Rasa
Last night, I was teaching the first session of my latest round of Tarot classes, and one of my students posed an interesting question.
I passed around a couple of older style decks, and she noted that the death card depicted a skeleton with a scythe in each of those, but that Waite and Smith's death was not only on a horse, but also lacking a scythe and wondered why they might have chosen to change the image so much, and remove a component that seemed, to her, to be central to the nature of the card.
I was interested to hear others' thoughts on this.
Here are some of mine:
-the death image looks less violent, maybe, without the weapon, though the armor makes the figure seem less vulnerable, to me
-the scythe connects death to harvesting, so maybe leaving that out suggests human mortality more strongly
Some major arcana in Visconti or Marseilles or other early decks seem to carry quite a different meaning to me than the Waite counterpart, but Death seems like such a strong archetype with a clear meaning that to me even though the imagery is quite different, they convey the same thing.
Do you think Waite and Smith were trying to convey something drastically different than the older images were, and if so, what?
I passed around a couple of older style decks, and she noted that the death card depicted a skeleton with a scythe in each of those, but that Waite and Smith's death was not only on a horse, but also lacking a scythe and wondered why they might have chosen to change the image so much, and remove a component that seemed, to her, to be central to the nature of the card.
I was interested to hear others' thoughts on this.
Here are some of mine:
-the death image looks less violent, maybe, without the weapon, though the armor makes the figure seem less vulnerable, to me
-the scythe connects death to harvesting, so maybe leaving that out suggests human mortality more strongly
Some major arcana in Visconti or Marseilles or other early decks seem to carry quite a different meaning to me than the Waite counterpart, but Death seems like such a strong archetype with a clear meaning that to me even though the imagery is quite different, they convey the same thing.
Do you think Waite and Smith were trying to convey something drastically different than the older images were, and if so, what?