“Symbol-Sense Disambiguation”
Those who spend any time googling will have seen the term “disambiguation” in the search results. Its full definition is “word-sense disambiguation” or “text disambiguation,” and it describes “the act of interpreting an author’s intended use of a word that has multiple meanings or spellings.” In a recent essay I touched on the idea that what a tarot reader does when trying to fathom the meaning of a “bad” card in a “good” position of a spread is a form of “symbol-sense disambiguation.” By this I mean that we seek an alternate “spin” on the card’s traditionally negative symbolism that will support the assumption that it might actually be a good — or at least a manageable — influence in the circumstances. Getting there can often take a great deal of “pretzel logic” and the use of shrewd “weasel words.”
It also crops up when the number of cards in a spread is inadequate to satisfy the complexity of the situation, thus requiring too much intuitive guesswork and symbol-juggling to fill any interpretive gaps between cards. We’re pursuing an informed judgment but too often it turns into what I call a “SWAG” (scientific wild-ass guess) debacle. There may simply be insufficient information there to formulate a rational conclusion, necessitating a hefty helping of inspired extemporizing (aka “fancy footwork”).
I’m not convinced that disambiguation is achievable in every such instance. When it isn’t many of us will simply “wing it,” make a stab at interpretation and say “If it feels right, it must be right” (the intuitive tarot reader’s mantra). But in a broader sense, I think it’s what we as readers do as a matter of course: try to interpret a deck creator’s intended use of a symbol that has multiple meanings; it just becomes more pronounced in the above situations. My own style when dealing with symbolism is to pay very little attention to the artist’s personal vision (although I may still appreciate it as art) and, in the interest of presenting a consistent outlook that is traditionally, personally and instinctively coherent, just stay with what I’ve learned over fifty years of practice. Too many artists try to put a unique twist on the images and lose sight of the core meaning that has been in use for at least a century. What they wind up with might technically be “tarot” in structure but it reads more like an oracle deck. Although I’ve decried such decks as “TINOs” (“Tarot in Name Only”), it’s not always a bad thing; I have a couple of nominal “tarot” decks that read beautifully in a non-traditional way. If anything, less disambiguation is needed because the images don’t run head-on into what they’re “supposed to mean.” But that’s beside the point.
A good example of creative overkill is the superfluous tinkering that occurs with the alignment of suits and elements; in Europe the pre-Golden-Dawn era had the playing-card suits of Clubs, Hearts, Spades and Diamonds (although there were regional differences). Clubs were matched with Batons (sometimes called Staves and ultimately Wands in more esoteric quarters); Hearts turned into Cups and stayed that way; Spades morphed into their final form as Swords; and Diamonds were swapped out for Coins, which finally became Pentacles in the hands of British occultists. The Golden Dawn then assigned the four classical elements to these seminal arrays (although Eliphas Levi and other Continental occultists may have weighed in on it somewhat earlier): Fire to Wands; Water to Cups; Air to Swords; and Earth to Pentacles. (Etteilla drew parallels between his cards and various astrological symbols, but I’ve seen no evidence that he extrapolated elemental attributes from them.)
There seems to be no end to the gratuitous wrangling over this paradigm. Joseph Maxwell indulged in revisionism as far back as 1938 in his Tarot de Marseille book, The Tarot, and there have been numerous incursions since. My own position has been to ignore these permutations as entirely unnecessary (I only occasionally read the cards down to the level of esoteric correspondences anyway) and just fly with the original associations regardless of the deck I’m using. These subsequent variations on a theme only create the need for “symbol-sense-disambiguation” where none existed before, and I think to myself “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on September 30, 2022.
