Barleywine
I'm sure this has been debated to death, but a new contender has entered the ring (Camelia Elias' "cunning-folk" method) and I wanted to open this topic up again. I'm still searching for an epiphany on reading the TdM pip cards. Because they're non-scenic and have far fewer (or perhaps just "less varied") visual cues than even the Thoth, reading them seems a bit like wandering in the wilderness.
I can't really warm up to the iterative "stacking up the bits-and-pieces" approach (3 lines here, two dots there, 4 folds in the fabric, etc.); it makes even less sense to me than all the esoteric correspondences of the Thoth minor arcana. The "pips-as-Trumps" (or is it "Trumps-as-pips?") idea seems similarly forced to me, although numerical connections make some sense coupled with the nature of each suit. What I'm really after is a fluid and reliable anecdotal way to read them.
Elias' ideas of "agency/embodiment," "gesture/functionality" and "gaze/intention" help some, but mainly for the Trumps and Courts, and also for contacts between those and the pips (to be fair, I'm only two-thirds through her book). Apart from the occult symbolism, the Thoth minors have color, movement, mood, tension and sparsely suggestive imagery going for them. Other than the main artifacts of the suit (Batons, Cups, Swords and Coins) the Tdm has careful arrangements of peripheral features like flowers, leaves and branches along with their relative number, size, orientation and distribution. It is possible to make a story from these decorative features in conjunction with the suit emblems, but the background "landscapes" tend not to be a whole lot different from one another, at least in my practice. I'm also trying to avoid simply transferring all of the "hermetic" devices like astrology, numerology, elemental correspondences and qabalistic associations - as well as any overtly psychological nuances - onto my use of the TdM.
All of this adds up to a rather daunting learning curve. My imagination is probably as "well-oiled" as anyone else's who reads tarot intuitively, so I could just make stuff up, but I don't think that's doing justice to the traditon. It's just kind of hard to pin down what the tradition is trying to tell me. Has anyone made great strides toward an anecdotal style of reading the TdM pips (apart from those rather literalist ones I mentioned)?
I can't really warm up to the iterative "stacking up the bits-and-pieces" approach (3 lines here, two dots there, 4 folds in the fabric, etc.); it makes even less sense to me than all the esoteric correspondences of the Thoth minor arcana. The "pips-as-Trumps" (or is it "Trumps-as-pips?") idea seems similarly forced to me, although numerical connections make some sense coupled with the nature of each suit. What I'm really after is a fluid and reliable anecdotal way to read them.
Elias' ideas of "agency/embodiment," "gesture/functionality" and "gaze/intention" help some, but mainly for the Trumps and Courts, and also for contacts between those and the pips (to be fair, I'm only two-thirds through her book). Apart from the occult symbolism, the Thoth minors have color, movement, mood, tension and sparsely suggestive imagery going for them. Other than the main artifacts of the suit (Batons, Cups, Swords and Coins) the Tdm has careful arrangements of peripheral features like flowers, leaves and branches along with their relative number, size, orientation and distribution. It is possible to make a story from these decorative features in conjunction with the suit emblems, but the background "landscapes" tend not to be a whole lot different from one another, at least in my practice. I'm also trying to avoid simply transferring all of the "hermetic" devices like astrology, numerology, elemental correspondences and qabalistic associations - as well as any overtly psychological nuances - onto my use of the TdM.
All of this adds up to a rather daunting learning curve. My imagination is probably as "well-oiled" as anyone else's who reads tarot intuitively, so I could just make stuff up, but I don't think that's doing justice to the traditon. It's just kind of hard to pin down what the tradition is trying to tell me. Has anyone made great strides toward an anecdotal style of reading the TdM pips (apart from those rather literalist ones I mentioned)?