How did you profile the Major Arcana?

Hello all!

I'm a beginner to Tarot, and I am deeply embedded in study right now. One thing I have decided to do on my blog is to profile each of the cards in the Major Arcana. Spend a day researching one card and writing a few pages about each one. So ideally, I would spend 22 days researching all of the Trumps and then have a pretty expansive foundation of knowledge to work with when they come up in readings.

So my question for you all is - how would you go about doing this?

Naturally, I will start with The Fool, and based on first impressions, it seems like a fairly simple card which could be easily summed up with a couple of paragraphs. Maybe one or two more for how it relates to other cards or what it means in certain positions, but I'm really drawing a blank on how this card could feel complex to me.

I also understand that this viewpoint probably stems from a lack of education on the topic. I'm sure the fool feels like so much more to people who have been studying these things for years. So help me out - point my in the right direction for research, talk about your system of note-taking for a singular card, etc.

Anything goes at this point. Thank you!

You may want to look at Mary K. Greer's "21 Ways To Read A Tarot Card"

There's a forum here where people post their observations about all 21 ways they looked at the card. There are threads for every card.

Aeclectic Forum: 21 Ways To Read A Tarot Card"

That is extremely helpful! Thank you so much!

Erebella said:

Hello all!

I'm a beginner to Tarot, and I am deeply embedded in study right now. One thing I have decided to do on my blog is to profile each of the cards in the Major Arcana. Spend a day researching one card and writing a few pages about each one. So ideally, I would spend 22 days researching all of the Trumps and then have a pretty expansive foundation of knowledge to work with when they come up in readings.

So my question for you all is - how would you go about doing this?

Naturally, I will start with The Fool, and based on first impressions, it seems like a fairly simple card which could be easily summed up with a couple of paragraphs. Maybe one or two more for how it relates to other cards or what it means in certain positions, but I'm really drawing a blank on how this card could feel complex to me.

I also understand that this viewpoint probably stems from a lack of education on the topic. I'm sure the fool feels like so much more to people who have been studying these things for years. So help me out - point my in the right direction for research, talk about your system of note-taking for a singular card, etc.

Anything goes at this point. Thank you!

Click to expand...

I hope I can remember the answer to that! It was almost 15 years ago when I was learning.

I did learn and journal the Majors, one by one. It may have taken me a bit more than a day each. Some took more than others, I didn't set a timeframe.

I had a lot of Tarot textbooks at the time. I read about 30 Tarot books at the start. I think I started a bit by comparing meanings in all books. But I believe I soon settled on the one book whose meanings felt best to me and went with that one.

I think I then wrote down the meaning of the card I was working on. Ways I could see that the image tied into that meaning? What else I saw in the image, what in my real life or in the real world around me the image made me think of? What I could imagine the card meaning in regards to different topics? How might it react with other cards? How does the image feel? If the feel of it were a color what color would it be? What would it sound like?
What part of the image stands out to me? What could I imagine it saying to me in a reading? ...

For me, card meanings vary somewhat in usage. They are flexible in that sense. And that is part of their complexity. When you think that there are only 78 Tarot cards and that Tarot is a system that can tell us ANYTHING, an infinite variety of things...each card can say many many things in usage. More than could be listed in any book, and likely more than could be listed in all of them. Most readers have slightly different takes on the meaning of each card anyway. So it's really about developing your own spin on it.

For me anyway, The Fool is about true trust and faith in life. About optimism, expecting to be lucky, and for things to go well, and believing in happily ever after. For others it may mean different things.

Whether or not the meaning itself is complex to understand, it can be a hard life skill to master for some. And when it comes up in a reading, it is usually something it would benefit the querent to master. Many people who have been badly hurt have all kinds of walls up and refuse to trust again in case...

I think we all know people like that who really get in their own way and pretty much really make their own lives harder because they can't let go of that and trust in life and people again. It can be a very hard topic to master for some.

Also, for me, most of the meaning actually comes from the card image, and not from my set meanings. So each deck has a different spin on that card image and it can leave quite different nuances to the meaning.

Babs