“Low-Calorie” Tarot
AUTHOR’S NOTE: It is a well-established premise that the Minor Arcana of the tarot describe routine or mundane factors affecting the life of a querent, the court cards correspond to social matters (or in some cases personal attitudes and behaviors), and the Major Arcana reflect trans-personal, universal or spiritual “big-picture” implications.
For a long time now I have created spreads that adopt a multi-tiered design: a chain of “pip” cards for a straightforward perspective on simple aspects of the situation; a second chain of court cards for socio-psychological observations; and a third chain of trump cards for broader considerations. I shuffle each segment of the deck separately and deal the cards into their respective rows or columns. Then I read the answer at three levels, taking my cue from the sitter as to which deserves the most thorough examination.
But an approach to the “skinny” reading that I like even better is to split out the forty minor cards from the pack and set the rest aside in order to sharpen the focus on day-to-day affairs of an unexceptional nature. In this way, if it is known with certainty that there will be few extra-personal, psychological or overarching global ramifications with which to contend, the reading will present no random, cross-cutting insights that would make little sense to the querent under the circumstances (which also coincidentally makes my job easier). Obviously, it is crucial to ask the question in as practical and literal a way as possible, avoiding open-ended invitations to wax philosophical (although it is fair to say that such profundity can still be gleaned from the minor cards with a bit of reflection).
It’s worth mentioning here that the Minor Arcana that “do it” for me most satisfactorily from a minimalist perspective are the “glorified — and glorious — pip cards” of the Thoth deck due to their evocative color palette, the “synthetic projective geometry” of their graphic design, and the semi-scenic suggestiveness of their imagery, all of which ignite the inspiration, imagination and ingenuity (and perhaps even the “intuition”) in furthering their interpretation. These are followed closely by the “natural” (that is, non-scenic) pip cards of the Tarot de Marseille, which demand a sturdy intellectual grasp of symbolic subtleties since they “whisper more than shout.” My least favorite “small” cards are those of the Waite-Smith deck and its myriad clones since they presume to inform me through their “canned narrative vignettes” what I should be thinking about the subject of a reading (and often get it wrong). But — short of playing-card divination — the non-tarot Lenormand oracle is still the champion of thoroughly pragmatic cartomancy, and the 36-card Grand Tableau is the “Swiss-Army-knife” of life-reading spreads since any conceivable topic can be covered in a single throw (although, as Mary Greer once told me, it isn’t necessary to explore all of them every time).
I’ve received some push-back from the online tarot community about this idea, although I’ve encountered a handful of people who occasionally work with just the Minor Arcana. There are readers (especially Europeans) who read with only the 22 trump cards, extracting the necessary mundane details from their interaction. I’ve experimented with this, but there can be a wide gulf between archetype and reality that must be bridged with a good deal of intuitive guesswork. I know of nobody who works solely with the court cards, but I can see how that might be useful if what we’re after is a multi-faceted psychological profile of someone’s state of mind and their mode of relating to others (this would require a carefully-framed spread with well-defined position meanings).
So far I’ve applied this concept most effectively to my Lunar Month Look-ahead reading that parses the 28-day monthly lunation cycle into astrologer Dane Rudhyar’s eight, roughly three-and-a-half-day, sub-phases beginning on the New Moon. In astrology, the fast-moving Moon by its very nature relates to routine or habitual patterns of behavior that reoccur in a cyclical way, and the Minor Arcana align quite well with that assumption. To quote my previous essay on the subject, “This allows the scope of lunar phase changes to be scaled to the ordinary range of mundane events.”
Here is a link to refresh that initiative for your information.
https://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/rethinking-the-monthly-lunar-look-ahead/
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on June 12, 2023.
