Minors, pips, elements, social order

[Splungeman]

So...depending on what source you look at, the suit symbols represent social order: Batons for the laborers...Coins for the merchants...Swords for the noble, elite ruling class...Cups for the spiritual types.

OR the suits represent elements: Fire for wands, Water for cups, Earth for pentacles, Air for swords......OR is it earth for Wands, Fire for swords, Water for coins, Air for cups? I've read two different books with varying ideas on these elemental associations. The most popular seems to be the first group of associations. Though I see no reason why the second shouldn't be taken as seriously.

So...does anyone here have their own way of making sense of all this? Do you choose the on you like best? Do you toss out the elemental associations? The social order associations? Do you make your own associations? DO the pip symbols matter less to you than the scene depicted on the card if it had characters? My instinct is to go back to the items themselves...as they were originally used when they were placed on the first decks of playing cards. Batons, Swords, Coins, Cups.

Here is my way of using the pips:

Batons: Used to motivate and train horses. Basically it is that which causes action, or movement. Batons/wands/staffs to me, the symbol of action and movement.

Swords: Used for battle and conquest. That which conquers, destroys, liberates, cuts. The sword is a symbol of power, of victory. They are cold metal with no emotion. The idea of the sword as the cutting edge of logic, slicing away preconceptions, etc is a later idea to me than the original meaning, which was simply the instrument of warfare...though I do use that idea as well.

Coins: Commerce, exchange, business. This one seems to have the most stable meaning no matter what book you look at. Money provides shelter, water, food....Basic survival necessities in a civilized world. If you've got coins, you've got earthly needs taken care of. Coins are possessions and resources.

Cups: Cups contain drink. Drink sustains us (if water) and intoxicates us (if wine). To this day, the polite thing to offer a guest in your house is a drink. Drink brings people together. To this day, if you are interested in getting to know someone better you invite them out to get a cup of coffee. We attach importance to "having a drink with someone" regardless of what the drink is. I can see how the cup quickly came to be associated with love and therefore became the suit of hearts.

SO...let us discuss pips and minors. What do you do? How do you see the pips? Why do you choose to see them that way?

 

[ethan_greer]

Wands: Fire. Energy. Action. Impulse. Passion. Drive. Forcefulness. Charisma. Creativity.

Cups: Water. Emotions. Feelings. Sensitivity. Intuition. Relationships. The arts. Flexibility. Passivity.

Swords: Air. Thought. Intellect. Analysis. Reason. Logic. Conflict. Anger. Willpower.

Coins: Earth. Practicality. Skills. Reliability. Hard work. Material and financial matters. Conscientiousness. Routine. Health.

I look at them this way because it's the first way I learned, and I haven't found a system that I like better.

 

[All Is One]

I probably babble about this deck enough to irritate everyone, but they'll survive ;~)

In the Merlin tarot:

Coins = beasts/earth
Cups = fish/water
Swords = birds/air
Wands = serpents/fire

Stewart also gives North South East West to each suit and other correspondences. I don't know all of them. I stick closely to the elemental associations as a starting point. Some people have related that they use other elemental associations and that seems to work fine too. I am unable to rearrange my original order. But any system that works for anyone is something I would hesitate to challenge.

The social order has been in the back of my mind for years but I don't really use it. I read somewhere long ago that wands were spiritual and related to the clergy, swords were intellectual and related to the warrior and to the occultists, cups were emotional and related to ummm...can't remember...artists? Maybe? And coins were earthy and mundane and related to the merchant class or to the laborer. In other words, coins were dealing with the real world on a physical level. I do use that last one.

Good questions!!

 

[Splungeman]

I wonder who first decided that wands=fire, swords=air, coins=earth, cups=water. The argument could be made for swords being earth OR fire. Swords are made of metal that is mined from the earth. Swords are forged...hence, fire. Heck...any one of the suit symbols could be earth, as they are all made or spring from the earth itself.

I guess just like the meanings of all the cards themselves, deciding what the symbols mean for YOU is best. I personally don't jive with the old elemental associations. Other than cups=water, the others don't immediately strike me as obvious correlations to the classical elements. Swords=air? One has to explain their reasoning for that after making that association. It is not, to me anyway, an obvious relationship.

I don't think that when these symbols were first placed on playing cards they were being associated with elements. They were simply common, important items to those who made the cards. This does not devalue their significance to me in any way, however. I think that the elemental stuff was interpreted as such by the mystics and occultists later. This does not, of course, mean that the association with elements is WRONG. Just like anything else in divination practices, we do what works for us.

Has anyone else jettisoned the classical elemental associations with the pips or am I in the minority?

