Tarot decks that read like oracles

Crowqueen

I didn't actually know there was a difference. Is there ;)?

There is a great spread on Tarot Passages by Diane Wilkes called the Goddess Oracle, where seven Greek goddesses - Artemis, Athena, Hestia, Hera, Demeter, Persephone and Aphrodite are called upon to give advice, one card each. I use my Goddess tarot for it since that's the most appropriate deck. Aphrodite's card can usually be summed up by a lyric from a song or stanza from a poem: tonight's reading for my sister was:

"When she gets there she knows
"If the stores are all closed
"With a word she can get what she came for." (Led Zep, Stairway to Heaven)
 

Fatima

All of them. All tarot decks are card oracles anyways so same method for all.

F.
 

Sulis

Fatima said:
All of them. All tarot decks are card oracles anyways so same method for all.

F.

Depends on how you read.

I use the Marseille tarot most of the time and I read this by using primarily a number and element method, followed by the image.

I've just been gifted the Fairytale Tarot by Baba Studio (love it, it's gorgeous) and I don't read this like my other tarot decks at all. With this one, I'm not taking numbers and elements into consideration much at all, I'm reading using the fairy tale and the image - much more like an oracle (IMO).
 

Crowqueen

Sulis said:
Depends on how you read.

I use the Marseille tarot most of the time and I read this by using primarily a number and element method, followed by the image.

I've just been gifted the Fairytale Tarot by Baba Studio (love it, it's gorgeous) and I don't read this like my other tarot decks at all. With this one, I'm not taking numbers and elements into consideration much at all, I'm reading using the fairy tale and the image - much more like an oracle (IMO).

But surely the purpose of tarot - as well as other -mancies, like reading tea leaves, card oracles, runes, etc - is as an oracle, an insight into the past, present and future. I also use my watch and the movements of birds...different birds represent different facets of life, different numbers represent different degrees of insight. How one interprets the oracle - in our case, tarot decks - on the other hand - whether by elemental assignation or intuition from an image - is the key here, not whether it is in itself an oracle or not.
 

Alta

I read all of my tarot decks like tarot decks except, as Sulis mentioned, the FairyTale tarot. Even then the tarot meanings are in the background, but the tale itself dominates my understandings when I use that deck.
 

bleuivy

I agree with Sulis on this one. It's true that tarot cards are a type of oracle, but they are a specific type of oracle with a certain structure. Major arcana, court cards, and minors arranged into suits. Sometimes they have non-traditional suits (eg. Halloween Tarot), but they still share the same basic format. (There's a thread for discussing what is and isn't a tarot deck, so I'll stop this discussion for now so as not to take the thread too off topic.)

I read traditional tarot decks (RWS, decks with non-illustrated minors) in a certain way. It has much more to do with the number of the card, the element the suit represents, and the correspondance to the major card. Decks of cards that do not have a standard tarot structure are often marketed as "oracles" rather than tarot. I read those decks in a fundamentally different way. All of the methods I use for reading tarot - the suits, the the number of the cards in the minor arcana, the correspondance to the majors - goes out the window and I have nothing but the picture telling me what I want to know.

Occasionally, a tarot deck will come along (eg. Waking the Wild Spirit) that I find myself reading like I do an oracle, rather than a deck of tarot cards. I let the picture talk to me without really caring about the number of the card I've pulled. I think this reaction has to do with the non-traditional structure of the deck. The images are so very different from the traditional images I know and love, that I just let the pictures speak to me.

Is this what the deck creators intended? Possibly not. Is it an acceptable thing to do? I feel like yes. After all, they've created such evocative images that I respond to them without needing to know that the card I'm looking at is the, say, 10 of Pentacles.
 

Sulis

bleuivy said:
I agree with Sulis on this one. It's true that tarot cards are a type of oracle, but they are a specific type of oracle with a certain structure. Major arcana, court cards, and minors arranged into suits. Sometimes they have non-traditional suits (eg. Halloween Tarot), but they still share the same basic format. (There's a thread for discussing what is and isn't a tarot deck, so I'll stop this discussion for now so as not to take the thread too off topic.)

I read traditional tarot decks (RWS, decks with non-illustrated minors) in a certain way. It has much more to do with the number of the card, the element the suit represents, and the correspondance to the major card. Decks of cards that do not have a standard tarot structure are often marketed as "oracles" rather than tarot. I read those decks in a fundamentally different way. All of the methods I use for reading tarot - the suits, the the number of the cards in the minor arcana, the correspondance to the majors - goes out the window and I have nothing but the picture telling me what I want to know.

Occasionally, a tarot deck will come along (eg. Waking the Wild Spirit) that I find myself reading like I do an oracle, rather than a deck of tarot cards. I let the picture talk to me without really caring about the number of the card I've pulled. I think this reaction has to do with the non-traditional structure of the deck. The images are so very different from the traditional images I know and love, that I just let the pictures speak to me.

Is this what the deck creators intended? Possibly not. Is it an acceptable thing to do? I feel like yes. After all, they've created such evocative images that I respond to them without needing to know that the card I'm looking at is the, say, 10 of Pentacles.

What Bluivy said :) - Exactly what I meant.

Thaks Bluivy :)
 

bleuivy

You're welcome, Sulis. :)

And, incidentally, I think the Fairytale Tarot is going to show up on my wish list. I've taken another look at it, and it looks like a very evocative deck.
 

Fatima

Crowqueen said:
But surely the purpose of tarot - as well as other -mancies, like reading tea leaves, card oracles, runes, etc - is as an oracle, an insight into the past, present and future.

That's what I meant.

I have a core meaning for every card, that might get (or not) affected depending on context, symbolism, deck etc.
So, say, the 2 of pents, no matter the deck, the images, etc. always has the same meaning (sort of and adapted).
That's my "method" and I have the same approach to all traditions of card oracles; that's why I can't differenciate among them.

F.
 

Crowqueen

bleuivy said:
Occasionally, a tarot deck will come along (eg. Waking the Wild Spirit) that I find myself reading like I do an oracle, rather than a deck of tarot cards. I let the picture talk to me without really caring about the number of the card I've pulled. I think this reaction has to do with the non-traditional structure of the deck. The images are so very different from the traditional images I know and love, that I just let the pictures speak to me.

I see what you mean now.

In other words, there are decks with structure to them (eg Marseille, Thoth, even the RWS in some senses), and decks whose "meanings" come from the stories or artwork rather than the traditional tarot structure. Perhaps that's why I have thus far shied away from pure pip cards, as I read visually rather than memorising meanings, and thus treat all tarot decks as a set of distinct images depending on the deck I use.

For example the Morgan-Greer Seven of Wands came up in a children spread, and the figure seemed to be selecting a wand from a pile. I initially thought this might mean seven children but thought that in a modern context that was unlikely. So without looking up the meaning I intuited from the picture on the card that the querent was likely to be able to plan her family carefully after overcoming the difficulties that came up elsewhere in the spread (The Chariot).

I have ordered a Thoth from Amazon though so will be taking a step forward into using Tarot using a fixed structure.