Footprints in the Sand
I’ve been pondering just how ephemeral online content can be. Unless the material we discover through our internet searches is downloaded and saved for future use, we may never be able to find it again (particularly if the source goes down). I was brought to this conclusion by noticing that someone in Japan has been thoroughly mining my Tarot de Marseille “pip” material. Maybe I’m flattering myself, but I have no idea what they’re doing with it — whether compiling it for private study or planning to translate it and publish it under their own name — so I thought I had better organize all of it into a single document to both stake my claim to it and affirm the copyright that was already established by its original electronic publication.
Consequently, I will be backing away from daily posting of new essays for a bit in order to spend some time each day assembling the material into what I will probably call A Short, Simple Study of the Tarot de Marseille “Pip” and Court Cards. “Simple” because, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not nearly as fastidious (or “anal” if I must use the word) in my approach to interpretation of the patterns of suit emblems and “arabesques” (decorative embellishments) on each card as those writers who have tried to squeeze symbolic meaning out of every last detail. As far as “short,” we shall see. I’ve been encouraged a couple of times by tarot author Lee Bursten to “write that TdM book,” so this may just be the warm-up to it. I expect it to take me around a week, mostly in tailoring what I’ve already written into “long form.”
This isn’t to say that you won’t find anything new here until I finish the compilation, just that it will only pop up when something especially interesting motivates me (usually ideas encountered in my reading or in the online pages I frequent). I have almost 1,400 previous posts in my WordPress blog now, so if you haven’t explored them yet take some time to do that.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on April 12, 2022.
