> My main concern with this idea is pretty fundamental. The first
> bit of text on http://plains.uwyo.edu/~astarte/tarot.htm:
>
> What is the Tarot? It is a system of cards often used for
> divination, as well as spells, meditation, and many other
> things.
>
> The very point of Tarot seems to be anti-virian. One could
> perhaps argue that there is room for Virian ideas in the
> "meditation, and many other things" part of the description but
> most people immediately think of divination when you say
> Tarot. So the most obvious question for me is: What would be the
> goal of a Virian Tarot deck? Perhaps to help spread Virian
> philosophy? There could be images representing important ideas on
> the cards but how would the reading work... without some sort of
> reading scheme, the deck would essentially be a set of flash
> cards. But what would be the point of the reading? Hopefully not
> to predict something about the future or discover something about
> the character of a person.
>
> Still, I very much like the idea of visually representing Virian
> ideas, virtues, sins, etc.
I agree: our intent is a major mutation of the historical purpose of the
original.
My impression is that most people have problems knowing all of their
beliefs on something. This is why Freud invented the idea of
subconscious; the idea is effective enough to spread through all of
conventional psychology. [The Weird Psychology schools (NLP, cognitive
therapy, etc.) are interested in the subconscious only insofar as you
have to reprogram it, apparently. The books on cognitive therapy never
mention it directly....]
Thus, a schemata for explicitly representing the inaccessible part of the
belief system can be very useful, by bringing all of the subjective data
into visible access, where it can be used as part of the decision-making
process.
Incidentally, I have never been able to get useful results from the
random methods for dealing it out [either in Tarot or I Ching]. I have
to deliberately choose it in order to get at the inaccessible part of my
belief system. The insistence on random methods strikes me [in my frame]
as a Luciferic demand. We should distance from that, as a game-theoretic
move--WHAT IF there's a "hostile supernatural"? [This is one of my major
annoyances with New Agers--they just do not appear to realize that "spirit"
does not imply "simple psychology, incapable of deceit, bluffing, etc."!]
The 'hand' concept definitely should be adapted from Magic, even for the
solo version. [My preference is to use the entire deck at once! This is
probably impractical.]
Another trick I find useful [even in conventional analysis of ideas] is to
explicitly check for "whose thought is this?". By violating conventional
psychology and dropping the assumption "I experienced this thought, so I
must have originated it", one gets a much more useful framework. [This
assumption provides gains for me independent of its actual truth value.]
We may want to build this in.