Cult of Tarot Forum

Hi all,

I suppose the most Tarot readers are used to work with the 4 elements when it’s coming to interpret the pips.

But is there any author who reads the cards without this “4 elements dogma”?

I think that associating the pips with the elements of water, fire, air and earth is a New Age phenomena from Western occultism.

What do you think about it?

Scanner wrote: ↑13 Apr 2021, 11:08 I think that associating the pips with the elements of water, fire, air and earth is a New Age phenomena from Western occultism.

I tend to agree. In terms of divination, I don't make much, if any, use of elemental associations.

I use the associations of fire/spirit, water/emotion, physical/earth, air/mind.
Otherwise it wouldn't mean as much to me where it comes to the minor arcana in the waite style.

Sounds like you may come from the older marseilles style. ? I heard the cups may mean this class, and batons that social class.
It didn't gel with me. But that because i learned the other system first and it worked out for me.

HOLMES wrote: ↑13 Apr 2021, 19:00 I use the associations of fire/spirit, water/emotion, physical/earth, air/mind.

I use much the same associations. They've been drummed into me over many years of study. It's just that, unless I wanted to incorporate astrology or apply elemental dignities, which I generally don't, the elements themselves are a bit superfluous.

HOLMES wrote: ↑13 Apr 2021, 19:00 Sounds like you may come from the older marseilles style. ?

I don't know whether that was directed at me or the OP, but for my part, I read RWS and TdM, and although I read the pips differently between the two, I use the same "suit essence" associations for both.

JudyK wrote: ↑13 Apr 2021, 18:55

Scanner wrote: ↑13 Apr 2021, 11:08 I think that associating the pips with the elements of water, fire, air and earth is a New Age phenomena from Western occultism.

I tend to agree. In terms of divination, I don't make much, if any, use of elemental associations.

May I ask you then how you read the pips?

Actually I don't think that it is "wrong" to include elements in tarot readings. So when you decide to do that, I think it will work.

But nevertheless..,I feel there is a more "hidden" art to use the cards..

HOLMES wrote: ↑13 Apr 2021, 19:00 I use the associations of fire/spirit, water/emotion, physical/earth, air/mind.

Can you explain how you use these associations with the pips?
How are they related to the minor suits?

And yes, I'm reading with the TdM.

"... is there any author who reads the cards without this “4 elements..."

When talk of elements comes up, J-M. David prefers to consider all the classical elements in every suit rather than to assign one to each suit, and they're not his main focus. He explains here. His Reading the Marseilles Tarot is loaded with Medieval and Renaissance history plus analysis of card art details.

Enrique Enriquez doesn't use any elemental correspondences and focuses on seeing a story in the TdM in the moment with eye-rhymes (and you can get a sense of his style in this short post). No fixed meanings. He has a few books and a film.

I don't have a strong feeling against using elemental associations in my reading, but I rarely get there. We have so little information about what divination with tarot might have been before the French occultists. I like to stay with associations and correspondences that are actually contained within the cards, but the classical elements were very much part of the intellectual currents of the world that created the tarot. And I suppose we do see all of the classical elements appearing in some card or other. I do like the occultist association of each rank in the courts with an element, so you get effectively a reflection of each element's aspect as it appears under the dominance of another. But I don't really use that in Marseille.

Scanner wrote: ↑13 Apr 2021, 21:06
May I ask you then how you read the pips?

Actually I don't think that it is "wrong" to include elements in tarot readings. So when you decide to do that, I think it will work.

But nevertheless..,I feel there is a more "hidden" art to use the cards..

I read RWS with the "usual" assignments, i.e. the usual assumptions about the dominant traits of each suit and the generally agreed upon meanings (unless I see something different ). With TdM, I use a combination of suit trait + numerology + visual cues.

I don't think it's wrong to use elements either. It's just not something I personally find useful. Where "they" say Cups = Water = emotion, I say Cups = emotion. I am more of a pre-Western occultism style reader, despite learning to read with a RWS deck. I think testpattern put it well -

testpattern wrote: ↑14 Apr 2021, 02:41 I don't have a strong feeling against using elemental associations in my reading, but I rarely get there... I like to stay with associations and correspondences that are actually contained within the cards...

As for being more of a "hidden" art, that is the essence of "occult".

Scanner wrote: ↑13 Apr 2021, 11:08 Hi all,

I suppose the most Tarot readers are used to work with the 4 elements when it’s coming to interpret the pips.

But is there any author who reads the cards without this “4 elements dogma”?

I think that associating the pips with the elements of water, fire, air and earth is a New Age phenomena from Western occultism.

What do you think about it?

So Western occultism and tarot both got their start in the Italian Renaissance and spread quickly among the nobility in Europe during the same era. A lot of the same Renaissance-era people were reading the same translated occult/metaphysical books, commissioning decks and playing cards together even though the card playing was not part of any 'esoteric' activity back then. But a lot of the art and themes that got thrown into those early Italian, French, and German decks had mythemes and symbols from alchemy, astrology, Greco-Roman and Christian mythology so "New Age phenomena" is misleading.

The four elements as they were understood as the Four Humors in medicine during that era was another example of how the Hellenistic concept of there being four root forces was part of Renaiisance society and all of this contributed in a psychological way to why four suits, two red and two black, took such a strong hold inside the card-making, card-playing mindset of the early card game and later cartomancy traditions.

The whole quaternary principle is so ingrained in all the things that brought tarot decks together that it gets expressed one way or another in just about every tarot deck/author I personally know but there are definitely plenty who don't really get into the esoteric side of it all, keep it more secular and superficial. I wish I knew of a good one to add to the recommendations being made, but being an occultist for even longer than I've been a tarot reader, its been my personal focus.

When i first read the thread i though you meant just the minor arcana.
I forgotten none illustrated minors are called pips

When i do read with pips i remember with my.mind what the waite version looks and so i read the minors like waite minors.
The elements helped me. I havent read with pips in quite a while.
There is a kickstarter where the pips are illustrated in the marseilles style.

JudyK wrote: ↑14 Apr 2021, 08:42
I don't think it's wrong to use elements either. It's just not something I personally find useful. Where "they" say Cups = Water = emotion, I say Cups = emotion.

But you know, thinking about it, I can see thinking about elemental intersections being useful in pip reading. Water and earth make mud, which makes bricks = emotions and fiscal concerns might move towards stability, or fire and water make steam = the power to make a train move. Like I said, I rarely get there, but since pip reading is so much about reading card blends, anything that helps to spark those imaginative crossings is useful. But I think that using the algebraic rigidity of Mather's elemental dignities is not so fruitful in this respect.

HOLMES wrote: ↑15 Apr 2021, 12:48 When i do read with pips i remember with my.mind what the waite version looks and so i read the minors like waite minors.

I think that a lot of us who read with pips do so in preference against the overdetermination of Waite minors. Pip reading is more fluid than are the situational rigidity of RWS. No aspersions cast against that venerable deck; it's just that pips feel more like the particles, prefixes, suffixes, and roots of a language, and so in reading them, their infinite recombination makes for a lot more possibilities.