The Lady is the counterpart to the Knight, a riding court card. The Visconti-Sforza deck had her depicted directly ahorse, just like the knight. It can certainly be done that way, traditionally done that way. So, Lady Godiva references are appropriate, St. Joan of Arc, just some sort of riding female figure of cultural significance if you want women that are actually riding. You have to remember that the court cards at one time, and especially if they were commissionsed, represented someone historically, and that is true of the Tarot as it is of the Anglo-French deck. These weren't always nameless figures. The early artists had specific people in mind for the cards. I think that's some of the reason that people get lost in the meanings of the courts. They have no references to think about. That's why with the Maidens I included fictional characters. People know movie and theater characters now better than they know the characteristics of royals. But with the ladies, these are represented by historical figures. It enhances the maidens which all sort of live in a fiction of unrealized wants, whereas the Ladies actually go out and do the thing that the maidens only sigh and sing about wanting and not only that, Ladies come back to teach what it can be to be a female of the suit outside of the traditional seated role that the queen fills.

In my personal take for the design of the cards, I wanted a twist on the idea of the Lady. They are not directly riding, they have a conveyance. The difference between the knight and the Lady is that the Lady is about people-centered "mission" and the knight is about self-driven "campaign." The lady is driven by the ideals of her suit but is still inferior to the Queens who are the traditions and feminine Regnant of their suits. They are slightly lower than the Knights, which are the active service of doing of the King's will according to the suit. Knights go questing as part of their duties as peers while Ladies become governesses. 

In this deck they are passengers in a vehicle and with an animal that represents their suit. This is still technically riding, it’s only that the power in her card is in front of her rather than beneath her. Because of this, all ladies reference the Tarot’s major Arcana, VII The Chariot. 

In the Chariot, we come to face the concepts of focus, willpower, self-control, communication, hard work and discipline. This is the mission of these ladies in their suits. They serve the middle-manager’s function, to communicate and interpret information between the upper (Knught-Queen-King) and lower courts (Maiden-page-Lady), to be the emotional work center for their suit and to serve as the highest official of the lower court. When you come across a lady in your spread, you need to be asking yourself how you are using the power you have earned and how power is disseminated through you. Unlike the Queens, which hold and sit in their power, these ladies are conduits for power. They are managers, not directors. If they hold power, they lose it. That is why they are small in their image compared to the front and center queens and Maidens, part of the scene rather than being the focus of it. They are in danger of being lost in their missions.

Inverted, the Chariot also means that obstacles are in your way and strategy and planning is needed to overcome them. The ladies, too, have this problem. A vehicle is not as agile to overcome obstacles as the knight on his horse. Potholes in the road can break wheels, hedges present barriers rather than hurdles, and even the arrangement of the beast hitched to the vehicle can be a danger. A knight can be thrown, but a lady will be wrecked.

The only thing that changes slightly for the Knight, Page and Queen are the influences they offer. The page in the four suit Tarot is the youngest, now it is the Maiden that is the youngest. The Page when the Maiden is in the deck now becomes the student of the world to the maiden being the wanderer. One day, when he grows up, he will be a knight. Until then, he is an apprentice or student or understudy and a message runner rather than a person just starting out. Meanwhile, with the Lady in the deck managing the mission of the suit, the knight is now free to campaign for his suit either as an Errant knight or as a commander of armies. That is the purpose of the knight, after all. The queen with the Lady and the maiden in attendance is now clearer in her purpose, not having to be the sole female in the court. She can now act properly as the director and the soul of the suit. Think of her in the six peer court as the COO whereas the King is the CEO. 

 On the Ladies of the temporal suits:

The Lady of Swords: The Lady of Swords is in a hot air balloon and geese with ribbons around their necks are flying alongside her. This looks like they are not coupled, but they are indeed invisibly connected as is appropriate for the suit of air. Both the birds and the balloon are being borne by the same air currents. That is why she is in a balloon and not a powered aircraft. This lady is looking at the ground with binoculars in one hand and carries a sheathed saber at her hip. It is of note that this is the only card in Swords that has the sword sheathed. It implies guarded thought and measured passion, only to be drawn at the appropriate time. It would be detrimental for her to draw a sword next to the ropes that hold her basket to her balloon.

Historical Lady of Swords: Mary Wallstonecraft

The geese that are tied to her through the currents she is carried on also symbolize her role as the person of commitment and loyalty. Geese are also a beast of migration and transformation and symbolize personal growth. Air in this Tarot is the first suit whereas traditionally it is fire that comes first. This lady exploits that, depending on the difference in air pressure between heated and cooled air to carry her aloft. It isn’t the fire alone, the fire in this card is in service to air, not it’s predecessor. It took a cunning mind to think up a way to exploit fire as well. Thought and passion come before anything else.

