Complete show notes including transcript for Episode 1 of the Witching Half Hour or so…
In our very first episode of “The Witching Half Hour or so…” we spend a bit of time getting to know each other. I break down my training and how I practise for you. Then I walk through what I am planning to do in our reoccurring “Tarot Talk” segments. We have a tarot 202 style discussion on the Fool card. Focusing on 3 different decks; the Rider Waite Smith, Tarot de Marseille, and The Legacy of the Devine Tarot. We talk about the themes presented in the artwork of these decks and how they changed from the 1600s through the early occultist movements and into our present new age spirituality.
Here are the images I promised you, of the mean lynx 😉
- Article about the women behind our most common tarot deck, Pamala Coleman Smith
- Oldest complete deck we have Tarot de Marseilles
- Ciro Marchetti, creator of one of my favorite decks
Link to my YouTube “Tarot Talks” i’ve got more tarot videos there plus one just for this episode showing you the three decks I showcased today
- My website, you can book a reading with me through my booking page
- My Instagram and TicTok, great places to find out what I am up to you can find me under
@sprite.made.soaps @witching_halfhour…orso
Please like and subscribe 😊
Transcript
Welcome to the segment of the withing ½ hour … or so, where we talk about tarot. I’m gonna call it “Tarot Talks.” this is our first one together, so I think I’m just gonna babble a little bit about what I plan to do here. I wanna go through the high arcana with you one card at a time. Now, I’ve been reading tarot cards since I was 17, so that is a very long time, so I don’t wanna just do the 101 stuff that you can Google. I wanna try to dig a little deeper with the cards I wanna talk about some of the symbolism behind the tarot and some of the older decks that aren’t as popular. I wanna do some 202 stuff with you. What do you think about that? I think it’s gonna be pretty fun!
So let’s dive into this, to start off I want you to know that the cards have really changed a lot overtime and I imagine most of you are familiar with the Rider Waite Smith deck. Yes, I call it the Waite Smith deck because I wanna give a great big shout out to Pamela Coleman Smith, who actually penned the cards and did all those illustrations when I talk about that deck. OK so, that’s the deck that most of our modern decks are based off of. She’s the one who put all of those cool illustrations on all of the pip cards, before Pamela Coleman Smith did all those lovely illustrations, the pip cards in our tarot cards were just like pictures of cups and swords and wands. So, the four of cups had four cups on it, not someone staring reflectively into a pond. The oldest deck that we still have artistic copies of is the Tarot de Marseille. (I think I am pronouncing that right. But I might not be, sorry if I get it wrong. I’m terrible at pronouncing Italian words) It’s from the Italian resonance, like I was saying and it dates back to around the 1600s. It’s thought that we had tarot cards in like the late 1490s in 1500s, we just don’t have any copies of those. If you follow the history, there was a game people played similar to bridge and really wealthy people an courtiers, kings and Queens would have tarot decks drawn up with pictures of their family in them. I think I’ve heard and read that there still copies of some of those around in collections in the world. But the whole deck that we have is the Tarot de Marseille it is from the 1600s. That’s the deck I actually learned off of and I’m going to refer to some of the art in that deck. My personal deck collection contains a lot of contemporary decks some of them really closely reflect the Rider Waite Smith deck, some of them are their own artists renditions. I’m gonna talk about some of those, just some of my favorite ones. There’s a few other decks that I don’t really own a copy of but I think they’re pretty important. One of them is the Thoth deck, that one has some interesting things about it. And I will probably talk about that. Oh and for everything I’m going to be making sure in my show notes that I have a link to my YouTube channel, so any cards I talk about you’ll be able to go there click on it and kind of get more of a visual. And you know you might even want to go ahead and subscribe to that Channel so you don’t miss out on anything.
One of my favorite ways of thinking about the higher arcana is as a journey that the fool takes to enlightenment. So let’s start with the fool card and lets get to know him. Along with the Rider Waite Smith deck and the Tarot de Marseille; I’ll be using one of my favorite decks to read from that I bring to all the psychic fairs I work, The Legacy of the Divine Tarot. And that is penned by another Italian name I have a hard time with, Ciro Marchetti, again I’ll put it in the show notes guys ’cause I’m probably butchering this amazing guy’s name.
