What cards do you always associate with a "set" meaning, no matter what?

[caridwen]

I think that unless I have wild intuitive leaps, I use my learned meaning for the cards. That may change for good or bad depending on surrounding cards.

However I have a bit of a strange meaning for the RWS 10 Pentacles. I always see it as one person looking on at two people. That one person is usually older than the other two and observing them moving through a gateway as though transiting to a different level. In my readings it seems to come up as that quite a lot.

I do not read cards generically but according to the deck so I read the Thoth differently to the RWS for example.

 

[vee]

I feel like each card has a spectrum of meaning and I interpret where on the spectrum it lies in that particular reading by the card art, intuition, placement, and surrounding cards.

So yes, each card doesn't mean EVERYTHING, but it can mean a whole heck of a lot of different things depending on the reading!

Having said that, I think that I often use "rebellious" meanings with the Devil. The DruidCraft was my first serious studying deck and in it, the Devil card, relabeled "Cernunnos" says something tooootally different to me than it normally does in other decks. Since the Devil is supposed to be something that distances us from god and pulls us to the material word, from a Druid/Pagan perspective, where the material world IS divinity, it takes on different connotations! (Not that Cernunnos is like a 100% "good" card in that deck, but it does add a different layer of meaning) I often find myself inserting that approach in decks where the art doesn't necessarily indicate it.