So now that I've had about two weeks to thrust myself back into a regular (i.e. crazy) schedule involving classes, multiple jobs, and no social life outside of the sporadic drink with the sporadic stranger (a gal could get used to being single) I figured, "Hey, it's about time to start waxing philosophical about art."

I looked back over some previous journals, and despite not making any headway at all whatsoever on designing a new tarot deck, I did buy a new deck called "Legacy of the Divine Tarot" by Ciro Marchetti (he did the Gilded Tarot, if anyone recognizes that name.) The first two decks he did a long long time ago smack of a personal style but seem to lack a lot of cohesion, but this latest and greatest really blew me away when I first saw it (and used it).

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We've gotten into a lot of abstracts already this quarter; what makes a mind see things in images it can't even begin to comprehend with words (left brain=analytical and language, right brain= artistic, abstract, and subjective.) How someone can visualize something happening in their life only to have it actually happen years down the road (RAS and creative visualization.) I got into this discussion with someone over what makes Tarot cards "work" and if the images are so non-specific and generic that, put in context, could apply to anything, or if there was some unseen or unknown force acting on the decks in order to present the most accurate images in regards to the question.

Or do our minds essentially know these answers already, but can't put them into words yet for us to consciously understand them? So our fingers flip through cards, and the images arrive seemingly by chance when we turn them over in the pre-determined spread, and we go off of gut and instinctual feeling when these images strike us; they lay out a story that patterns the choices we've made and the choices that are coming upon us, and half the time we're just fumbling through them, trying to understand with words what is being told to us through images.

Marchetti's deck, when I read with it, presented images that to me were so multi-layered and indepth that I'm still trying to decipher the incredible reading I got out of them. It's like asking a yes or no question, being handed a 1400 page book on life, the universe, and everything, and being told "It could be this, this, this, or this; what do you think?"

And being told this without words.

If any of you are remotely interested in Tarot I strongly suggest finding a deck that speaks to you artistically, and throwing out the instruction manual that comes along with it. Those words tend to clutter up what your mind could probably decipher on its own