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Saturday, January 18, 2020

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.


2 comments:

  1. What about the Five of Wands? Is that not a family outing to the garden centre having devolved into fighting because three of them can't decide what type of tree to get for that shady corner, while the other two just want to go to the cafe?

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  2. Ah ha, despite your protestation you definitely can read tarot. Other traditional interpretation of the 5 of wands of course include struggling with a deckchair and putting together Ikea furniture...

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