RE: Tarot Basics - The Major Arcana Part 1

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Tarot Basics - The Major Arcana Part 1

in tarot •  7 years ago 

In my opinion, if you can read with a deck, then that is a good deck for you. I personally dislike some of the modern decks (e.g. the "Penny Dreadful Deck") with little or no form of symbols (colour, pictorial or setting) on them as I see no depth to any reading that can be obtained from them, you rely on the card definition alone with a little intuition. Reading is complex to understand in depth, there are a lot of subconscious keys when you get into the depths of the process. Things like the impact of a given symbol over the card as a whole or how two cards affect one another in a reading. I'm writing a second book to discuss this sort of thing and add depth to my introductory work.

Nice post there @axios very much about the Death (XIII) card in the Major Arcana.

Note: I count numerology in with the definition.

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Good point about the impact of symbols interacting in any spread. I'm learning - and it's like the more I learn, the less I 'know' - so many layers to a good tarot reading. It's like learning a language and context is everything. A single card takes on a whole different meaning depending on the cards surrounding it.

I think there's also a personal element to interpretation - what the symbol means to both the querent and the reader. The more I talk to long time readers, I find they've created their own methods.

I guess I'd compare it to being a doctor for 30 years vs. a student fresh out of med school. After years of experience, a doctor may be able to diagnose a rare disease almost instantly from one or two symptoms he's seen in other patients over the years, while the new doc wouldn't have that ability/intuition and resorts to the book so to speak.

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

Definitely right about the personal element @blunderbabe, this is some thing that I discuss in my book. Developing an understanding of how your intuition plays with the symbols, selecting the important etc., and learning the High Priestess' lesson is key to developing a more complete understanding of Tarot.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing that insight. Any recommendations for decks I could grab from amazon or one that's more widely available?

And yes! Death card for sure haha

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

I personally like Rider-Waite based decks, the most recent deck that I bought was the Steampunk Tarot by Barbara Moore & Ally Fell. I like the artwork and accessibility and the book that come with it, but the cards are a wee bit flimsy for my liking. Really the best thing that you can do to select a deck is to troll through google images, searching on themes that catch you imagination, and then check out any that strike you on the Aeclectic Tarot Tarot site.

Take a look at this post I wrote on selecting a tarot deck: Selecting a Tarot Deck
it may be of help, or I'm on Steemit Chat if you want to talk on the subject.