stella01904 said:
Interesting, but you seem to be imposing much unnecessary complication.
Unnecessary to whom? (To most, I know.)
Batons can be convoluted into a correspondence with anything one likes, as can anything else. But the simple explanation is usually the correct one, if indeed "correct" exists. It is certainly the most practical and effective.
But it has to be an
explanation, else it is simplistic. As for convoluted correspondences, this is what occurs in modern ‘poetry’—and in the sort of ‘readings’ you seem to espouse—that a sound poetic science obviates need for, which is why I feel that bardic tradition from the heroic age is so invaluable and should not be discarded simply because it is not commonly known.
You seem to place a lot of emphasis on things being "fallen." But the philosophy of the Tarot is Gnostic-flavored: "The Kingdom of Heaven is all around, but men do not see it." Which Joseph Campbell called "pure Buddhism."
Hence, no "fall." Which is likely one of the reasons why there have been sermons against cards beginning around Dante's time.
Where in the world did you get the idea that the Gnostic view of things precludes a fall? Why do you think ‘men do not see it’? The Gnostic view was in essence Plato’s, and he saw man as having originated as a sexless being, meaning to get to his current state he
had to undergo a fall—
the Fall, in Judeo-Christian terms, Kabbalah being closely related to the Gnostic Christianity of the bards, whose world-view these cards embody (that it does can be shown beyond reasonable doubt, though why this seems to interest so few I do not know). As for identifying Gnosticism and Buddhism, I have
long preached that Buddha himself was in essence Gnostic—a Platonist—as is evident from the
Dhammapada. But modern Buddhism, by and large, does not appear to be, except inasmuch as it still reveres the early sutras and the abovementioned work (and the
anatta doctrine is, of course, diametrically opposed to gnosis as the
Theravada Buddhists interpret it, though originally it merely meant that self is not something to be found in ‘other’, in the things not
of it to which one nevertheless attaches Light).
I don't see any evidence that he is going to burn it. I rather think he is going to pack it up when he is done, and use it again.
I assume you jest here (else things at this point become mere tit-for-tat): the point is that staves are the only suit symbol capable of
becoming fire and that their use to direct the eye is consistent with the light so produced.
Back to Campbell, I belive he refers to that kind of thing as being "stuck in the metaphor".
Here you squirm, rather than reason (by falling back on an easy ‘out’, a common trick intellectuals use to avoid serious consideration of contrary viewpoints).
Not a problem. I don't have any particular yen to sidetrack this into a snarky discussion of where commas do, or don't go.
At the risk of ‘getting down in the same mud’, I should point out that I would not have inserted them were they not required, but the greater point here is that if the insertions were ‘not a problem’, they would have required no answer (hence I shall refrain from such jests in future).
The "complete and utterly reliable map" is simply saying that "the fall" is illusion.
How so? To simply state something does not
in itself make the case for it (unless it be common sense, and even this usually needs defending nowadays), which is why I defend stipulations with chapter-and-verse even at the risk of being considered verbose (which is what I consider myself
anyway). You need something specific here besides Campbell’s charming idealism (based primarily on mythology, not Hermetic metaphysics), unless you are ‘preaching to the choir’ (I wish
I had a choir to preach to).
I think of it more like this: As Black Elk said, "Everything tries to be round." The nature of everything IS round. Stephen Hawking has even said that time is spherical and asking what is before the beginning of time is like asking what is north of the north pole.
Sometimes you appear to fence with someone other than me, as I agree that man’s psyche is much healthier in a round lodge, such as that of a Cheyenne (I know, Black Elk was Lakota Sioux) or a Kelt. But as for Hawking, he is an idiot: if he weren’t he would understand that time as he means it
has no beginning but is continuous, rather, and therefore any instant must have continuity with both future
and past, which his hypothetical ‘first instant’ would not. But then people of his ilk even believe a point without extent can ‘contain’ all matter, and that Euclid has been superceded by Riemann, and other such dribble (including the at this point stubbornly preposterous idea that gravity, rather than electromagnetic forces between plasma filaments, is what shapes the stellar universe).
I like the uncluttered, if you haven't noticed.
The only real clutter is falsehood, or the irrelevant. Which am I? (Just tapping blades here, as I know you didn’t mean any insult.)
Not sure about your "other than Diety" though. By all accounts, "other" is illusion. We are not separate, at least form the Diety's point of view.
That’s why I put it in single quotes: I was trying to use verbal shorthand to express a somewhat subtle esoteric doctrine.
Not so much "held captive" as not properly perceived.
Yet the Gnostic metaphor is of Light ‘held captive’ (imprisoned, bound), this because we humans who waste it are held captive in a very real sense by attraction to sensation to the exclusion of reason, and thus we attach Light to objects of nature, death being the result of using up one’s current supply (having to return to the high self to get more, so to speak).
Very sensible astrologically, but not so good for card reading since it takes the heart association away from the Coupe suit.
Where do you get this? I should think it is the Sword that is more closely bound up with the heart—that which
pumps blood but does not create or hold it—since the heart is its chief goal (its point’s objective). This is true of both concrete sword and what it stands for, namely thought’s expression, making (or objecting to) distinctions. The Cup, remember, symbolizes
peace, not passion, whereas it is the latter that gets the heart a-pumpin’.
The deck will fit together and balance very nicely if you let it. But you have to remember that it is a thing in itself.
Why do you talk down here? True, I am not a reader, but have been working to piece together the origin of the Tarot of Marseilles since 1972. Do I seem like a novice? (Forgive me if I bristle slightly here, but I know precisely how it ‘balances very nicely’: the way it ‘fits together’ is something I have struggled seemingly in vain to interest people in, but the historians are too into ‘history’ to notice, and no-one else seems to
care much about anything that went unnoticed by such as Waite and Crowley and that Frenchman Eliphas.)
Because it's interesting, the different ways that people have assigned elemental correspondences over the years. Even completely without elemental correspondences, there is plenty to go on other than stream-of-consciousness.
Touché! (Quite true.)
As Jodo said, it is capable of being sublimated.
???
The Baton suit simply suggests sexual or creative energy . . .
As long as you recognize the creative aspect, which tends to get submerged in the sexual (its procreative guise) but is the
essence of the suit. Oh, I see now: yes, sublimated, but this makes it sound sort of as if the original is being sidetracked into something ‘other’, when in fact the sublimation is what
ends its being sidetracked and restores it to its proper place (place where it becomes once again a boon).
. . . it is not beneficial to obsess overmuch about what one should or should not eat, or embrace the science du jour.
(If it’s
du jour then it probably isn’t science, which is more like
du Siecle [I
think that’s the word for ‘century’, though I probably have the gender wrong].) But many basic principles of nutrition are well-understood, such as food classification-and-combination and the fact that maple syrup from a tree does not do the same damage sugar does (but is not nearly as lucrative for Hawaii, of course). But yes, if one were to listen to reporters, all one would
know would be the ‘science
du jour’, as you say.
