Thanks R.A., great graphic.R.A. Hendley wrote:Well, if we accept the idea of the trump cycle as a 'moral allegory', then the authority and basis of this moral 'dogma' is simply the trumps themselves. We see three clear 'teachings' here - courage, fairness, and moderation. Fairly strait forward.
The main challenge here is to explain myself without looking like an extremist.Mary Greer wrote:Just this one thought brings up so many issues. The first is 'who is defines what's moral?' I've had/seen a few readings in which the reader got very preachy about what was the 'right' thing to do, based on that reader's own extremely narrow sense of the morality implied within a card.
Mary, I suspect that your question, as legitimate and common as it is, may be founded on a false conundrum. This links contains a list of Human Universals, also know as epigenetic rules. Those are human traits consistently shared by all cultures in all countries in the world.
http://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyph ... nivers.htm
Not only “distinguishing right and wrong”, “good and bad distinguished”, “sanctions for crimes against the collectivity” or “self is responsible” are common concepts shared by all cultures in the planet, but for those who may argue that the notions of right or wrong may vary from culture to culture, we can also see how the list contains several traits alluding to conducts we define as moral, like “rape proscribed” and the “ability to overcome some fears” or objected as immoral, like “reciprocity, negative (revenge, retaliation)” and “incest between mother and son unthinkable or tabooed”, which are also shared by all cultures in the world.
Who says what is moral? We do, at an individual level, on a daily basis. But our moral choices aren’t individually acquired nor are they unique. They conform with patterns shared by the society at large, and as the human universal shows, by the world at large. Morality is not a mechanism for promoting judgement and instilling shame but a set of simple tools for us to function . In terms of the tarot, I know of no culture that praises cowardice, celebrates injustice and rejoices in intemperance. No culture I am aware of trust imprudence, dismiss hope or punishes charity. The problem is not in our adherence or rejections to these principles, but in what we do with them in the context of a reading. There is an enormous distance between reminding someone to face the reversals of fortune with Strength and telling someone “you should pack your bags and leave that SOB”. It is not about telling people which actions undertake in their lives, but about reminding them that there is a bottom line in terms of what we should expect from themselves. (Here is, BTW, where I see readings being closer to homiletics than to psychology).
In other words, our insistence on stating that “no one can tell us what is right or wrong” is somehow fallacious because our default sense ‘social equilibrium’ tends to be in agreement with those who share our cultural space, and more likely than not, also with the world at large.
I will reply to your other points tomorrow.
Thanks,
EE