On the dark side, Do you feel targeted? Someone is watching over you. It’s up to you to decide whether that person or entity is your ally or your enemy. But make no mistake, whatever you are doing, someone is cataloguing it for future reference. You will have to decide either the plan or strategy to overcome this oversight. Communication is needed, perhaps confrontation. You must know your situation enough to know what is needed. Geese are the messengers of gods and ancestors so you might be getting a conformation that your situation has been seen and heard, but they are also a warning of dangers to your wellbeing. Sometimes the message we get for our asking is not the one we want to hear.

Either way, Look into the ways others impose on your autonomy. If they are an ally, they will work with you, validate you and listen to you and if they are an enemy they will be looking at your strengths and faults for a point of exploitation. The realm of Air is the realm of sound. Communication is key when you find yourself watched. Pay attention to how you feel about the geese. It is important to your understanding of the situation whether you are intimidated, drawn, repelled or welcoming of them. Geese are a source of family, protection, transformation and communication. Depending on how you feel about them will point you in the right direction when you see this Lady in your airspace.

Lady of Cups: This lady has a draft horse, as is appropriate for the suit tied to water. Horses were created by Poseidon and all of them are sacred to him. She rides a barge drawn by this horse. Her ride is the canal barge that was invented to convey shipments and people along manufactured waterways like the Erie Canal in the United States and the Llangollen Canal in the United Kingdom. She stands on her barge, a signal of her common upbringing, as the pages and maidens stand, but she wears the charismatic clothing of her station. She lifts her goblet in toast, right hand on the cup part and the left supporting the base. The action is reminiscent of the blessing of wine at Eucharist.

When you see her, think about the community of engineers required to build the locks and canals. Think about the workers, the laborers and the trainers of horses and of the cities that were built because the canal connected the interior of the landmass to the seaports. 

Towns were built from nothing to support this movement and expansion. This is why she holds up the cup. She is toasting the many people who made this marvel possible. By the actions made to move water where there was naturally no safe way to navigate, now there are places where people can call home comfortably, allowing trade and commerce, yes, but lasting memories, places to gather, and places to feel in, worship in, commiserate in and celebrate in. The Lady of Cups brings life where life was not previously possible. The whole world becomes infinitely grander and smaller at the same time, and she glorifies them and not herself for the achievement.

Historical Lady of Cups: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn  

On the dark side, she is the consummate politician.  Think everything negative you might think of that professional archetype. Not a queen, a ruler by association to a person with divine mandate, but the voice and representative of the people that uses her position to maintain her social net and hide her selfish dealings.

The Lady of Rods (Wands): This lady is rich, powerful, hardworking, full of pleasure in doing her work and driven by it as well. Her ride is the carriage, and her animal is the mule. Mules are bred to work and purposed to do nothing else. The hybrid of a donkey and a horse, a mule is the soul of inner strength and stubborn resilience. Remember that Rods, the suit of fire is about following passion and desire. A carriage affords her the space to continue working even while travelling. Work never ends for this Lady, and if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing right now rather than waiting for opportune moments. She will spark her own moments and her light will ignite others to follow her example. She is going to look elegant and dangerous and composed every step of the way.

Historical Lady of Rods (Wands): Julia Child

On the dark side: They more commonly say that the work of a man is never done, but a man still kicks his boots off and demands dinner and a decompression session at the end of the day. That is actually kind of the theme of the Knight of the suit, that risks are good, but haste makes waste. This Lady doesn’t entertain such nonsense. She works her career, comes home, handles the business of the home and still finds time for her loved ones. She doesn’t complain about it because she never concludes that it shouldn’t be that way. When stressed, she very easily can be known for burning everyone around her that is not moving at her pace just like a wildfire can sweep a plain. She may even be the one to spark that blaze if she thinks it needs doing. While the Knight of Rods will go off galavanting, the fire of the man of action, The lady of Rods is the fire of the homefront, for better or worse. 

Unfortunately for her, feelings are not a hallmark of fire. Undaunted, she fails to connect to her emotions where it concerns pursuit of success by any means, even at the cost to her own well-being. Burnout sneaks up on the lady of fire. So does a loss of a sense of self. This is the lady who will, after raising her children and having her career, suddenly wake up one day wondering what all the hustle was really for, not knowing who she is anymore apart from what she is known for.