 

[berrieh]

I've been heavily influenced by a lot of different systems. Marseilles taught me the implements/symbols, Thoth taught me the elements, RWS taught me meanings to incorporate, and Cabala associations affected my views a great deal. So, I think, at this point, I have my own little way. Some of it is hard to describe, because I'm not entirely sure it's all linear in my head. But here's a snapshot:

Wands
I view them as fire and spirit, but I also see the 'implement' (the wand, hazel, or baton itself) as being a part of this as well.

Spirit, the highest level of being, is what drives us, as the baton drives the horse, as the human spirit drives enterprise...so too is the spirit what creates all action in life. So, wands are active because fire spreads, spirit creates, and batons drive.

By 'spirit,' I mostly mean 'essential energy.' I think that's important to define, because it's not a dreamy thing. I believe that if you change the spirit or essence of a person or situation, you get a faster change than changing the earthly things (Coins) and yet you still get manifestation.

I think of Wands (Fire/Spirit) and Coins (Earth/Manifestation) as the only suits that describe things actually happening (not why or how they happen - but *what* happens).

Cups
I view them as water and emotions, but again, I also see the cup. Cups were meant for holding things, and, occasionally, for offering or sharing with others. Cups want to share! Chalices want to be held, filled, used.

Water seeks to fill space, it changes its form to suit the vessel, and emotion craves a focus, a source to return to, somewhere to renew, as well. So, the cup suits water/emotion very nicely, they all blend together quite well.

Emotions are what drive us to seek connections, so it is no wonder this is the suit for human connection (or disconnection, as the case may be).

I think of Swords and Cups as suits that describe the why and how of things... They aren't events or concrete answers in themselves, but rather the will behind it, either emotional (Cups) or mental (Swords).

In this way, Cups/Water likes to fall, towards Coins/Earth, as emotion wants to manifest itself in the here and now of earthly Manifestation. Water seeks land, and water nurtures land. Water was essential to living, when we lived with the land, and the suit of water, Cups, is essential to the suit of coins, Manifestation on the earthly plain. We act from our emotions and impulses in human connection/disconnection to achieve things on the earthly plain.

Cups and Wands sometimes clash elementally, as fire and water weaken each other, because emotions don't work as well with spirit. Feelings capture us, they are intoxicating, but they don't have the strength of will that thoughts (Swords) have, and they are too heavy to rise. They're filled with earthly desires, based on impulse, and sometimes they're murky.

They haven't the lightness or sharpness needed to penetrate the true essence (Fire) of a person/situation. So, they tend to be neutralized or, worse yet, confuse the whole situation and leave everything unfinished. Changing something in the spiritual realm requires clarity, which emotions often cloud.

Swords

I view them as air and thought (or, rather, the word is probably "will"), but then I also see the sword, the sharp tool meant for conquering, fighting, defending, and winning, an instrument for battle. Swords were meant to divide, define boundaries ("this is my land"), and achieve victory. They are merciless, as is will and thought.

Will, or thought, seeks purpose and either seeks or resists change. It defends or it fights to conquer. It seeks to define things, as the suit of Air often does, quite often to painful circumstances. Sharing, and compromising, like the suit of Cups is much more pleasant to many on the earthly realm, than the stubborn definition of Swords.

Yet, air (Swords) seeks fire (Wands) in this way, because will is the most powerful way to change things on the essential/spiritual realm. There must be no compromise, but rather a world of absolutes and some ruthlessness.

Air rises quickly, towards Spirit. Spirit moves faster than earth, so Wands and Swords are the two "faster" suits, while Cups and Coins are the slower suits. Swords are motivation and movement that feed the spiritual realm. (In this way, I personally believe most spell energy is Swords energy, achieving Wands energy. Change your mind, change your being...that changes your life.) So, strong and clear Swords energy 'feeds' the suit of Wands.

Coins

I view them as earth, or rather earthly manifestation, but I also see the symbol of the coin -- which we exchange for all earthly things, a symbol of work completed, a symbol of where we stand in this life, like it or not.

We want to gather coins and use them, they seek hands, exchange for things, and they represent an idea (the value of money) we've made concrete, even though its essence isn't really. So, they symbolize earth, and the 'real' world as we see it, things that are 'proven' and have manifested in this realm.

This is fed by our emotions (water/Cups), which accept what they see on the surface, and drive us to exchange with others and make real our lives. Our emotions, dreams, and human connections nurture our day-to-day life and make us crave things we can hold onto, like Coins.

I don't just use them for finances; I use them for anything that has manifested and can be proven, pointed to, and agreed on. Marriage, for example, which has a certificate and everything. Relationships are Cups, but marriage is Coins.

