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The accepted meanings of tarot cards can't be deduced just by looking at them. Let alone their "true" meanings.
Nor can you uncover their secret significance through philology. Claims by people like Court de Gebelin, Eliphas Lévi and Dr. Papus that the cards originated in Egypt or some other ancient repository of lost wisdom hold no water whatsoever under historical investigation. What educated guesses we can make as to the original designers' intentions are disappointingly mundane; "The Tower" representing the defeat of the De La Torre family in medieval Italy; the "Strength" card commemorating the victory of a friend over a clan whose crest was the lion, etc. I hope I'm not ruffling any feathers by stating outright that the land disputes of long-dead bourgeois Italians hold no cosmic significance to me.
But nonetheless, these cards have a nice plurality of possible meanings that have been ascribed to them. Some interpretations are more agreed-upon than others. The little book that came with your deck might disagree with the little book in another deck, though. Or with the website you found. Or with this old book from the Golden Dawn era. Who to believe?
So we're left wondering not just what they mean, but how and why they mean. Of course, you can also ask /whether/ they mean, answer "no", and move on with your life and never pick the cards up again. This is a perfectly respectable position and I have neither means nor desire to dispute it. I don't want to do that, though, because I Like Them.
So what will be our guide in the darkness? What kind of heuristic should guide a reading on the assumption that I'm not immediately blessed by wisdom from above?
Waite, a Golden Dawn-affiliated English occultist best remembered for his role in creating the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, is not telling. He'd agree with almost all of the above, I think. He's not one for facile correspondances or fanciful and unrigorous scholarship. There is, however, true universal and metaphysical truth in the cards. But he can't tell us what it is. For reasons. We wouldn't really get it.
Weirdly, I'm damn near completely satisfied by this approach.
For one, it leaves the ultimate truth open to our discovery. This is a wise move, because if he had tried to articulate it, it almost definitely would have come across as trite. Even when he's telling us how to interpret individual cards, he's prone to sly circumlocution, and you finish the description (and the whole book, in a sense) feeling like you've read the marginalia without the body of the text. It's like a Lacan lecture in that way. At the same time that his epistemic haughtiness makes him less likeable, I think that his refusal to give The Full Truth is what preserves the vital mystery of the thing which makes it interesting in the first place.
Secondly, he has this peculiar kind of disdain for the exact thing he's teaching you how to do; namely, divination. He thinks it's downright disrespectful to reduce the Major Arcana to tools for fortune-telling, but doesn't tell us what to use them for instead. Contemplation, I guess? Again, his arrogance is a turn-off, but I think this move is also generative of meaningful reads, specifically because it encourages skepticism of received wisdom and tells you to keep an eye out for a little something Extra beyond your everyday practice.
This jives with something he explicitly returns to throughout: that your intuition is as important a factor as anything else, that context can carry just as much weight as an association you might look up. He's positioning himself as elitist, but the effect is to keep the practice fluid and relational by frustrating the desire for definitive interpretation. Granted, the way he intends to push you to further reflection is by a kind of spiritual negging, and your receptivity to that will vary.
Was this his plan all along? Is he after the well being of any apt seeker? Can we read his exclusivity and superiority as upaya, skilful means, rather than a genuine reflection of his beliefs? Probably not lol. I don't get the impression from this text at least that Waite was a pleasant person to be around. Such is the case with many of these long-dead spiritual dudes I'm fascinated with. Polyvalent, wily, and immoral in both cool and shitty ways.
The occultism I see around me today looks pretty different from Waite's. For one, it's really gay. It's a community I am technically included in but have limited exposure to. Nonetheless, my impression is that what 21st century queer new agers seem to strive for is a practice where anything goes so long as it works *for you*. Interpretive systems are accepted and discarded by use value or by the word of trusted community members. Individual practitioners may have standards they cite, but Waite's days of "the real truth is the domain of an initiated elect" are certainly gone in this crowd. However, it was really intriguing to me that the two approaches complimented each other in their denial that we're anywhere near a finished and final truth, and it makes me wonder if this could be a hint as to how explicitly elitist occult practices such as the Golden Dawn got up to could become the new age phenomena we know today.