Lady of Coins (Pentacles): Here is lady that needs no man. The Knight of this suit is quiet and plodding. He is the Earth that remains stable, patient and workable. By contrast, The Lady of Earth is the calamitous soul of the Earth in motion. This is the spirit of the earthquake, the volcano, the render of continents and the uplifter of mountains.

Her ride is a covered wagon with coins for wheels and her beast is an Ox. She is a lady who knows that what she believes and works toward, she achieves. Feminine Earth can nurture in gentle seasons, but it can also destroy lives in cataclysms. The lands around a volcano are renowned for their fertility but also for their proximity to the forces of catastrophic change.

Failure is not an option for this Lady, not because she stubbornly refuses to consider it, but because she knows failure is inevitable. She is just the kind of person to turn every failure into a learning experience rather than a stopping place. As the Lady of the suit of Earth, it is keenly felt that her legacy will never die and her needs will always be met because she’s worked for them and on them in practicality and diligence, sparing not even her own comforts, if it will mean a better life for her descendants. She is not afraid to destroy everything to start anew, not phoenix-like as the lady of Fire does, but as a force of Earth.

Her caravan wagon turns on coins for wheels and creates the ruts that guide tomorrow's highways. The Ox is a trained bull, not a steer as they usually are, and that is a direct reference to bull markets. The covered wagon is a symbol of core needs. Strong, capable, independent, defiant and practical in the face of troubles, possessing a jack-of-all-trades encyclopedia of worldly knowledge inside her head. Unlike the lady of Rods that may burn out, working a goal until she forgets who she once was, she doesn't lose sight of who she is, she just transforms seamlessly to a new purpose as lava transforms to fields of soil and stone. Her unshakable character is the product of clear goals, expectations, consents and boundaries.

Where the Lady of Rods operates on the success in the ever-present and conventional moment, giving life to all around her even at the risk of burnout, the Lady of Coins is intrepid, independent and future seeking. Remember, this is the Earth that builds mountains in an upheaval of lava. Lava is made through heat and pressure of the Earth, not fire. She will rejoice in hardship, knowing that her necessary calamity today will be the fertile soil of tomorrow. The Good Earth isn’t good because it’s kind. It’s good because it has potential for bounty. That bounty is revealed in the Queen of Coins. And yes, sometimes the Queen of Coins does look enviously at the Lady of Rods, wishing that her subordinate would be more like that. But the knight of Coins is already settled enough. He needed the raw force of Earth to balance him.

Historical Figure: Charley Parkhurst

On the Dark side: THis lady's attitude toward life isn't coming without contention. She many detractors, keen to call her problematic, overly independent and unruly. They question her character, motives and actions constantly. But those people don't want a Lady who is unconventional and unstoppable so she bothers people who expect courtly women to be demure and feminine. Her weakness is that people will see her tumultuous methodology and think her scandalous and dismiss her, only realizing sometimes centuries later, that her planned "unwomanly" behavior truly shaped history for the better.

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Hermetic Principle #4: "Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled

Hermetic Principle #7: "Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes.

 --The Kybalion

The Kybalion was known to R-W-S, being published at about the same time, 1908 for the Kybalion to the RWS deck in 1909. These two positions were present in the Visconti-Svorsa deck (1463), so there is reason and provenance to reintroduce them to the courts. The issue was how to depict them for Oracular purposes.

Restoring these two also restores the trifold nature of the chthonic divine feminine to the cards. Maiden-Mother-Crone that is present in numerous pantheons, and sometimes multiple deities within even one pantheon. Just in the Greek pantheon alone, Hera, Hecate, Artemis, Selene, the Fates, the Seasons, and the Graces all had a triplicate aspect. Wicca has its own version. Non-Western religions also have their triplicate goddesses. It's as Carl Jung said, something fundamental to the human psyche. And yet, modern Tarot still has not revived these two positions. Aligning it with the official playing deck's card count is not really an excuse. There are more oracular Tarot readers out there, especially in the West, than there are players of the game, even if French Tarot is the #3 most played trick taking game worldwide and oracular Tarot decks are not official playing cards. The two types of deck are, at this moment, diverged in purpose and use, unlike with the oracular use of the Anglo-French deck. 

Really, this has little to do with the five-suit approach to the deck, more a criticism of the modern Tarot on the whole. It is time to assess and correct it. The solutions I came up with took careful consideration, but I think very satisfying.

Solution for maidens:

The maiden, just like the Page, depicts a standing figure. This one, though, presents a female figure. The difference, besides the gender of the two is in the background to the cards. Pages are, if it has not noticed, always outside. The maidens are depicted in an interior scene. I haven't drawn them out yet, but I do have descriptions, at least for the Travail deck. They fit with any deck, really.

