Tuesday, November 28, 2000

The primary focus was the Minor Arcana, which we examined from the perspective of the Four Elements and simple numerology. Because the four Elements are so important in tarot and all Earth spirituality, we started with a Four Elements exercise.

Four Elements Exercise

Each student examined each suit Ace through ten, from the perspective of the Element it represents, and wrote a sentence to describe what each card means to them. Then the students shuffled each suit independently, and drew one card, at random from each. The Pentacles card suggested how the student was handling Earth-related things, such as money, health and the material world, and how grounded she was at this time. The Swords card represented how the student was dealing with Air-related things, such as intellect, integrity and anxiety. The Cups card denoted how the student was handling her emotional life, and the Wands, her creativity and passions. The cards were interpreted based on the sentences that each student wrote at the beginning of the exercises.

We discussed the elements of Fire and Air as masculine, and the elements of Earth and Water as feminine.

Because the group agreed that the Court Cards were the most frustrating and confusing aspect of the Minor Arcana, we spent some time discussing ways of interpreting them:

Court Cards as People

• Choose a Court Card to represent a person based only on the fact that a particular card reminds you of a particular person, or just "feels right."
• Choose a Court Card to represent a person based on physical attributes.
• Choose a Court Card to represent a person based on Astrology.
• Choose a Court Card to represent a person based on Elemental attributes.
• Choose a Court Card to represent a person based on numerology: Pages=2, Knights=3, Queens=4, Kings=5. (We liked this one!)

Court Cards as Energies, Encouragements or Events

• Page: Communication, studies, you will receive a message
• Knight: "Get off your Butt"- the need to move forward, Forward motion, travel
• Queen: The need to nurture
• King: The need to take authority and leadership

 

Storytelling

As tarot readers, we are first and foremost storytellers. To help with our understanding of Minor Arcana numerology and to be better storytellers, we did an exercise taken directly from Diane Wilkes' storytelling workshop from the ATA October convention.

At random, we choose cards from piles of Court Cards (Story characters) Aces (how the story begins), Eights (how the story climaxes) Tens (how the story ends) and The Major Arcana (The moral of the story). Our story flowed easily, and allowed the whole group to participate in the process.

For our next exercise, we broke into pairs and read for each other. Because all students are at different levels of tarot memorization and understanding, we remembered that the cards can be read through standard interpretation, through intuition, or through simply "reading into" the picture.

To close our circle, we played a variation of the Prosperity game, from the book "Tarot Games." In this game, we used the cards to explore our own issues with prosperity and abundance, and what we need to do to draw abundance to us.

The focus of our next meeting will be trends, blends, storytelling and working with larger spreads.