When someone teaches someone else the traditional meanings of the cards, they often don’t waste too much time giving them a rundown of all the applications of the one or two keywords they give them, especially at the beginning. Keep in mind that in many traditions, at least in Italy, the initial instructions for card reading are passed down on Christmas Eve, so the explanations must be quick enough to fit into one evening where you have plenty of other stuff to do.

Usually, the initial instruction is followed up by a more thorough explanation later, but the new reader is also expected to “lavorare le carte”, literally to “work the cards“. This means that while they are being given a vocabulary (the keywords) and some grammar and syntax (the various spreads and combinations) they are supposed to develop their own language.

Think about it: we all speak English on this blog, yet each of us speaks a different version of it, not only because some of us are native speakers while some aren’t, and not just because some come from the US, some from GB, some from Australia, etc. but also, and especially, because each speaker of a language has their own slightly different version of it, owing to their character, personal history, experiences, education, talents and many other factors.

This may sound like an admission that language is random and infinitely pliable at will, but it isn’t. Your own language is an emanation of you as a person, but who you are as a person is not fully under your control. In fact, the diviner and occultist in me believes that it is only very slightly under your control.

What is true for regular speech is true for the speech of the cards. Once you are given the meanings of the cards, it is not a matter of reinventing them, but rather of discovering how the meanings work for you, of understanding what your particular, individual dialect is. This is a never-ending process, because the language of divination is a difficult second language to learn and because there is no human native that can help us.

But let’s discuss an example of how you take a single keyword and turn it into a web of interrelated meanings. In the Bolognese Tarot, which is my current obsession and is quickly becoming one of my favorite systems, the Queen of Coins is called “the truth”. There. If you were sitting on grandma’s lap on Christmas Eve and she were passing the meanings down to you, that’s what she would say. The truth. Period.

The truth is a complex thing, and throughout history different people have understood it to be something different. In itself, it is an abstract concept. After receiving it, you need to make it concrete, i.e., you need to discover how the word “truth” is used in your particular divination dialect. Let’s give it a try (and this is my dialect, obviously. It may or may not overlap with yours).

The truth is what truthful people tell, so obviously the card qualifies people as truthful, dependable, reliable. Next to a person card, the person will be all these things, probably.

Once you know the truth about something, you know about it. Knowledge is therefore another aspect of truth. Who has knowledge? Professors, for sure, and people who have studied something. One might counter that so many graduates today are ignorant fools filled with prejudices they never questioned. And one would be right. Archetypally, though, the connection (the ‘signature’) holds, similarly to how astrologically scholars are ruled by Mercury, even if scholars are often up their asses.

Study, teaching, learning, explaining, science, discovering, bringing to light, intellectual (or at least not physical) occupations seem to also be concepts that beautifully complement that lonely keyword “truth”. But all these aren’t just descriptions for abstract knowledge. What is a less abstract form of knowledge? Expertise, for sure. If you call the plumber, he may not be able to tell you how the categories of Aristotle’s logic apply to your toilet, but he sure knows how to stop it puking out scum. And that’s a good deal more helpful. So a plumber with the truth on his side is certainly a plumber you want to hire.

Today, the word wisdom is almost forgotten, or relegated to describing dubious practices with no scientific stamp of approval. But wisdom used to be deeply connected to knowledge. The Queen of Coins, therefore, surely describes the ability to lead your life the right way, or to lead others the right way.

Especially in the West, the idea of truth has always been connected with the ability to see. “I see” we say, when we understand something. This may sound shallow, but it actually has its roots in the old Greek notion that the truth is what the mind sees beyond the illusions of the senses. The word “idea”, which is what we have in our minds and which we hope to be a truthful representation of reality, comes from the root ‘vid-‘, which is the same root as the latin ‘videre’, to see. So the Queen of Coins stands for sight and for the eyes, and for windows, which bring light (understanding) into the home and from which we see how the world outside looks like. And so on and so forth.

These associations can be discovered by practice and by decoding the combinations that are usually passed down. Again, it is not a matter of making up. It is, literally, a process of discovery.

MQS