Maidens are fundamentally about wants: "I want to experience the world," "I want to have people that want me," "I want to be known for something," "I want to be rich and hardworking."  The problem for the maidens is twofold. They are constrained by their environment, and they are imperiled by their station. They are slightly lower than the Page, the standing youthful character in pursuit of something related to their element.

The page, on the other hand, is more about "I need." "I need to seek knowledge beyond what I have been given," "I need to know myself and my emotions," "I need to be doing something about this," "I need to start a legacy of something."

These are fundamentally different ways of approach. Both imply youth, both imply yearning. The difference is that the maiden is unrealized yearning and the page is realized yearning. That is why the background of all maidens is an indoor scene, while the Pages are all outdoors. The maiden is trapped within her place. The page is embarking on endeavor.  

Now, another post will address the Shields, because they are specific to the deck, but these are the maidens as I think should appear. 

On the four Maidens of the temporal suits: 

Maiden of Swords: A maiden stands in a posture about to sing her heart out. She is cradling a prop sword in front of her. Her eyes on the distant fourth wall, she stands on a wood floor in a field of prop clover with a castle in the background and the painted sun rising. Around the edges of the picture are the curtains of a stage. This is her show, after all. It is the stage that is her cultivated space. This image looks like an outdoor scene, but that’s all it is, a scene on a stage. Let the backdrop fall or the curtain close and the true nature of the theater surrounds her instead.

Reasoning: The maiden of swords is about air wanting an outlet. If you could describe the essence of the Maiden of Air, it would be the "I want" song of American musical theater. Think of any Disney princess with an "I want" song. That's the maiden of Air. This is opposed to the page of swords, who is about new ideas, communication, and the pursuit of knowledge. The page is pursuing knowledge, the maiden thinks she knows everything, even though her knowledge is constrained to her surroundings. Since Disney princesses are a handy pull to consider, all of them being maidens of one kind or another and Disney princess movies being a subset of American Musical Theater, this Maiden is like Belle from Beauty and the Beast or Ariel from The Little Mermaid, but also Crysta from Fern Gully, or Bastion from The Neverending Story. The backside of this character is the damsel in distress. This maiden is the easiest to capture and always overstepping her boundaries which, of course, leads to needing rescue. This is the character that thinks that they know everything and wants to go out and experience the world that they have only ever heard in stories until they get out by rebellion and wind up in adventure level drama. 

Maiden of Cups: . A beloved maiden by her elders but doesn’t always fit in with her peers. She is in touch with her feelings. In fact, she is deeply certain about them. She is a dutiful person who wants to honor her family but also to honor her own feelings. But all she wants, really, is safety and belonging. She will have to go through terror and hardship to get it. This maiden wears glasses, a theatrical device indicating both an introverted soul and a person who often has trouble seeing past the end of their nose. She wears a dress meant for serving others more than for the finery of the court. She raises up a goblet to the rays of light coming in from an open window. She stands in front of a table full of set places with a loaf of bread in the center. In the background, behind the table is a merry hearth fire. She stands alone, as if she has set this table herself and is examining the goblet she holds for any dirt or imperfection. The problem is that the people haven’t shown up for her yet.

Reasoning: Finding family or escaping family that does not love her is the core need of this maiden. Cinderella is an easy pull for this card, but outside of Disney there are plenty, some not even female. Fivel Mousekowitz, Anastasia, Eliza Doolittle. The water maiden wants to draw people in, to belong, to make connections, and above all to dwell with people that love her that she can love in return. But the backside of the water maiden is the Siren, an entity that distracts others from their mission, engages in emotional vampirism, and is easily co-dependent.  

Maiden of Rods (wands):  Driven, hedonistic and dreaming, she is a maiden of causes. From her sheltered vantage point, she daydreams of being on the front lines of social and political movements, befriending the poor and downtrodden and fighting the wars the pages are training to go off to. Intrepid, fearless and flighty, she consumes the news and wonders aloud at what she reads and whether she would ever face such circumstances. But she lacks the fundamental life skills to do what she is dreaming about. She doesn’t know where to begin.  Merida in Brave, as a Disney reference. These are the female version of a Byronic hero, brooding, rebellious, isolated. Jasmine, from Alladin also, but also Daria and Jane from the Daria series for different reasons. Lisa Simpson is iconic for this card.

