The Family in the Tarot

It has literally just struck me that there are very few families depicted in the RWS tarot, surprisingly few since the family continues to be the setting in which most people live. The family continues to be the setting for most abuse and violence (you cynic, Hound), since some families are nuclear in the sense of fission.
I am only able to identify two cards which depict actual families  and they are in the top row of the picture. My own opinion is that both of these families are dysfunctional - the 10 of Pentacles one because nobody is listening to each other, and the 10 of Cups one because it is the sort of ideal which doesn't happen in real life. The latter one reminds me of some family friends of ours where the mother didn't bother to tell her four daughters that she had had breast cancer when they were small, until the eldest daughter found a breast lump and died very shortly afterwards.
The cards in the lower row depict family events to my eyes  and it is interesting how they are mostly negative events. I have put the Lovers there because I think of it as the interfering mother in law card, the way it is depicted in the Marseille deck. You will see that I have not included the six of Cups because, despite what anyone says, I still think that card refers to child abuse.
Luckily these days there is a tendency away from traditional family towards a more 'tribe' - based way of living. Perhaps Pam depicted this coming change in the minors of her deck - I wouldn't quite say foretold, but I would say that she perhaps unintentionally depicted the future. I say in the minors, because Waite dictated the majors, and they were in turn dictated in large part by the existing majors. The court cards also in my opinion don't have the intention of showing a family - in my opinion the point is to show the mediaeval court.
I do have a theory as to why there is so little depiction of family in the tarot - which is that in the game which was the origin of the deck the point was about scoring tricks so that the relationships shown are more about actions or even civil contracts, rather than about the religiously-motivated sacramental relationships. But of course I wouldn't go to the stake for this opinion.
I suspect that Pam would have been working within the Golden Dawn correspondences (including initiatory] for the tarot, which are about relationship with the universe rather than earthly commerce or love.
Have a soundtrack... Predictable I know.

Graveyards Again

Two posts in one day and both about graveyards!
I was delighted at Warstone Lane to see that the catacombs, which have been tending towards collapse for ages, are in the process of repair. The rest of the graveyard is also being tidied up. I am of course less happy to see that a number of the gravestones have obviously failed the 'shove test' and have been laid down flat to stop them killing people, since this reduces the likelihood that I will be killed by a falling gravestone.
I have also discovered a new titbit of information about the graveyard which was dug up to build the ICC. I knew of course that it was huge and completely undocumented. I did not know that bones from the graveyard had a tendency to surface in the playground of the school next to the Catholic church there! This presents a wonderful image of a boy going in from playtime saying, 'Miss, look what I've found'...

Have a Witchy New Year

Of course I am celebrating the new year with the womanly arts of witchcraft. I did some clothes repairs and sauntered over to the Jewellery Quarter to sacrifice some black sesame seeds in Warstone Lane cemetery. Sadly the needs of witches are rarely considered in town planning and the convenient Park Street cemetery is boarded up for HS2. On the other hand, how I laughed when I found the brand of black sesame seeds in the Chinese supermarket was Honor.
I have enjoyed baby sitting a cat but he is going back to his normal human early because the human is not helping me in a particular problem so I am not feeling the need to do him any favours and find myself out of pocket on cat litter!
As for what the problem is, well of course despite being one of the more obvious homosexual men you could wish to meet I am a c*nt magnet so am in the early stages of a grievance already in my new workplace and of course am finding allies!