So we’ll start with the Tarot de Marseille, the card is an image of a man in colourful clothing. If you remember this deck was illustrated in the 1600s, so it’s a fair assumption to say that the attire of the man in the image would reflect a court jester or fool. He’s garishly dressed with a silly kind of hat on his head, in some of the versions of this deck I’ve seen, he’s actually wearing like a pointy jester kinda hat. He carries a sack tide to a stick, like seriously hobo style its slung over his shoulder and in his other hand is a walking stick. And he appears to be on a journey of sorts. He’s walking away from us in this picture and he’s turning to look over his shoulder. Now behind him is a small dog, well some sources say it’s a lynx, and it’s jumping on his leg and it’s pulling down his pants. Now I’ve even seen variations that show the dog or lynks or whatever really laying it into the fool. Like biting him on his leg and like drawing blood from him. And there’s one, where the animal has like pulled his pants all the way the ground and the Fool’s genitals are exposed hanging down between his legs and the animal looks pretty vicious, if you know what I mean. I will definitely have that in the show notes for you.
So now the Waite Smith deck has a very different image. Kay, the fool is depicted on a pathway walking more towards us and off of a cliff! Now he still holds a satchel tied to a stick, but the sun is out and its shining on him, and he looks so hopeful almost like a Disney character ready to burst into song. His clothing it’s lost like that but it’s still sort of a formal renaissance style and it brings to mind more the role of the page. There’s a real youthfulness about him in this card there is also an animal in the illustration but it brought us alongside the full almost like a pet or a friend.
Now for our contemporary deck, I’ve chosen the Legacy of the Divine Tarot and looking at this picture it’s different again. The jester look is back, keeping with the contemporary style of this deck though he’s more like in a cirque du soleil kind of a look. He’s got this really cool red and purple bodysuit with like a fun hood and mask. He’s depicted above the earth in space balancing on an hourglass and there’s like this rainbow arc around him displaying the first set of cards in the high arcana. He still has a little dog companion there and it’s kinda clinging to a ribbon, an like looks really playful. So what I find interesting is that in all three renditions through the ages of this card, they all have an animal on it. And I will talk about that, I wanna look at this symbology around the dog and the natural environment. But before I do let’s just go over what this card means divination wise when it shows up in a spread.
The fool is often calling on us to let go of conventions, to trust the journey we are on, to let go, to be brave, to head out into the unknown. The fool is us. He is the uninitiated making his way through the path of enlightenment. I just wanna say how much I would love to see the Fool move towards a more androgynous expression of gender. The fool is all of us, so I don’t think it needs to be male or female or genderized at all. As a culture we are evolving, we are moving into a place of acceptance around gender identity and gender expression and sexual expression. And I think that as we evolve we see the reflection of our culture in the artwork of our decks. And although we’ve caught up with a lot more decks that show people of colour and we’ve dropped some of the name of culture, nomeclature around, nomenclature around …or how do you say that? We’ve gotten rid of some of the names or change the names around knight and page and king and queen. We have decks that are much more inclusive in that way but we need to bring in more diversity still and the fool is a perfect place. The fool is the initiates the fool is everyone and no one. I mean come on it doesn’t even have a number!