Dark fire is cynical, a flame turned inward to self-destruction because it wants power but can't get out of its constraints. The backside to the Maiden of swords is that she becomes a destructive rebel, a rebel without cause. Things in her life are actually really good, but because she wants to do her own thing for her own reasons, she winds up ruining a lot of lives with her antics, even if she does learn a lesson about it. Think like the young Women that are the subject of the movie "The Craft"

This is the chic maiden. Where the page faces to the right to admire his rod, the maiden’s rod is the stick carried in her right hand that will eventually hold the protest board tucked under her left arm. She is a hippie, a Bohemian in her bedroom, as is appropriate for the suit of dreams. Her crunchiness almost hides the fact that she isn’t outside, she is in a room in her parents’ house. The sandwich board is new, the stick is manufactured, the clothes are designer as is the purse and shoes and her walls are decorated with posters of past causes. Because work is part of the suit of fire, whether she understands it or takes it for granted she is directly benefitting from the work to get her to this privileged place where she can dream and act but never do

Maiden of Coins (Pentacles):     

The core want of this maiden is purpose. And therein is the core problem. She wants to be something, and she is not being allowed to be something. She wants to know her purpose and the other cards of the court keep telling her “Wait until you are different than you currently are, and then we will tell you.” Never mind that life also has a bad habit of moving the goalposts. The problem is that her purpose is known early on in her life. The danger is that she will give up on it before she has the agency to realize it.

This is the maiden of untapped potential, obstructed dreams and frustrated growth. She has done the work on herself, but nobody is seeing it. Instead, they keep trying to use her for purposes and problems in their own lives, excusing themselves by devaluing her training because of her lack of experience.

This maiden does not wear a dress but a business suit. Her hair is in a bun and she seems like no-nonsense kind of person. She is the go-getter, the dress-for-success person. She offers the xian coin or pentacle to the audience as if it is her resume and portfolio. For the maiden of coins, it very much is her offering to the world, take it or leave it, but it would be best for both you and her that you do consider it rather than reject it for her lack of experience. She believes, perhaps naively, that work and refinement and can-do attitude will land her in the ideal place. She is the maiden that understands that if you are true to yourself, you will wind up in the right place every single time. How could you dare refuse her? Tiana from The Princess and The Frog is archetypal to this card as a Disney Princess.

The dark side of this maiden is The Shrew, Katherina Minola. Katherina is harsh and uncompromising, and winds up getting broken down by Petruchio. Mind you, Petruchio does it through very abusive tactics, but that's the fate of this maiden who wants very much to be true to herself when society wants her to submit.

So if something can be that simple, why can't the cards be condensed down to one overarching nonphysical concept? I began looking through all kinds of interpretations, thought about it and researched the best words to fit. And I did cheat a little. Because Tarot does, in fact have several modes to pick choose from. There's elemental interpretations, numerological, astrological, alchemical, psychological, philosophical, mythological, even. Modern decks, fully illustrated, provide an even easier and referential tool because of the iconography in the illustrations. And the cool thing is, you can puzzle together the significance of any of these modes to make a cohesive narrative for the querant.    

Cheating for the Travail basically meant choosing what interpretations to kick out of the card's description in favor of putting it into a mode. If you distill out those meanings back to where they belong and look at what is left, you get to the heart of the card. And it really, as far as the Travail is concerned, very seriously down to one Quale. One interrogative: What is this? or What is it like?

Why qualium and not quale? Basically, I don't know Latin. But inadvertently choosing to use this version of the word makes it a pronoun. So the idea becomes What is this that is that? Honestly, that pretty much fits for Tarot cards, because that's exactly what people ask when a card is drawn. Latin language lovers are cringing at me right now, almost certainly.

So what got distilled? Well, I yanked the astrological significance out of the cards first and pinned the astrological significance to the numerological significance, because I wanted a Chthonic interpretation. What that means is that the primary message comes from underneath rather than from above. And yes, while that does have spiritual significance, it doesn't need to. What it really means for these cards is the underpinnings of western understanding giving provenance to modern interpretation. There is a whole lot of borrowing in the Tarot, and that's kindly put. Where possible, I wanted it to be stripped out of the borrowing from Vedic practice and from Kabala, and get it back to more open practice and philosophy. That was a positive move because it makes it more accessible to beginners, and making it accessible to beginners was part of the whole point to begin with.

I chose numerology as the easy keeper. They're playing cards in a bijective base 10 format. That works all the way across the tarot until you come to the problem of The Fool and The World. But if you go back to the actual playing of the game, those cards are not scored the same. If you are into the card game, the trumps, just like the pips, give you only half a point. Even though the trumps are their own whole suit that wins any trick played, they are still only that half a point. Kings, the Magician, The World and the Fool give you 4.5 points. the rest of the court cards 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, respectively, officially.

