Hi Silverlotus, and everyone else!
Silver’ I like your suggestion to start the thread by giving an overview of the deck, discussing changed titles, colour associations, choice of suit names/iconography etc, as these are all highly pertinent to this deck and its ideology. Anyway, I look forward to your opening thread on the 29th, on this one!
As for The Language of Flowers, I confess I know nothing about it – but it is certainly called upon and used in this deck. The following links may be of use in exploring the meanings of the flowers in the pictures (for example the yellow lilies underneath The Hanged Man). The first two links are quite useful in understanding where the language of flowers came from, and in getting definitions for each flower quickly. The third is a little more long winded but it does have pictures of many of the flowers – which maybe useful in identifying the flowers in the pictures; again this is something I’d be useless at!
http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/hilda/flang.html
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/plantanswers/publications/flowers/flowers.html
http://www.baacks.com/thelanguageofflowers/
On the timeline for looking at each card, I’d be interested to know how quickly other study groups do this. One suggestion I have is that each time we start a new card we leave a day where people simply post “what they see” ie: mention each thing in the picture, who appears in the picture – how them come across and what they are doing. In other words simply state the basic imagery of the picture and what is possibly going on. This way by the end of the day we should have a good list of what is in the picture – as we are all bound to miss certain things which others spot – and we will have all given our first honest reaction to the card without influencing others by starting to say what they think the iconography means and stands for. After that, when everyone who wants to has added their thread, the true thoughts, discussion, insights and personal knowledge can come into play and we can really get down to debating the card and its ideological and mythological structure.
NB: That’s just a suggestion, and the paragraph was not meant to end up that long!
Finally, it is worth remembering that this Deck was put together by one man and eight women, all of whom brought years of experience and research in spiritual beliefs and customs, physic consultancy, religion (old and new), Wicca, The Occult, ancient symbolism, and The Natural Kingdom.
Hopefully this should be motivation enough for us all to search deep into each card, as there is clearly a lot of knowledge and wisdom behind every iconographic choice in this deck.
See you later!