AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve been reading tarot cards for over 50 years, and have been involved with the Lenormand cards for the past 15 years; playing cards, geomancy and horary astrology for 12+ years; and Norse runes starting just this week. While working with the runes and cards in a single spread, I finally realized that tarot is far more anecdotal than literal when compared to any of the others. It can tell charming stories but it doesn’t always get at the “hard, cold” facts (and more mystical or psycho-spiritual readers – don’t look at me – are OK with that).
This reliance on fluid metaphorical approximation lends itself nicely to narrative storytelling but doesn’t offer much from the standpoint of pragmatic, action-and-event-oriented analysis. As I see it, tarot is long on “color” and short on explicit detail, which the reader has to gin up from a combination of visual free-association and internalized knowledge. Contrast that with Lenormand prediction, where every figure on the cards carries a specific meaning in the common lore that doesn’t respond well to imaginative improvisation of the psychological or spiritual kind; for example, the Rider signifies the arrival of something: news, deliveries or visitors (perhaps a young man) and there is little wiggle-room beyond that established concept despite attempts by “tarot transplants” to remake it with intuition.
The Thoth tarot sports evocative Minor Arcana (aka “pip” cards that blend graphic design, color scheme and on-board title in almost perfect harmony), and “proto-psychological” (i.e. pre-Jungian) definitions for the court cards, and it comes closest to my ideal for vivid impressionism supported by intelligent metaphysics. I’m very seldom at a loss for words when using it in my professional work, and it (or one of its “clones”) is my go-to deck for self-reading.
The Tarot de Marseille with its non-scenic pips is my second choice because it demands more from the reader than any of the other decks except playing cards. There is almost no historical guidance for interpretation going back beyond Etteilla in the late 18th Century to assist the diviner in making practical sense of its abstract graphic images. In concert with standard suit-and-number theory, this places the reader in the position of having to “read into” the patterns to make them speak in more than cryptic ways. This has been tackled by a number of modern authors, and I’ve built on their approach to my own satisfaction without trying to emulate them by parsing every last design detail into some kind of meaning. I published a short e-book on my system a while ago, and you can find those essays scattered across nine years of TdM blog content here.
For the novice reader, the Waite-Smith (aka RWS) deck with its “canned narrative vignettes” in the numbered “small” cards is the customary place to start, but the danger is that its mundane folkloric dimension is all the student will ever try to learn, thus allowing the wealth of symbolic insight from its Golden Dawn roots to go by the boards. Waite didn’t help matters by purposely concealing much of his esoteric wisdom, which never made it into Smith’s pictures due to his vow of secrecy.
A vast network of speculation has grown up around the deck that tries to get inside Smith’s head, especially where her prosaic scenes do not align closely with Waite’s descriptive text. In those instances, I find that I can’t rely on what I think I see in Smith’s private vision, so I just import Thoth and Golden Dawn definitions into my readings and treat the RWS pictures as a secondary source of insight. (There are occasions when they are indispensable, but most of the time they aren’t despite Stuart Kaplan’s efforts to elevate Smith’s role over Waite’s.) I would prefer to leave the deck home when I do face-to-face public readings, but it’s what most clients expect to see so I grudgingly overlook its weaknesses.
As I apply the tarot cards in combination with other methods of prediction (see my recent post on runes, cards and dice), I’ve discovered that they aren’t so much fundamental to the subject of the reading as they are contributory to an anecdotal understanding of its less concrete aspects. I’ve most often found the true “foundation of the matter” when using techniques that lie closer to the heart of older, fact-based forms of augury. Then I can expand into broader deliberations inspired by the tarot images without losing sight of the essential features derived from more literal analysis. But if that’s what I’m after above all else, I can just turn to Lenormand and skip the tarot, losing nothing in the trade-off.