The point is brought up because of the concept of Oudlers. Yes, The World has a number of XXI, technically. But it doesn't need to. In fact, the numbers of the trumps weren't even printed on early decks. You just had to know the order. But if we use a bijective set of ten and apply it across all the cards, it falls outside the number set. So, in Travail, because it is outside the number set, it becomes undefined, just like the fool.

On that point, the Fool is NOT the number zero. In a bijective system, zero doesn't actually exist. It is, in fact, the placeholder Omicron. That's an ancient numbering practice for the placeholder and one reason why zero looks the way it does. -- was also used, but I wanted Omicron to be that, even if it gets confused with the letter O or the Arabic numeral number 0. The reason is so that the world can take the infinity symbol as it's number, which is a much better placeholder character for that card. The fool is one loop O, the World is two conjoined loops ∞.

And since zero in a bijective system does not exist, to make that a continuity point I had to do the same for the pips. 10 does not exist because zero does not exist. The problem is that you usually count in base 10 bijective: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A (alpha). You can't use Alpha because A is already Ace, so Travail calls the tenth place Omega instead, which is sensical because it closes the set as Omega closes the alphabet set. When you look through the pips, you will see A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, Ω. The Major arcana didn't need that same adjustment because roman numerals are already bijective base ten. It doesn't change the numerology any. 

And, once again, same as the cards It is numerology simplified to a single quale. That will be explained in a later post. I can show you the numerological chart here though. Never mind what it means for the top two columns yet. I will get to those in another post. Mind you these are quale that get applied to all the cards with the same number. Think of it as horizontal interpretation. 

What got distilled out next is some alchemical and esoteric odds and ends that are related to the elemental significance. These were brought in by Hippocrates and so forth. These were just references where it concerns the elements and how the old philosophers thought of the elemental qualities. It's stuff that went into the protoscientific ideas about the humors that still seems to stick around, but it sticks because we still find literary references to these all the time and these do wind up enmeshed with Tarot concepts too. A little changes because the action of Aether made the changes necessary. This is a way more complicated table and will require a more in depth explanation. I wound up including these because of literary writing. When I create characters for books or for storytelling games and I am trying to find motivation and appearance for a character It's a handy cheat.

But you all came in to see the qualia for the cards themselves. The thing is that this deck isn't designed to replace Tarot, it's a companion to it. It's not going to really disagree. What it does do is test. Which, I think I mentioned in the last post, is how the deck got its names, Travail, Trials, Tribulation. The pips are the trials. Just the pips, not the court cards. The courts are their own thing. SO when you draw a card and you know the quale of it, what you are interpreting with this to make the narrative are the underlying tests of the question at hand so you can build narrative off of that instead of the surface level question.   

So. What one word per card can be used to define the "what is it?" Just note that Shields does in fact have three. That's because Shields are bidirectional cards. The other pip cards actually don't have a different meaning inverted, which really was standard until a hundred years or so ago.

Shields does, however have different meanings for orientation. Upright, they are ascending qualia, the qualia that break cycles into a higher conscious understanding, and inverted they are expanding, how we bring the cycle breaking energy of the card out into the world around us and elevate the whole world through our understanding. So two positives.

The third quale listed is the action of Instinct, the animal in us that resists; that wants to stay in the transactional and attritional state of being. You can't really interpret that based on card orientation, but even when we are experiencing cycle breaking qualia we are still creatures that are triggered to instinct. They're not negative or opposite, but they are a kind of opposition. I put it in there because I wanted to give readers this option. You really don't have to interpret shields as the Aetheric concepts if you are not of a spiritual inclination or if the querant is not interested. Instincts are rational qualia, just like the qualia of the other suits. Aetheric qualia are irrational, qualia that can only be understood if you are functioning in an open cycle. 

Last note, the arrows are there to tell you how to read the cards in sequence. Travail recognizes the straight suits as constructive and round suits as deconstructive. SO when you read in complete sequence, for example, the swords, and you get to the Omega, the next card in sequence is the Omega of Cups. When you get to the ace of Cups, the next in sequence is the Ace of Rods.  After that, the Omega of Rods leads to the Omega of Coins, and the natural cycle can start over from there or Aether can be explored. Aether does remain odd like that. But then again it moves a little bit differently.   

