thinbuddha
sansa said:However (bear with me here) most people who read the tarot should take into account who made the specific decks. After all are they just cards or do they not have part of their creator in them? And I mean more then just the art work. Don't we respect the decks and feel a certain way towards them? If a deck was created by someone who had an "evil" or "bad" intent couldent the deck have a negative affect?
It seems that a lot of people believe in this. It's the same reason why some people wouldn't feel comfortable handling a deck of tarot cards at all (because of the "evil" they perceive to be locked in the deck)
This theory doesn't apply only to occult items. Why is a $1500 guitar suddenly worth $150,000 because Jimi Hendrix used to use it? Because it is rare? I have a one of a kind Thoth deck- one of only a few decks ever used by me (very rare!) but not valuable (alas!).
There is a belief that the people who handle something somehow add power to the object. The more "powerful" the person, the more value the object has.
I am sort of on the fence about this- On the one hand, I do believe that objects *can* hold power, but I'm not quite sure how that power manifests. I have a Buddha statue that is reputed to be 500 years old. It is beautiful. Somehow, if I were to find that it was a fake (newly manufactured) then I would still think that it is beautiful- but somehow I would feel that it has less "power" than if it is authentic (certainly less monetary value-but also less power). I guess that I can imagine the energy that people have put into the statue as an object of veneration has somehow been stored within the object itself- if it's new, then ther is no power there, right?
I'm digressing- I guess that I don't think that there is power in tarot cards because of what is printed upon them- I think that whatever power (or energy) is in the cards is put there by the people who use them..... and I'm not really even sure of that. That said, I think that what is printed on the cards certainly helps define the nature of the power that people channel into the cards.....
So I guess I'm not decided about this-
But I do think that the Thoth energy isn't bad.