Sorry; I didn't mean to post this and leave it dangling. I was so excited about it I wanted to share with everybody right away (even though it was an insane hour of night) and then I spent yesterday running 5Ks, nearly getting sunstroke and boiling my radiator dry on the 401 highway...
Anyway, I was shown it as A. and I were going through the cards again (only maybe my third or fourth time through after getting them). He had the deck, and was leafing through them, and I was looking at the cards he handed to me. He got to Die Herrscherin, The Empress, and said, "Of course, it makes more sense this way up," and flipped it over.
The Vagina Dentata, or perhaps simply the striated vaginal channel, becomes very clear, and the seated figure is now the clitoris, between spread thighs. Then, looking at it again, the shape is a diagram of the womb, with the two dropletted leaves at the top the ovaries and the drops releasing eggs. The landscape surrounding it shifts, with the shapes on what is now the right becoming very clearly bare bones; on the right, it is fields vanishing to trees, rather than the deep forest.
Let's see. The next that is particularly striking:
Rad des Lebens, The Wheel of Fortune.
On first look, this is one of the most beautiful Wheels I've seen. The rainbow circle, with the serene face at the top embracing it, and the beautiful female figure curling gracefully round the right, make it brilliant and expressive. Turned, it is altogether a darker card. The screaming face now on the right is very clear. On the top left, a plummeting figure emerges from the blue waves. The serenity of the face now at the bottom is lost in the brightness, which now suggests inferno rather than radiance. And while, upright, the motion of the card seems to me very much to be spiral, turning counter-clockwise (emphasised by the female figure), reversed it is turning both ways. The main motion is still counter-clockwise, into the now-inferno, but here and there bright figures fight the mainstream (the resting female figure is now one of them) and head clockwise with their arms outstretched. Down near the chin of the reversed face now at the bottom, I also now see the head of an animal... like a dog, or a wolf.