Its a poem. But its also in a matrix. but it's also the whole major arcana for the five element deck. and it works out so that you can read it front ways, sideways, back ways even diagonally. Composing it helped my confidence about knowing whether or not I was on the right track. One final point to make before I let it be. The deck is called the Travail. Its minor arcana is called the Trials and the Major Arcana is called the Tribulation. And that sounds ominous but it really is not. I promise.

So, what does that have to do with Tarot?

Tarokka.

D&D put out a whole set of cards for Curse of Strahd 5E that are pretty much Tarot but for Barovia. And now me already very deep into Tarot IRL, I was trying to make a really neat set for my VTM game. It is already a well used suggestion for the system, White Wolf games are like a dark alternative, monster filled magic positive version of the world we know. But I was kind of struggling with simplicity and elegance. Nobody wants to pause a game for a little Tarot interpretation in the middle. SO if it was going to be a character prop or a Storyteller aid, it was going to need simplification.

Which is where my author training came in. John Truby's Anatomy of Story is one of my favorite books for setting up stories and narratives and something I am referencing when I make chronicles and characters all the time. If I was going to make a tarot prop for a chronicle, it had to be simple, concise, and understandable between my character and the Storyteller. John Truby Talked about the Elevator Pitch for a story. You probably have heard it from a few authors and scriptwriters. One day, you climb on the elevator and a movie producer climbs in with you. Now tell the producer your story in the 20 seconds it takes to go down the elevator at your office in a way that he will want to call you back to hear more.

Be Simple, Concise, Organized, Impactful.

The pitch for this deck: Create a five suit expansion to the tarot that cleanly shows the elements as natural elements while showcasing the supernatural as a fifth suit. Create a major arcana that interacts with the traditional Tarot while still covering the same storytelling themes

Ok. interested? now the long-winded insight. Just bear with me. I am nothing if not an overthinker.

At the time, I was struggling with the minor arcana, because we all tend to do that due to confusing, conflicting interpretations and the sheer bulk of pip cards that are in the deck. It's easy to grasp the major arcana because it's already a story. The idea of trumps go all the way back to the Triumph parades of Ancient Rome, parades that told the story of the Emperor's conquests. That's literally how the names of the cards got their names long before they had cartomantic significance and it was just a trick taking game borrowed from North Africa and popularized in Milan and across the European side of the Mediterranean and then appropriated by the French when they acquired Milan and then taken to the French colonies in the New World just as cartomancy was taking off as a niche use for the cards.

Even through all that history, The minor arcana does not have that kind of a story attached. Heck the minor arcana didn't even have full illustrations until about two hundred years ago and still doesn't in official gaming decks. And originally I was going to design a pip deck as well. It's cheaper, easier and faster to only have to worry about card illustration for the trumps.

That notion didn't last long. As it turns out, just like in most things, simplifying meant taking apart the whole thing and putting it back together. SO I did that. ANd then I went down the rabbit hole with the history of card games, stumbling through the 19th century innovations in the anglo-french deck and into games like castle and the idea of a fifth suit. And then looked into whether Tarot as a game ever experimented like that. ANd really it hadn't. There have been a few attempts. Now mind you, Tarot does have an incredible number of variations, The 78 card French Tarot is only the most popular kind of Tarot, but it's always been just four suits. 

But again, at the time I was designing a game for a fantasy game that is set in an alternative Earth. So maybe there, Tarot had a five element version. In White Wolf's Mage the Ascension, after all, there are elemental mages and they do deal with Quintessence whereas in the real world, Quintessence was kinda off again on again in philosophy and alchemy and abandoned late into the 18th century, with the last alchemists and first scientists seriously debating it as valid being people like Torbern Bergman (1735-1784). Science abandoned it because it is not part of the study of physical matter. It's just not quantifiable in the structure of matter or in the humors. And it stayed that way, at least until recently where it's getting picked up again in Quantum Physics and the search for the fifth fundamental force. 

SO, I was reading into that. It's really true what they say, we did know quite a lot more in the ancient world than we gave ourselves credit for. Pythagoreans believed that the monad begat the dyad, which begat the numbers, which begat the points, which begat the lines, which begat the shapes, and so on.  And what that really is is an understanding of dimensions and forces. That understanding, all the way back to 6th c. BCE. So I thought, well, what if we looked at this from a theoretical perspective, and put forces first. We get four classical elements, we also have four fundamental forces. Thats electromagnetism, Strong Force, Weak force, and gravitation. and if Quintessence is a fifth force as people like Dr. Cristof Wetterich (1952- ) are studying

What would be a fifth element to go with a fifth force?

and what does the model look like rather than the traditional circle of elements? And it would make sense too, five elements, five senses, five forces, five internal wits.

