At one point in time the court had six positions rather than four. The maiden card and the lady card, one female standing position and one riding female position. Tribulation restores these to the deck. it is to satisfy Hermetic principles. I don't know why, precisely, the oracular tarot has not restored these already, other than to continue the tradition of keeping the deck exactly as the French tarot deck 78 cards. Over the history of the playing deck it makes sense to condense the courts. But the oracle use of the cards I think should have revived it. It is a long overdue revision.  This post discusses the maidens and what they do for the deck and how they affect the Pages.

 

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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.