Picking the Deck..

So... deciding which deck to pick for these sorts of projects is always the hardest decision.
Do you go with a deck that has less symbolism, or that has hundreds of symbols? That is Rider Waite based or Thoth or even Tarot de Marseilles...
All of these are valuable thoughts and questions that are faced the tarot collector on a new project - and that's only if they look at decks already in their collection! If you start looking for the 'ideal' new deck for the project you can see how hours are easily lost in the art of picking a deck.

The picking of the deck though is an arbitrary process - it doesn't really matter WHAT deck you pick as long as you pick a deck. I however, often like to think about the deck that is going to be the ideal companion to the journey... which deck offers the me the best 'friend' to take along the journey.

So, I pulled a card from some of my decks I thought might be good for the job. I asked for an outcome card of our relationship together through this Tarot Life process...

Top Left - Right...Tarot of Vampires, The Wild Unknown, The Thoth
Bottom Left - Right .... Mary El, The Via, the Tarot of the Sidhe

And so.... thinking about these cards and the decks themselves I actually began to whittle it down to two.. The Via and the Mary El, or their cards, the High Priestess and the Moon.
These are interesting cards, do you go with person who receives and interprets the subconcious, that asks you to bridge that gap between the Divine and your ego, your mundane self and walk a life as the two united... or do I pick the deck that gave me the Moon, the revelation of secret knowledge, of the shadows in the darkness that will slowly come to light, but there is much 'more' in that darkness than first meets the eye and am I really to undergo that process??


So... to help me some more I picked up my latest Lenormand deck, the Gilded Reverie Lenormand to help me some more, combined with my 'Destiny' card from the two decks..

The Mary El shows me that the Woman (me) will have the key to unlock something within me... that there are things to learn and to reveal, this echoes the feeling of the Moon card which is about searching, unlocking, discovering things in the darkness and bringing it into Light.
But, is that necessarily a good thing? Will it be overwhelming?

The Via is covered by the Woman, who is looking towards the Via cards, and through them to the Cross. In the Lenormand system the Cross is a card of obstacles, and ordeals.. however the greater 'wisdom' of this card is that the suffering stems from the time we resist the path that is in our highest Divine Good. When we resist the change, the knowledge and the wisdom we feel pain and suffering. We 'bear' the cross rather than become transformed. And when I look at this cross, with the Destiny card from the Via I see something that 'clicks' of the Divine light and how I should focus on that rather than my thoughts and the 'logical' side of things, and in that I can perhaps become the High Priestess card.

So, I picked the Via for this project... especially for this stage. We will see how things go what happens next month!