At this point I asked Chris if he would like to answer some questions from Jason, a reader who had been enjoying the interview. Below are the results:
1. So how does Chris read his Lovecraftian cards and not come out of every reading with fear that the universe is decaying about him? Or how do his querents feel about this, especially if they ask about their love life? I’ve seen a few cards from the Dark Grimoire deck, and they were all negative looking. (Dramatic though!)
I think I can respond to both points together. Primarily I’d want to start by exploring the notion of polarity; that is, that the Tarot is polarised as both positive and negative.The notion of positive and negative is essentially coming from the idea that there may or may not be some kind of underlying morality to the world, which is a matter of belief and faith. The forces of nature illustrated in the Tarot are, alone without a cohesive morality. The Tarot for me is a tool to explore consequences (divination) and while in combination various types of morality can manifest out of the gestalt to inform the consequences the querent is subject to. Just as in everyday life, this is entirely relative to the individual querent and their situation. Morality more often than not is an anthropocentric cultural narrative, and in our scientific, multicultural and mostly secular society most of the people I encounter are in a moral grey zone as a result. Morality comes from the way in which we read our experiences of life, which is represented by the images of the Tarot. In this way the archetypal images contained in the Tarot can, in their re-combination, give us an ability to formulate our own narrative underpinned by our own experience rather than the experience of others and their agendas.
For me, a Tarot deck must be free of any moral agenda and leave the cards free to be themselves. True, in many of the more shadowy decks available you will find compromises being made so as to limit or modify the range of emotions and ideas that they can express. I call these “genre decks” and they range from decks that have a bleak horror theme to “The Lovers Tarot” and “angel cards”. That’s not really a problem, if you have a lot of them to play around with, like a DVD collection, but you are probably going to find that such decks have massive blind spots and won’t be the best tool for a sincere or important divination.
I don’t put “the Dark Grimoire” Tarot into the “genre tarot” category, although at first glance that’s exactly what it appears to be. There are few, if any blind spot to the Dark Grimoire (TDG), and emotionally it has a broad spectrum. Cards such as the 2 of Cups, the Stars, the Lovers, Temperance, the Sun, the 3 of Cups, the 6 of Cups, 9 of Cups, the 4 of Swords and the Aces, retain their benevolent characteristics in an appropriately whimsical and lyrical way. Even the cards which depict the formidable Lovecraftian entities, if you have read any of these stories; they aren’t negative or misrepresentations of the cards. They are simply expressions of the principles of the cards in the Lovecraftian context which, as I described earlier in my interview with Doug, fit very comfortably in the Tarot. Those cards which do correspond to anthropomorphic qualities are represented by some very interesting characters from history and myth. They are independent but cross paths with the Lovecraftian Mythos.
To me, the overriding theme of TDG is an adventure. It’s a quest for knowledge which is only dark in that it is unconscious. This fits very well with my approach to the Tarot as a whole. The cards are well equipped and have in the past bloomed into pictures of happy relationships and love, sexual desire, happy times and wealth, as well as bleak pictures of emotional turmoil, loneliness, mental illness and financial ruin. I don’t think a genre deck has that kind of ability.
Querents generally find the deck creepy at first glance which helps to create the emotional dynamic I spoke about earlier in my interview with Doug (credulity…) this is good because it makes them engage in a reading and makes it a more enjoyable experience for them and me. However, once we’ve drawn some cards, and they’re looking closer, there is almost always something in there that they like; sometimes that I haven’t picked up on myself.
One querent was particularly taken with the 10 of Disks which shows a woman dancing happily in a subterranean world with her “demons,” now her friends (at least this is what the querent’s interpretation was). As for querents asking about their love life I think that the emotional eclecticism of the deck caters as well for that sphere of life as it does for any other. How many times do people find that their lover can make them feel euphoric as well as put them into the pits of hell, all at the same time?
2. What deck(s) did Chris work with before gravitating to these two?
Since I first started out with the Tarot I’ve been through many, many decks. I’m a Gemini and as such my attitude towards everything is “variety is the spice of life”. I was reluctant to be limited in my understanding by decks that have been formulated according to one person or another’s agenda and wanted to get behind the set dressing to see the universal archetypes and forces of nature manifesting through them. My first real Tarot was “the Mythic Tarot”, which even at the time was underwhelming; in that it seemed very pedestrian in its execution, and didn’t really capture my imagination at all (which is the most important criteria since you’re imaginative faculty is what brings the Tarot to life). It’s based on Greek mythology but rather than drawing on the infinite amount of exquisite and evocative art created in western culture which concerned itself with the Greek myths, it seemed to be drawing on children’s storybooks; it was completely impotent as a tool. The decks that have been most significant in my journey through the Tarot, other than the Dark Grimoire have been (in no particular order):-
Crowley’s Thoth Tarot
Having had a bit of a dead-end experience with the Mythic Tarot, it’s was the text of Crowley’s book of Thoth that made me thirsty for the tarot again, gave the subject depth and a sense of mysticism. The deck itself was difficult to get hold of; I had to order it online. I still love the attention to detail contained in the Thoth deck as well as the visual illusions and eclecticism of its visual vocabulary. Everything from Greek and Egyptian mythology to modern physics and chemistry has a place in that deck. It’s like walking through an exotic bizarre and being intoxicated with all the different languages and smells. Its still, objectively one of the best Tarot decks ever formulated, which is a testament to the work and energy that Crowley put into it. It works for divination too, but it’s almost a system of its own in that the cards have metamorphosed by way of Crowley to reflect the new Aeon which he was heralding and can be a bit confusing unless you understand the card’s starting positions. I look on the Thoth deck as a psychedelic meltdown of the Tarot and I think that this fluidity really empowers the cards to melt into a gestalt which I spoke about before. It’s a very Piscean deck and I think I read somewhere that Crowley had his moon in Pisces which makes me think that perhaps one could look to your natal moon to get an idea of which decks would capture your imagination in such a way as to engender decent readings.