Earth is weakened by air, because air seeks to conquer and divide. Air wants to slice things up and make earth irrelevant. It wants to change the idea to suit itself, as it does with fire/spirit, but this doesn't work so well with mundane/manifested things, which want a consensus. Wands and Swords are more individualistic, whereas Cups and Coins are more communal.

Air also wants to change things quickly, so it's often incompatible with earth, which resists swift change. I find Coins and Cups move more slowly than Wands and Swords, as things take more time to change in the mundane. Yet these changes are easier to predict, effect, and achieve...and often more long lasting.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, and it's really just the tip of the iceberg... but there you go.

Interesting to see everyone's replies!

 

[frelkins]

I wonder who first decided that wands=fire, swords=air, coins=earth, cups=water.

Etteilla, i believe, the drunken wigmaker.

 

[Venus Moon]

The correlation of coins/pentacles to earth is pretty obvious IMO, besides the water and cups.

I've always used what I first learned all the years:

Wands/Fire/Noon/South/Summer, Cups/Water/Twilight/West/Autumn, Swords/Air/Morning/East/Spring and Pentacles/Earth/Midnight/North/Winter.

Those are very important to me as besides reading the cards for divination and guidance, they are a spiritual, mystical and occult tool and mentor as well. I suppose if you just use it for dvination or fortune-telling you could switch the associations around whenever you wanted. But each of the associations listed above that I use deepy affects each suit and each card in the suit in profound ways, at least for me.

 

[The crowned one]

Etteilla, i believe, the drunken wigmaker.

Etteilla was just copying Court De Gebelin.

Levi through his reserch read a mauscript by Henery Cornelius Agrippa that stated each of the four letters of the tetragrammaton was assigned to one of the four elements in Pythagorisum :

J-fire
H water
V-air
H earth

He then in his book " Doctrine of transcendental Magic" stated that all of the suites in tarot also related to a letter of the tetragrammaton:

J-fire/bantons
H water/cups
V-air/swords
H earth/coins

Going back further they may be based on a social system or caste system like in ancient Persia... or how about the four cardinal virtues as written about by Gertrude Moakley?

 

[The crowned one]

SO...let us discuss pips and minors. What do you do? How do you see the pips? Why do you choose to see them that way?

I guess we all build off of Etteilla to some degree as most if not all cartomantic interpretations seem to start here for the pips. From there I built off of Waite and Case mostly then added my own twists mostly through numerology and the history of numbers. I do certainly modify any traditional meaning to suite how I feel about the card but my foundation still starts with the above.

 

[Kircher Tree]

The "wigmaker" attribution against Etteilla came from Levi, but I believe later opinion has it that Etteilla was the successful owner of several businesses, and a wig factory may have been one of them. I am not sure where they get drunk tho. (I mean the idea that he was drunk, where it came from.)

In my Etteilla book, he does not say anything about suit attributions, but I only have the first volume. I think that there are some variants on the W=F, C=W, S=A, P=E sequence in the French tradition. One is in the Tarot de Marseille book by Maxwell, which I can't seem to find right now.

Also, there is a peculiar sequence in "The General Book of the Tarot, by A. E. Thierens, [1930]"

Thierens has Wand = Air, Cups = Water, Sword = Earth! and Pentacle = Fire!


Strangely, this book has a preface by Waite, but he is critical of Waite's attributions in the text of the book. Then he goes and follows Waite's card meanings almost identically, despite the different attributions. Anyway, the book is online at:


http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/gbt/gbt04.htm

Quotes:
>>WANDS.--As a matter of fact, curiously enough, all authors agree in naming wands or clubs in the first place. ...taken as a whole, wands stand for the Message of the Macrocosm or Ideation, as Air transfers the message from the Ether.


PENTACLES.--Generally cups are named in the second place but are at the same time identified with hearts. We agree that the hearts come in the second place of the hierarchy of the Tarot suits, but do not see, that they should be 'cups.' ...So pentacles or golden coins are the hearts in playing-cards and correspond to the element Fire.


CUPS.--The soul is ruled by the Moon and the element Water, as is well known in astrology. It is in the cosmic principle of Soul, or in other words: in the Cosmic Soul, that the truth of the philosophic statement, Panta Rei (everything in the world is flowing), is revealed. And there is no better symbol for the specific nature of the soul in concreto than that of a cup or chalice, which contains the Liquor of Life. The cup is really suggestive enough with regard to the element Water.


SWORDS.--Not much choice is left with regard to the fourth suit or colour. Perhaps a sword looks more like a magic instrument than a spade, but both are made of iron, which 'cleaves' the Earth or 'the body of Earth.'
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