I agree, and that's why whenever I find some old Tarot decks in the bottom of a 12th century Italian well, I call the pope. "Luigi" whisks them away before I can even get my paints out of the box.bogiesan said:
LRichard, Yes and no. Paint is (to me) poison, card-wise. But what works is the way to go.
I think your view of Force/Strength is valid. However, the Strength and Justice interchange was in order that the cards would fall naturally into place on the Leo and Libra paths of the Tree of Life. Since so much of the symbolism in the Rider-Waite is derived from the Golden Dawn's Book T, I doubt that it can be extricated successfully from the Qabalistic correlations. The deck appears superficially to be exoteric, but, rightly or wrongly, it is as thoroughly enmeshed in the western magical tradition as is the Thoth. I don't want to get into a lot of details, but, as an example, Temperance is blatantly in one's face with the symbolism of the Middle Pillar of the Tree. All that stuff can be ignored, of course, but that leaves the problem of weird images that don't make any sense otherwise.LRichard, Yes and no. Paint is (to me) poison, card-wise. But what works is the way to go.
On that subject ~ going/motion/force~ I've never attempted to alter VIII or XI on an RWS deck, as much as I'd like to... but in terms of Mathmatical Physics, if we were to return to the roots of the XI "Strength" card, and overcome the politically incorrect aspects of XI "Force" (the modern sense suggesting organized suppression, even brutality) do you think we could get a thread going where Force could be intelligently recognized as Universal Energy in Constant Action? ~ and let Justice get back home to VIII ~!
ie; La Force = the underlying principle found operating in all elements of our lives?
OK. But please explain The Emperor's long white Waite beard. As either tsaddi or heth (though actually daleth, MARS) how is it conforming to the cult of Crowley to depict a long bearded old man, frozen on a stone throne, as the VITAL sign of Aries?
Crowley claimed to have had an epiphany that Tzaddi (Aquarius) is not The Star, so he interchanged the positions of The Star and The Emperor on the Tree of Life but kept the astrological attributions of the letters. The Emperor thus became Tzaddi/Aquarius and The Star Heh/Aries. (Daleth was the letter of The Emperor in Levi's system, but the Golden Dawn moved The Fool to the Aleph position, so all the Trumps except the last got pushed down one letter.)
