The Hermetic, in contrast, feels overly male and slightly cumbersome
Oh, no! It's lush and rich and elegant and luxurious and endless and ...
- it lacks the Thoths warm, rounded edges
It has its own warmth! a different warmth. It gives and gives.
and feels what I would call *dutifully* symbolic - it's cramming the cards full because it can.
<cheerfully> Yup! And every time you look at any given card in it, something else surfaces and hits you in the Tarot-brain. Every card in every MRP deck I own or have seen are equally stacked with symbolic details, but you don't hear people complaining. In all cases, you will see what you need to see on each occasion, and the rest fades into the background. The detail simply makes the deck loquacious, in the way of a street-corner gossip with a thirst for passing the news around but no speck of real malice anywhere in her.
It is a bit overloaded and, in short, is inferior because of its inaccessibility.
It's only overloaded if you try to see everything in every card every time you look at them. And if you do that, IMNSHO, you are completely missing the whole point. Inferior? Inferior to what? The miracle of creation? A happy orgasm? a bank account with only one number but generously stuffed with zeroes?
The Thoth and the Book of Thoth are one and the same and you can't really understand the symbolic beauty of one without the other.
Normally I'd debate that, but if I choose to accept it as a given, then surely that is a weakness of the deck - it is not a stand-alone system.
I know very few people who gush over it as a reading deck.
<holds out hand> Nice to meet you, Mr le Fanu. My name is Nisaba.
It feels like the tarot equivalent of the boring Latin class at school - you know you should study it because you know it is important and clever but it's a bit dry and boring...
Facta non verba, laddie, facta non verba.