A long while and a lot of going back and forth between old Agrippa, looking into the sources he used courtesy of the references provided in Donald Tyson's annotated version and digging into what modern physicists are saying about the fundamental forces. ANd then somewhere in all this digging, halting myself and saying, wait. what the heck am I going this deep for just to get a simple prop for a game. If I'm going this deep, I want a real world usable, legit set incorporating quintessence as a whole force at play, What's the element already, for the purposes of a useable set of concepts?

It's life. 

Its as simple as that. And just as elements have their properties too, you know, like hot, dry, wet, cold I began to see the elements as the points of an inner pentagon of a pentagon of forces with quintessence as the top point. Life found its properties too. it has the properties of Observation and countermotion. And that matters (pun intended) for quintessence as a force, because quintessence was probably a force in making the big bang happen. But forces can't be perceived, only the consequences of forces can be perceived. Matter exists because forces interacted. and if you set the pentagon model with forces on the outside, upright, elements inverted, and make Air the Arche, because in terms of how things began in the big bang, fire did not come first, heat came first (fire is not heat, heat is actually the precursor to fire), and hydrogen among all the elements out there, finally, when enough subatomic particles got together, basically. Hydrogen is air. and only after you have forces acting on hydrogen can you at last have actual fire, as in kaboom, the universe has stars.  

So, back to the ancients again. Pre-socratic, because the arche was a hot topic back then. Plato settled for fire as arche, but yes indeed, there is a case in ancient philosophy for air as the Arche through Anaximander of Miletus. It's important to go back like this. For the sake of provenance. If I want to change the Tarot, and the tarot works with the elements, the concepts had to have been there in the ancient world to study it that way, to take it from a different perspective that then better aligns with a more modern understanding.

Life: counter motion and Observation. Just hanging out there opposite Quintessence, something that can't be directly observed. Affecting all other elements because of Countermotion. Life moves. it seeks out or avoids interaction. The rest of the elements are at the mercy of fate. But we can't see life as an element because we are part of it. That's where Aether comes in.

Aether. It was described as the air of the gods, but it's actually an immanence point, at the perfect admixture between fire and water, the consequences of the force of Quintessence can be observed by life. We are always describing it in these kind of terms: the fire of the spirit, the water of life. WE see it in our dreams and in mysteries, the stuff of fire and water, all the time. Even if you don't have a concept for sentient supernatural beings that may inhabit that point, gods and such, immanence is a concept that means the indwelling of spirit (source) in everything observable. For the sake of the model, the place where life observes and reacts to the interaction of quintessence with the physical elements.

Tarot is inherently monist. Alchemy, magic, religion. These study the change of things or the perseverance of things rather than the matter of things. Let's make a gnostic leap and call in the concept of an undefinable, but possibly sentient source. Irrational, by the mathematic terminology, power and perhaps will. and how do we describe life and by extension Aether? spirals. DnA, for example. Sugars. Alcohols. All with chirality, and left hand chirality at that. That's Countermotion. How do we describe the procession of four elements? circles and squares (and triangles).

Now we have the basis for the fifth suit. Let's call it Shields, reasons saved for another post because this one is getting long. Shields describes the open system, the creative and expansive spiral to the closed, transactional and attritional system of the four elements. It's irrational by nature, because it means that it does not have to conserve energy so it acts different than the other elements. Powered by source (extra-creational force). Is it sentient or not is more theology than necessary. It just is what it is.       

So what would the fifth suit be and what would it look like in the cartomantic set? Ascension and expansion. Those human concepts that would break cycles and draw us closer to an understanding of source work. Whatever you want to call becoming a living thing that is capable of seeing and understanding forces at work rather than just dealing with the consequences of forces. True supernatural understanding. and then to take those concepts out of the elemental suits because they are redundant there. That helps simplify the traditional suits. Bonus, the concepts of Shields are all concepts we all understand already to some degree or other. no initiatory mysteries necessary. That means accessible and universal. Which means it fits in the minor arcana. AS for the Majors, it fits both ways because twenty is divisible by four and by five, which covers the numbered cards, if we take the older approach and remove the numbers from the oudlers, the World and The Fool, now we have a comparative elemental story there, the five suit playing off of the traditional four suit in every card. Which actually worked out really well, clarifying the cards' meanings. Again, story for another post.

As I said. Too big for a game prop, but now it has real world application. And modding the Tarot is ambitious but if you hang with this blog maybe I can make better sense of this rambling first blog post with later more specific ones, but it's been three years bouncing around in my head and in my documents with pretty much nobody else to look at it. Hope I didn't confuse people too much.