buddha Tarot study group. Perhaps I should swing over there and share some of my hard-won knowledge.

Once I finally "got" the Buddha Tarot (I don't find it a good deck for general readings and rarely use it to read for other people now) I decided to take a walk on the dark side for a while by studying MRP's Bohemian Gothic. I turned to the BoGo as a way to focus particular attention on the range of shadow meanings of all the cards in the tarot deck (whether represented by the BoGo or otherwise) and thereby add more nuance to my readings. Life's not all unicorns and rainbows. My study of the shadow didn't take as long as my Buddha Tarot study before it felt "done." My main method was doing a daily draw until I'd looked at every card carefully and the cards started repeating themselves, and reading the study group thread for each card as well (I started a couple of threads to fill in the study group, but didn't post in all the threads by any means). I finished up with the BoGo before the 2nd edition hysteria really reached its fever pitch. I may contribute to some of the 1st versus 2nd edition threads even now because I really do love all variations of the BoGo.

That's my historical IDS experience. Next post will contain my current IDS regime and its rationale. :D

:heart: M_M~
 

Master_Margarita

What I'm Doing Now

In late July I made the transition from the BoGo to MRP's Fairytale Tarot by doing some Childhood Nightmare readings with the BoGo and the Fairytale combined (very interesting experiment). I became interested in the Fairytale as a subject of regular study because each card in this deck is associated with a separate fairytale. The companion book contains a version of each tale and a discussion of how it correlates with the RWS meaning. The associations caused by the fairytales are very deep and rich. Because the deck authors are widely-read as well as creative, many of the tales are apparently not commonly known. Many were certainly not known to me. So in order the crack the code of the Fairytale, I've needed to learn a lot of different fairytales.

For some reason, this deck got little attention on this forum, and seems almost to have been forgotten, perhaps because there have been so many other amazing decks pouring out of MRP. Also, the artwork is perhaps not quite as attractive as that in some of their later decks. Because there are so many additional stories to learn, the deck may come across as "too much work." I know I found early readings with it to be very tiring. I think a single card from this deck might be enough for any reading. It's a good deck to combine with other decks.

I've largely been doing daily draws with the deck and reading a fair amount of literature about fairytales, e.g. Women Who Run With The Wolves, and books of fairytales. Each time my daily draw turns up a card that I've never drawn before, I work up an individual card study post for the study group, including a link to the pertinent fairy tale on the web (there are one or two that can't be found anywhere on the Net). My conclusion that the deck is largely unsung is based on the limited number of threads that existed for cards in this deck in Fairytale study group before I got started. When I've studied every card, I think I'll be done with this particular IDS.

When I get closer to the end of my study, I'll offer some readings to see how the cards relate to one another once I know the stories better.

:heart: M_M~
 

rwcarter

I wish you all well, but I'm going to sit out the IDS for awhile. I've completed my study of the Mythic and posted on all 78 cards in the Study Group. So, to that extent, my IDS was a success. I'm currently working on comparing cards by their Astrological Associations (PF Case, not Golden Dawn), but that is going really slowly because other things keep pulling me in different directions.

I'll check in on the thread every so often though to see how folks are doing though, cause the IDS has and will always have a place in my heart.

Rodney
 

Le Fanu

HerzogIsGod said:
I totally agree. If I decide to commit to this, my primary interest will be what Enrique Enriquez refers to as, Eye Rhymes. That is, what are the visual commonalities between a group of cards. I believe this can be approached scientifically as well as artistically. But this will be my focus.

Maybe every day I'll draw two or three random cards and force myself to find at least twenty "visual similarities" between them. I will post my list and a scan of these cards at the end of each day --or the beginning of the next day, depending on how tired I am :)--
What I'm curious about is where people who are doing their IDS post their thoughts. I mean, if you are studying a deck (like the Mythic), you can post in the study group, as you work through each card of the deck. But Herzog seems to be proposing here a study of a deck's interaction rather than a card by card approach. Would this have to go in "Your Readings? Reading Exchange? Could it be a thread in the Historical Decks forum?

Plus it could be a "Marseilles IDS" focusing on one deck, like the Dodal or Conver or whatever, but it seems to me the generic reading method rather than the images of a particular deck which would be the focus?

I ask because I'm quite tempted to join Herzog (we have discussed this by PM) but I don't think the Marseilles decks are a card by card affair. It isn't a "yesterday was the 6 of Swords ("What do I see?").. today is the 7 of Swords.." type of thing.