16/04/25
i've been looking into el gran tarot esoterico. not sure how much of what i've found is eudes picard and how much is maritxu guler's synthesizing of the 19th century occultists overall.
so far i found out:
picard was primarily an astrologer and the theory is he assigned the suits according to the houses corresponding to each element. so while cancer is a water /sign/, he takes the 4, 8, and 12th houses, sees that 8 and 12 are the worst, and so assigns water to swords. houses 3, 7, and 11 talk of positive sociability so he assigns those air signs to the cups suit.
someone also mentioned something about the aristotelian qualities of the elements, although they were saying that air is wet while water is cold where.... all i see is pairs of qualities? so i'm not sure where they got that from, how picard "reinstated" an earlier elemental assosiation, restoring wetness to swords... you could make the same argument of switching swords to fire (a more common occurence), if the choices for air are "hot and wet".
he was also a fan of derivative houses. which makes me want to use melancholic's astrological spread with the deck.
i've also found out that the deck follows GAR's tree of life, if you're into mixing k/qabalah in there, i didn't dig deeper. except the reassigning of the elements while keeping the yod - heh - vav - heh associations changes the elemental order from fire water air earth to fire air water earth - the one already in use in, say, geomancy. why not the astrological order of fire earth air water?
someone stated with certainty that picard saw majors as causes and minors as effects.
there was also talk of piobb's influence (through maritxu guler), how the 22 majors coresspond to the 22 regular polygons you can inscribe in a circle. not sure what that is... i've been doing some circle inscribing a few months back, for the numbers 1-10 and got to 20. and the wikipedia page even has a chart for concave and star polygons that also shows 20. (if you deduct the polygons of 11 and 12 vertices. there's no way to add only 2 more polygons by including either the 11 or 12. maybe it's accounting for the numbers 1 and 2 which can't make a polygon but do appear in the tarot??) ohh ok i see, in an excerpt from jean carteret they mean you can divide 360 evenly into 22 different polygons. so they list 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 180 and 360. i assume it's missing 120, that would make 22.
piobb assigns the court cards to geomantic figures (aha! the geomantic elemental order tracks! but which court is which figure? are they determined by inner/outer elemental rulers? i found something online but i'll check with greer in his book.) the minors he sees as arithmetic number "divided into units, tens, hundreds, and thousands" depending on the suit.
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also hoping this will lead to my better understanding of the spanish tarot tradition. an article i read mentioned the spanish stuck mostly to joseph maxwell's correspondences (vs the french tradition and eliphas levi, even though maxwell was french himself?). never heard of him so looking forward to poking around. there's both a spanish and french version of maxwell's book on my local amazon... but just a quick glance online already reveals that his elemental associations to the suits are different from picard's/guler's. so idk if i'll be delving much deeper. especially since the english version is hard to find, expensive, and "truncated". the french is easier to find but apparently quite "brutal" to get through, especially in the numerology section. if it's brutal for a native speaker... probably won't have much luck myself.
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at first my gran tarot esoterico search meant making the most of a spanish youtube channel with auto generated and auto translated captions but it's uh pretty hard to follow along as it's two people interrupting each other and you still have to listen while reading to catch familiar foreign names that will just not get translated/written down properly and jumble up the subtitles into nonsense. so far they said the minors deviate a little bit from picard, slightly elaborated, while the majors completely deviate.
then i did find guler's original accompanying book to the gran tarot esoterico on scribd, so maybe that will be easier. the current version of the deck just comes with the standard fournier booklet (which i never understood - maybe learning more about the spanish system will fix that?) still need to do my best with an auto translator though.
some quotes:
"The imaginative gymnastics provided by the tarot is personal and non -transferable."
"The major arcane, composed of 22 symbolic letters (cards?) The first seven are related to the intellectual life of the consultant, the seven second to moral life, and seven thirds to material life; The twentieth first letter is transitive. That is, the letters of the main arcane represent the physical and spiritual forces that affect man: ailments, diseases, death, war, strength, power, love and religion." i think 21 is assigned to the fool, because there's 20 - the cycle instead of judgment, then the fool unnumbered, then the world with the nr 22.