The Ibis Tarot
Was created back in the 17th Century by an elusive ? astrologer called M.O. Wegener. The modern version by Josef Machynka gives the original images depth and colour. It’s an Egyptian themed deck that also incorporates a lot of astrological influences and symbols. Stripped down compared to tarots I’d used at the time it was using this deck that I worked out the Kabbalistic Sephiroth myself before I was even aware of it. I had gathered together the pips and saw how the cards of the same number corresponded. This deck was not really useful for divination at all. I found it emotionally mute and the iconography too academic and perhaps dry. The most interesting thing about this deck was “the crocodile” which is a manifestation of the Fool, which had a sense of danger and imminent calamity which I’ve found to be an aspect of the Fool that is often easily overlooked.
The Cosmic Tribe Tarot
This was an important deck for me for a long time. The name alone would have been enough to put me off, since it seemed very “new age” but I had been a fan of the artist beforehand and found his work exceedingly engaging and original. The deck itself is fundamentally a modern mutation of the already mutated Thoth deck but is incomparable in terms of artistry. It’s bold and colourful in a way that the Thoth deck might have been had technology and printing back in Crowley’s day been what it is today. The artist clearly has a good understanding of the Tarot from an esoteric point of view but also is able to present the images so as to relate to a modern generation. If the Tarot were a pop music video then this is what it would look like, his creativity is unbounded. Cards that are rendered especially well here are the 9 of Swords, the Tower, the Empress, the Hanged Man and Death but he really goes to town on the pips which are the best pips I have ever come across in that they’re vivid yet abstract and devoid of the “story” element I spoke about before. The Court Cards are also really good and lend themselves to divination in the modern world where Kings, Queens, Knights and Pages rarely can be recognised by their trappings and more to do with their relative age and experience as well as their influence and action. This is a brilliant deck I’d recommend to anyone for whom the tarot has become academic and perhaps wants to get in touch with the Tarot as a living breathing thing without losing the history and esotericism that underpins the system.
The Sacred Circle Tarot
Another one of my favourite decks; and as it happens it’s one of the decks I’ve had the most divinatory success with. It transposes British mythology and Neolithic monuments onto a Rider-Waite core using computer graphics to great effect. My connection to this deck may well just be one and the same as my connection to the theme of Neolithic Britain, but there would be a very dull way of doing that. The Sacred Circle Tarot is very lucid and dramatic. Again, the pips are an outstanding element of the deck. They don’t have an imposed narrative and yet are transposed in front of Neolithic monuments which have their own mythology which relates to the theme of the card, many of which I have since visited. The elemental association of all the cards is very well indexed in the colour of the border which I think lends itself to divination.
3. How have they influenced his reading style? Does he utilize any particular spreads, or a linear style (Opening of the Key or otherwise)?
The theme of my quest through all of the decks I’ve explored is the pips. I know that Doug agrees with me when I say that they are often the most misunderstood and misrepresented aspect of the Tarot and yet they’re key to successful divination. I primarily use the Celtic Cross spread since for me it’s the best one to zoom in on a particular aspect of life especially as is often the case for me the querent has no particular question. It gives the Tarot the ability to inform us of the root of the querent’s situation very quickly. I’ve never studied the Opening of the Key; I have no experience of it in a consultation. Hope that answers you’re questions.
Douglas: I want to personally thank both Jason and Chris for such a great section to the interview 
.
If you have any thoughts, ideas or suggestions about what you’ve read, I’d love to hear them.
Image by arkano3
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6 comments… Let's discuss
I would like to hear more about this. In what way do you think they are misunderstood and misrepresented?
I agree that pips are necessary for successful divination, as they are most representative of concrete events going on, not to mention the people in our lives. I’m aware of the schools of thought both for and against using only pips, or only certain suits of pips pertaining to the divination.
This topic of pips could also spawn some discussion on the nature of divination using only the majors, which is also employed by some people, although I think that’s more common among Marseilles readers.
