The need of more advanced deck?

I'm just curious. There're thousands of decks out there. What are the reasons that advanced readers prefer to read with an more advanced, perhaps abstract decks compared to the clear, fully illustrated beginners decks? Does it mean beginners decks don't have enough depth? Since I rely on intuition and not on symbolism, I find beautifully illustrated beginners decks work fine and offer great insight. Other more advanced decks (like Thoth and other more abstract) don't have attractive arts for me.

I like the simpler decks, more complicated artsy type illustrations aren't useful for the way I read. My favorite is still the Universal Waite, after 20+ years of reading it still tells me all I need to know.

The simple decks read perfectly well.

The more in-depth decks are deeply satisfying.

It's like the difference between a second-hand Toyota and a brand-new state-of-the-art Lamborghini. Both of them are cars. Both of them will get you to your destination. But one is *much* more satisfying than the other.

nisaba said:

The simple decks read perfectly well.

The more in-depth decks are deeply satisfying.

It's like the difference between a second-hand Toyota and a brand-new state-of-the-art Lamborghini. Both of them are cars. Both of them will get you to your destination. But one is *much* more satisfying than the other.

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Well, that explains my POV, as the way I drive, I would much rather (and actually do) have a second-hand Toyota than a fancy schmancy car that I have to think and worry about. Different strokes!

Some people rely not only on the cards themselves but on the structure of meaning they're based on. As they learn more about that structure of meaning, their understanding of different aspects of card art expands. Kabbalah and an intimate knowledge of the Tree of Life is a good example-- to a beginner, a deck like the Tabula Mundi might indeed look 'abstract'...but to someone well-versed in Kabbalah this deck and all its artistic complexities might be clear as day! If you get much of your reading from a particular system of meanings, it doesn't make any sense to use a deck that's devoid of those meanings. It would be like you trying to visually intuit meaning from plain pip cards--what you're looking for just isn't there. (as an aside, I'm not saying that the RWS doesn't have symbols that pertain to Kabbalah...they're just few and well-hidden)

I understand why people call RWS a beginners deck, but seriously, that deck is about as advanced as you can get if you really get into studying it and learning all the symbolism. For me, learning with that deck was what really got me going well enough to now be able to read with just about any RWS based deck.

For most beginners, illustrated decks might work perfectly well because they can be read intuitively; when I started reading however, I used the Hermetic Tarot, which is am abstract deck. The card's titles were ideal for learning the meanings, at least for me.

Fully illustrated decks helped me to get from the abstract to the practical use.
I think it's all in your reading style. You can read intuitively in a very advanced way, so an illustrated deck does not only have to be for beginners.

And more abstract decks like Thoth, Hermetic Tarot, Tyldwick etc. do transport a lot of emotion in their artwork.

For me it's a question of how much I get out of a card. When I started out I used things like the RWS and Morgan-Greer. However, when I began to study Kabbalah and other things like that, I found that the whole intuitive reading thing remained, but that my knowledge and understanding of a given card was deepened and expanded. So I gained a lot without losing anything. Of course, it is always a question of what's "good" vs. "good enough." Sure, beginners' decks are perfectly serviceable, but adding structure and symbolism to the mix allows you to go much further, to find connections between cards and their ideas, being able to see the deck as a unified model and understanding all its excesses and balances. Going strictly by the images just doesn't give you that to that extent.

The chief advantage of more abstract decks is that they allow you to better distill the card's essence, being able to then apply it to any situation since you're constructing the meaning out of several different sources and arriving at as pure an idea as possible. It also helps maintain objectivity because of external constraints and balances that allow you to take the reading out of yourself. You not only know what a card means in ways that surpass LWBs or simple personal interpretation, but you also know why it means what it means, and how it connects to other cards in the reading and how it behaves.

nisaba said:

The simple decks read perfectly well.

The more in-depth decks are deeply satisfying.

It's like the difference between a second-hand Toyota and a brand-new state-of-the-art Lamborghini. Both of them are cars. Both of them will get you to your destination. But one is *much* more satisfying than the other.

Click to expand...

Actually I don't agree. Kitty Kahane is one of the most satisfying reading decks I have.

http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/kitty-kahane/

Most people call it simple... I call it genius.

closrapexa said:

The chief advantage of more abstract decks is that they allow you to better distill the card's essence, being able to then apply it to any situation since you're constructing the meaning out of several different sources and arriving at as pure an idea as possible. It also helps maintain objectivity because of external constraints and balances that allow you to take the reading out of yourself. You not only know what a card means in ways that surpass LWBs or simple personal interpretation, but you also know why it means what it means, and how it connects to other cards in the reading and how it behaves.

Click to expand...

This this this. Studying more "abstract" decks, with more abstract tools, allowed me to see why it is said that keywords actually veil the meaning of the cards: to me keywords, either learned by heart or derived from sheer intuition, are like the shadow cast by the essence of the card, in different directions and of different lengths depending on the question at hand and on one's subjective understanding. They are indeed useful, but focussing only on them as if they were the real thing is like taking a shadow to be the thing that cast it.

It also allowed (and is allowing) me to see how the cards are so organically connected, balancing each other out, that they are actually like different windows on the same garden, each one hiding something to reveal something else in a very dynamic, dance-like way, but even that which is hidden is entailed, one way or another