Tarot card purity

[DrZoidberg]

So I am delving deep into hermeticism and tarot now. Something I've always been fascinated by. The idea of universal archetypes and symbols that we can connect with is cool. Using the cards in a ritual way to break out of set patterns of thought, I think is a healthy excercise. But there's one thing I keep running into that I don't understand.

Jodorowski used the Marseille deck and kept going on about how it's perfect. He then slams Crowley and the early 20th century occultists because they mix and match diffrent spiritual systems. Crowleys deck uses a lot of Kabbalah, Egyptian, Hundu and Buddhist symbols. Sweeney argues that the problem with it is that we need to know these philosophical systems well for the deck to be useful. But the Marseille deck is a deeply Christian deck. We don't live in a Christian world any longer. God is dead. Today we worship Amazon, Tesla and Alibaba. So I don't see the problem of opening it up and mixing and matching.

And it's not that serious. Right? The point of the symbols is just to jog our perceptions a bit. A kind of Rorchach test. All the tarot masters agree that you will only see in the cards what you are already bringing. You're not going to see anything that isn't within you already.

Anyway... I just don't get this purity aspect. It seems to be a big thing among contemporary tarot practicioners and I just don't get it. As far as I can see it's just asserted over and over without much of a justification.

Do you have an opinion on this?

 

[lostone]

I go along with the idea that the purity of the cards lies in the eye of the beholder. We are all free to pick and choose which practicioners to take seriously (or not) and how seriously to take them. Having grown up in a creaky old house, and also an avid reader and fan of of classic mythologies, such ideas also have an enduring fascination for me. If one wishes to mix and match various spiritual systems, and doing so pleases them to do so, I have every right to reject their ideas, but what gives me any right to pillory them for doing so? Only when they use their ideas to bilk gullible people out of their money , or to control them in other ways, does it become an issue. Live and let live.