And building on that, Sapienza.... Anyone who's reading a Waite-Smith or WS-derived deck and thinks they AREN'T influenced by the creator's intention is playing a weird form of denial Olympics.
Looking at artwork that is comprised of symbols involves readign those symbols, and thereby the artists' intentions, howveer indirectly. Intuition is not looking at a picture and making sense of it. Even if a reader's "personal" meanings are derived, they are derived through review of someone else's symbols. And since the Waite-Smith and all its clones are directly sourced from the minds behind the Pictorial Key and Liber T (however obliquely), anyone using those decks is using those texts. Ignoring that is a choice, but an odd one... and hard to defend intelligently in my opinion.
The odd trend of 80s and 90s so-called "personal" meanings is a trend that reflected the self-help zeitgeist of those decades: quick metaphysical fixes and satori in two hours! It often seems to me more of a workaround for people who have an aversion to primary sources. No one HAS to read Waite's writing or Crowley's or Mathers to read decks that draw on their work, but that doesn't mean those Tarot readers aren't studying the Golden Dawn when they use decks based on the Golden Dawn's Liber T. Studying and meditating and obessively cataloguing the contents of those decks is a way of tracing the underlying system... Put another way: you CAN study Liber T decks and learn a lot about the Liber T indirectly, but that
is what's happening when you study the images. As I'll point out until the clouds turn into bricks and fall form the sky, calling that process "intuitive reading" is a misuse both of the words "intuition" and "reading."
That isn't to say that people don't find personal meanings. Hell, the Golden Dawn
insisted that their members create and color their own decks for exactly that raeson... to build a deck
in their minds that could never be damaged or destroyed. I think that's the center of any esoteric discipline. Every reader finds their own "deck" their own "meanings" their own "voice." Each of us must find our own path of approach. And the zeitgeist has shifted some from the "make-it-up," "whatever you feel like" Tarot-in-20-seconds approach of the 1980s.
Again, this is only my own opinion (
nb I HATE typing that redundant qualification, but I know if I don't, people will get indignant) . No one has to study anything any particular way. But in the interest of declaring terms for clarity, I'll say it flat out:
Studying a Golden Dawn deck is equivalent to studying the Golden Dawn's view of the world, of divination, of magick. They were a magickal order. They reinvented Tarot as an explicitly and implicitly magickal object. Avoiding the sources of that reinvention and doing it at N degrees of remove seems (
to me! to me!) a little like learning the features of a sculpted face under layered veils... Possible, but perverse.
As Sapienza said, I think adding to your understanding by considering other author's, other reader's, understandings of Tarot has been completely essential to my own path. We stand on shoulders of those who have come before. That is why we aren't squatting in the mud banging rocks together to cook dinner.