Maat tarot IDS
Hi all,
I'd like to do an IDS with the Maat tarot. Penthasilia helpfully volunteered to be my Maat study buddy. I am pretty sure that I will enjoy IDS'ing with it more than I did last year, when I was studying a beautiful but much "colder" (emotionally) deck. That IDS fizzled out after a few months.
One of the other reasons I left that IDS is because the prevailing sentiment of that IDS group was that it should be an exclusive as well as intensive study, and it is very claustrophobic for me to focus on one deck only, especially with one that can't be "learned" in a few short weeks and will require months of intensive study.
So, my guidelines for myself are:
1. Study the Maat--using journaling about cards, reading through Cuccia-Watts' books and activity books, and doing exercises such as creative writing, meditations, etc.---until December of this year.
2. For reading, continue with my Deck of the Week program elsewhere on AT, in which I pick one deck a week and use it for reading with. This way, I will have one study deck and one reading deck (which will alternate) each week.
I have somewhat of a dilemma because I'm trying to figure out if I should go through the cycles in the order Cuccia-Watts (the Maat creator) has the deck pre-arranged (journaling about each card as the activity book recommends) or if I should give into my indulgence to shuffle and read with the deck. For those who don't know, she has linked up each Major with several minors within lunar astrological sycles (i.e. the Virgo cycle, the Leo cycle, etc. So the first cycle , which started last week, includes The Emperor and several different Minors).
If I determine that it's important to learn her system in the order of the cards, I might keep it in order to do the Intensive Deck Study with Maat and just use other decks for reading, until I've completed the study of the cycles. I don't know if it is important, though.
I guess one of the things I don't understand yet (and the part of the ebook about the moon cycle doesn't explain) is how the lunar cycles are relevant to a reading. What I mean is: what does the reader gain--from the perspective of enriching readings-- by learning the whole structure and lunar associations she has set forth?
For instance, if I get a card in a reading, I can note that it is part of the Virgo lunar cycle or what have you; would I then just use the Virgo cycle's meanings/associations the same way I would with, say, elemental attributions--by adding another layer of meaning to the reading? (i.e. when a Cups card comes up in pretty much any deck, whether Golden Dawn based or not, I reflect on or, to the querent, talk about what the element of Water means in tarot and how it could relate to the queren't life or question. Then I interpret the card's meaning itself. So the elemental attribution is important, after all, and well worth the time I spent in the beginning of my tarot studies, years ago, to learn).
I'm sure her system is worth learning, anyway. I just don't know how I will use it and apply it to reading once I've learned it.