When you think of that meaning both of these two cards makes sense, especially for their time in history. In the 16th century it was the Fool of the court who had the freedom to tease the courtiers and expose their follies, like a trickster god, wise in his jest. Even when his pants were down somehow, he was not the joke and he saw through conventions. Smith adjusted the Fool’s point of view from looking away to looking forward. Both Smith and Waite were active in the occultist movements of the 1900s and studied with the Golden Dawn, their Fool is a depiction of the initiate beginning a journey. OK let’s have a look at that pup and talk about how the wilds were seen in the different times that these two decks were penned. You’ve got the Tarot de Marseille in the 1600s, the point of view is that the wilds are really against you. We have the Fool out there traveling the world, outside of the court, he’s left the castle, he’s on his own and it’s more like the world is against him. Contrasting to the early cultist; they have the dog as your friend, the wilds and nature are not your enemy, they’re not what you’re battling. We’re divining more and using the tarot cards more to dive into our inner psyche, our inner life and our inner landscapes. And you can really see those two points of view when you break it down and look at the artwork and what age they are coming from. Now the animal starts out pretty menacing and kind of not very nice but our early cultists decided that the dog was the Fool’s ally. Instead of nipping at and exposing the Fools bottom to the world, the pups become like a friend on this journey. Instead of it being the animal, the danger presented in the Waite Smith deck is represented by the cliff. And it’s funny to me that I always thought there was a rainbow in Pamela Coleman Smith illustration, that the Fool was like leaping off the cliff onto it and it’s in writing this, that I saw I was totally wrong. I honestly don’t know what deck I’ve seen that in but it’s out there; like if you guys know what deck that is, like shoot me a message or like put a little comment because I don’t know what deck I’ve seen that in, an I was pretty sure it was in this one. But anyway, in both of these cards we can see the idea being presented that the fool is ill prepared, they are ignoring the circumstances, however, in the Tarot de Marseille the fool seems a target of fate, the wild he finds himself in are menacing. They either mean him harm or will expose his folly for what or will expose his folly for what it is. In the Waite Smith deck, the fool seems more foolhardy and innocent, with his head in the clouds as he dances and plays on the cliff edge. His faithful dog is almost acting as a guide. That’s the whole message behind this card, that the fool even in their foolishness, even feeling unprepared is answering the call. They are setting out, they are adventuring. The whole meaning behind the card is to let go, to heed the heroes call and begin something with that unknowing open heart of the foolish and naïve.
I chose the legacy of the divine because the modern depiction is a beautiful blend of the two traditional decks. The Fool is powerful in this deck and stands outside of time, not having a number between 1 and 21 he really is off the earth. He’s ready to meet the archetypes the cards represent ’cause they’re splayed out before him. And he’s back in his jester clothes. That idea that he can see through the masks and the different fronts people put up, ready to dive into the deeper layers and meanings of life. I like how the legacy of the divine’s Fool is still playful and has that trickster air about him. Especially in the costume and the way he is really dancing there is a joyfulness about him, a willingness to be foolish, a willingness to learn and still encapsulates that court jester who knows everyone’s secrets kind of air. It brings to mind some of those trickster kind of ideas. Examining our own follies and our own faults, and looking at where we are getting in our own way and stopping our own evolution. So, you can see when we look deeply into the artwork of the different decks in the different ages, they really do reflect the time they came from, however the message doesn’t completely change. It evolves with our culture as we evolve.
So there you have it guys, that’s my little tarot talk on the Fool. I hope you guys like this segment. This is what I really wanna do with this, is dive into stuff and talk about things. Please leave me a comment leave me a message, tell me if this helps you in your readings, I’d really love to know, OK. And yeah I hope you guys enjoy this, and I hope this gives you another perspective on your Fool card when you’re doing readings. I hope you enjoyed our half hour or so together talking about witchy things. It was mainly all about the tarot today. I really hope to bring you more topics in each episode. Today just because we were getting to know each other we just got through one thing. So I hope you’ll subscribe to this little podcast and that we can spend some time hanging out in your ear buds together. I’m going to be putting up show notes which will have links to my socials, some of the stuff I’m doing out there in the world, my YouTube channel. Which will have of course, as I promised you, a little video showcasing the decks I used today and giving credit to the beautiful artist.. beautiful artistry in these decks. I will also include a clickable transcription, so that you can read this if you’d like. I you want to book a reading with me, you can pop over to my website. There will be a link in the show notes for that as well. OK my lovely, you have a wonderful time thanks for joining me for this witching half hour or so ❤
Jodi Anne 
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