If I may digress: I’m aware of people attributing mundane matters to the majors; such as Chariot being related to one’s car. This puts me in mind of one of Waite’s lesser known essays on tarot, where he showed how to do a reading using all 21 majors, and said that every tarot reading occurs on three levels, from the most mundane to the most spiritual.
Hmm, I see a lot of room for future posting and discussion, more than can fit in this comment!
Hi Jason, thanks for the feedback
!
I think Chris, when he gets back from holiday, will certainly want to elaborate further
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The ideas that I now have on the Pips have changed since the start of the Christopher Healey Interview. At the time Chris and I spoke, we were discussing and reminiscing on the learning process we had both been on since we first studied the Tarot together. When we we’re learning, the information we studied was biased towards the ‘internalising’ of the Tarot, in the sense of the meaning to be understood was a subjective experience, relevant only to the person you were reading for. To be fair to the authors, that applied for both the Picture, Court and Pip cards.
This was at odds with our assumptions of what divination was – namely, the process of predicting the future. In that sense, the Pip cards, we felt, had to be objective, separate from the person you were reading for and the events depicted involved more than just that person.
This is no different to what you mentioned in the above comment:
The learning curve for both Chris and I began when we realised that the descriptions given for the Pip cards were a hindrance. We purposefully made every card an external event. It was part of our practice and it helped to remove the ‘person centered’ approach (useful in counselling but not so in a Tarot reading) that we were so crippled by.
The reason that they are misunderstood is that they, only in the sense of divination, are the most important section of the Tarot deck; much more important than the Picture cards. The Pip cards tell us more information than any other section of the Tarot. The reason they are misrepresented is that they are usually portrayed in a kind of ‘self-help’ or ‘Jungian’ way. Although this is useful, and to be honest, necessary, it is also inaccurate.
I would also say this: My experience of learning Tarot is not meant to be Universally applicable to everybody else. Everyone will have a slightly different introduction to the Tarot. There is no wrong way to represent the cards. However, for me personally, to Privilege the querents inner-psychology over an external event and to marginalise the ‘external’ in favour of the ‘internal’ is a mistake. It also subtly shapes ‘what is possible’ with Tarot. For me, much more is possible than the inner-state; or perhaps a new way needs to be talked about when thinking about this ‘internal’ consciousness that can be easily influenced by positive thinking?
I don’t separate the deck into distinct sections in order to perform a divination for other people. However, when I was first learning I did this quite a lot and I think it really helped me understand the dynamics that the parts have on the whole.
That’s an interesting point you make about Waite attributing three levels to a Tarot reading. I remember reading a great book by Lon Milo Duquette (forget the name
) that separated the picture cards into four distinct sections. I found that book really helpful in understanding the Tarot and incorporated that into my own practice.
LOL
yes indeed!
Just to clarify — my previous comment was supposed to start by including a quote from Chris’ interview. The blockquote was apparently stripped out by the system.
“The theme of my quest through all of the decks I’ve explored is the pips. I know that Doug agrees with me when I say that they are often the most misunderstood and misrepresented aspect of the Tarot and yet they’re key to successful divination.”
That was the thought that spurred my previous comment.
Hi Jason, thanks for bring that to my attention
I’ve tried to sort out the issue but I still seem to have some problems with it. I’ll look into that further and try and sort out the issue.
I’d support Doug’s well put response to this – there is nothing more dissapointing in a Tarot reading that only seeks to explain the querent’s internal state. I think this happens when the reader doesn’t have the courage of his/her convictions to go out on a limb and do a divination. I have fallen victim to this from both sides of the table many times in the past. Of course the internal state is an important part of the picture but ultimately most people feel like they’re in control of what goes on inside (whether or not that’s true or not) and their motivation for turning to a divination is to explore that which is out of their control.
The pips are often seen as trivial, often times in a deck they are clearly the cards over which the designer has spent the least time. In many ways they are the most mysterious and elusive elements of the deck – you can easily trace the evolution of the picture cards through many iterations but the tone and the action of the pips varies wildly even amongst the “daddy decks”. Is there more room for cultural and political bias in these everyday real world phenomena? or is it because the symbols themselves are so abstract that we can only be informed ultimately by a loose numerology which has so many culturally conditioned associations (eg – is the number 13 significant outside the western world?). This is why I rely on Kabbalistic interpretations to inform my reading of the pips. It’s a solid system that carries with it images and situations. I do however appreciate that there may be alternative perspectives, some of which are not strictly numerological at all….
Interesting
Hi Chris, thanks for dropping by
I couldn’t have put it better myself
I think that the expectations that clients have when they come for a reading, in the sense of what a Tarot reading does, is the very thing that a Tarot reader has to understand and work with in order to deliver a quality reading. When I read for people, I like to read the Pips as both reflecting their ‘inner-state’ and external circumstances that the client can’t control. The way I structure this into my readings is to state what the external circumstances are first. I don’t even look at the inner-state of the client until I have explored the external. Usually, the client will open up and want to discuss how they feel, so I simply reinterpret the cards to accommodate.