Gender Roles and the Tarot

[Heyo]

Inspired by recent threads I want to share some insights I learned from the Tarot.
I'm not superstitious (or "spiritual") and this is entirely social/psychological.

I want to concentrate on a small subset of the Tarot, the so-called minor (or small) Arcana. 16 cards representing male and female stereotypes as well as symbols representing archetypes or "elements" (the classical ones).

The symbols are staffs (or wands), cups, swords and coins (or discs). These are associated with fire, water, air and earth respectively.
They are also associated with the gender roles of knight, queen, prince and princess. There are two male and two female roles.

The interesting part is that masculinity and femininity have two distinct representations. The knight stands for the primary masculine attributes: leadership, dominance, strength. The prince is intelligence, creativity, swiftness; the secondary masculine attributes.
Likewise is the queen symbol for emotion, spirituality, healing while the princess represents the secondary feminine virtues: fertility, practicality, materialism.

What do you think, are there two distinct types of "typical males/females"?

 

[JustGeorge]

I think there is masculine and feminine, as concepts within the human mind.

Sometimes I've seen in occult writings that they are equated with positive and negative(similar to a battery charge, as opposed to mental/emotional states).

I don't think masculine and feminine needs to equate with a person's physical gender, or that it needs to mean 'of men' or 'of women'. I sometimes think we stir up trouble for ourselves by taking these two fields personally, when they seem to be more likely archetypes, concepts, or human ways of organizing.

 

[crossfire]

Crowley (whose Thoth deck you are using--which is different from the classic Tarot) likely got this from the I Ching concepts of Old Yang, Old Yin, Young Yang, and Young Yin. He certainly made a mess of it when trying to superimpose his rigid Western archetypes over these flowing concepts.

 

[Heyo]

Crowley (whose Thoth deck you are using--which is different from the classic Tarot) likely got this from the I Ching concepts of Old Yang, Old Yin, Young Yang, and Young Yin. He certainly made a mess of it when trying to superimpose his rigid Western archetypes over these flowing concepts.

Nope. While Crowley did change the Tarot, the minor Arcana are not among the changes. They are an entire western concept.

 

[crossfire]

Nope. While Crowley did change the Tarot, the minor Arcana are not among the changes. They are an entire western concept.

He did change the names of all of the court cards except for the Queens. Moving the name of Knight to the King card can be confusing.

Classic Tarot-------Crowley's Tarot

King-------------------Knight
Queen----------------Queen
Knight-----------------Prince
Page------------------Princess

 

[crossfire]

Pages (Princesses in Crowley's deck) were also not feminine:

 

[Heyo]

Pages (Princesses in Crowley's deck) were also not feminine:
View attachment 65590

You are right. It's been a while since I looked at the Rider-Waite. I never liked it.
So, maybe Crowley did copy the idea of "Old Yang, Old Yin, Young Yang, and Young Yin" from the I-Ching. What do you think about it?

 

[crossfire]

You are right. It's been a while since I looked at the Rider-Waite. I never liked it.
So, maybe Crowley did copy the idea of "Old Yang, Old Yin, Young Yang, and Young Yin" from the I-Ching. What do you think about it?

Personally, I'm really not into gender stereotypes. Your mileage may vary.

 

[amorphous_constellation]

I am strict user of the Tarot of Marsielle. I am not against the use or effectiveness of other other decks, as what you bring to them makes them effective, and you can bring many interpretations to any deck, and they can work

That said, I do see a masculine, feminine, androgynous, and non-gender type energy at work, with the way I currently look at my deck. But those are just minor aspects or energies that I see when working with it. I often don't think about it like that, as I often seem to see that each card has unique qualities that seem higher up in the overall stack of qualities, that it might have

In any case, I guess I'll give an example, or two. The pentacles represent a class of people searching and refining the material world, possibly. So you can see that the court cards have people that search in every direction. Now, what happens when you pair the two personalities in that class, of the king and queen? Well neither face each other, so that is interesting. But if we they work together, they can cover more ground, they can pinpoint every point on the earth for more material to work with.

But maybe if they are together, things will seem sort of 'cold,' after all, they don't face each other. They work together in the world of material pursuit. They are business people. They don't contemplate why they are together all that much

Take another few examples, say that the king of pentacles is together with the queen of swords. The sword is representative of intelligence, and the tongue of Jesus, which represents archetypal wisdom, is the 'sword' in revelation. The sword talks; it is not a sword, it is a tongue. She puts the king of pentacles in check, she cuts the floating pentacle in half with her tongue, or hides it in her cloak, wisely. This is because the king may spend unwisely, and might become ravenously stupid in his search for glittering material