Welcome to the fifth lesson in my Reading Tarot series! If you’ve missed the first few lessons in this series go check it out first. Previously we went into treading patterns in balance. This will be the last post specifically about layers and patterns, the lessons after this go more into your practice or how you can build one.
In this lesson, I will go over how card depictions can give you visual clues to read layers and patterns. This method works better for some decks than others, but can also be applied to certain other card systems, like oracle decks.
For this post I used 6 decks: Prisma Visions Tarot, Hush Tarot, Crow Tarot, Dutch Tarot de Marseilles, 3rd edition Darkness of Light Tarot and Pam’s Vintage Tarot.
Reading Layers & Patterns
In these couple of lessons, I will focus on reading various types of layers and patterns in the cards to help you out when interpreting readings. Some of these methods may be more applicable to how you read than others, but being aware of the various ways may help you get a general feeling of the reading more quickly.
The 4 layers & patterns I will be going over in the series are as follows:
- The Fools Journey, seeing growth or progress in the cards
- Numbers and their themes
- Balance, reversals and distribution of suits
- Depiction, or visual clues
Depictions hold Layers
In most tarot decks you find a visual depiction of the symbolic meaning of the card. The Rider Waite Smith is an example of such deck, while the Marseilles Tarot is an example of a deck style that tends to not utilize this as much, at least, not for the Minor Arcana. So while some decks focus more on simplicity and numbers, others show you their meaning through elements, gestures, direction, colour and much more.
Not all decks that have elaborate depictions have been made with this in mind. Some decks are more collector decks, where an artist distributed already made work over the various cards in a deck. Other decks have some elements in the depiction to hold meaning, while the rest is ‘filler’. This doesn’t mean, however, that we cannot still pull meaning from these depictions. In some cases, it may make the use of the deck more oracular than specifically tarot, and that doesn’t need to be a bad thing.
Visual Clues
So what visual clues can we find in card depictions?
There’s various things we can look for. Especially more modern decks can be made with colour correspondence as our printing techniques can be very precise and fine tuned nowadays, compared to when older ‘traditional’ decks were made. Now there’s not a universal list to colour meanings, they are often influenced by cultural context, but there are common themes where color is equated to natural occurrences, and those have their own symbolic meaning. With the colour blue for example, we often associate water, which is also commonly associated with emotions, specifically ‘calm’ and ‘sadness’. So if a deck uses a lot of colour themes, they may hint at a symbolic meaning.
Another clue can be direction. The direction a person is facing in a card or moving towards. In the western world we often associate left facing with the Past and right facing with the Future. Top and bottom facing can have it’s own meaning as well, hinting at a head in the clouds or firmly down to earth. Not all decks actively make use of this but we can still interpret it as such.
An obvious way to interpret depictions is to literally look at what is happening. Are there actions performed? Objects shown? Are people standing perfectly still or posed as if doing something? These can all be hints to active or passive energies. Animals or objects can have their own meanings associated to them. A blindfold is one we often see on the 2 of Swords as one is blinded from part of the situation, its symbolic. Lions are powerful and prideful creatures, something we often associate with them, so we can see this symbolism often in the Strength card.
One of the, in my opinion, greatest things to give value to a deck guidebook is when the depictions are explained. It gives you a ride on the perspective of the creator, it shows you the meaning of what’s there and helps you discern what’s of importance. If you have a deck that come with visual descriptions in the guidebook, that can be a real treasure along your studies of those cards.
Visual Exercises
To see if you understand how to use visual clues as a way of reading, you can try to answer the following questions for yourself, or do the following exercise to become more familiar with it.
- Are symbolic visuals a required component for a Tarot deck?
- What are 3 visual things one can look for to add meaning?
- What can a direction be a symbolic indication of?
Exercise: Differences and similarities.
What you need: The internet or multiple tarot decks, a notepad
The purpose of this exercise is to compare multiple visuals from different decks of the same card to see similarities and differences in how they are depicted, and take apart those depictions to find out the meaning. If you aren’t able to do this using multiple decks or for some reason don’t know how to navigate the internet to find them, you can use the image above of the Death card in 6 of my decks. If you own a deck yourself, compare it to other decks and see what symbolism you can find there.
Start with the first thing that stands out to you, be it colour, elements depicted, direction, poses, movement etc.
Go over how each card you’re comparing handles this specific visual element. After you’ve done this for a few things, look at the meaning of the card and try to put connections between the depiction and the layers of meaning.
Ex. All the Death cards shown in the above image show some sort of skeletal part. In a literal sense, Death means our flesh turns back to dust and our skeletons are all we leave behind.
That’s it for now! Check out Lesson #6 – Your Personal Associations next
Path of Ashes 