Question: Astrologian Deck and the Twelve

[Cleretic]

Which is why I asked. "Why is Nald'thal the god of trade when that's being given to Nophica/Althyk?". Not because I can't bullsh** my way through it, but because it's just weird how this lore association is being placed elsewhere.

For that one: consider that in Greek myth, there were separate gods for the domains of money and riches. The latter was Hades and specifically referred to things like mined gemstones and ore, the former was Plutus (and is where we get words like 'plutocrat'). These can be considered separate things.

Nald'thal's domain is currently seen as trade, although the epigraph we translated in 6.3 suggests that the origin was specifically as the domain of the subterrane and the riches within, much like the Greek Hades. The Deck of Sixty table specifically gives Earth/the Bole merchants, as in the people. Given Nophica is described as a goddess of abundance and the harvest, I'd say it actually makes complete sense that some would put merchants under her, as people who harvest and have an abundance of riches.

Similarly, you could separate other things like how Halone is seen as the goddess of battle, despite soldiers being instead over in Wind/the Arrow. THe verb is her domain, but the people enacting it are someone else's.

[Lyth]

I'm not overly familiar with the lore around the AST deck, but in the absence of any official interpretations of individual cards, it would help if we knew how the Deck of 60 is derived from and inspired by Tarot.

Let's take the Spire of Byregot, which we see in the opening cutscene of Aglaia. The Spire is a reference to the Heaven and Hell of Lightning. Byregot built the Spire out of a meteorite, and Rhalgr charged it with lightning. Architechs and revolutionaries live in its Heaven, while warmongers and slumlords live in its Hell, rained upon by lightning charged fragments from the comet.

Lightning works out particularly nicely because you have this dyad of an astrally associated builder god and an umbrally associated destroyer god coming together in a card that seems directly inspired by the Tower, from the Tarot Major Arcana. Symbolically it's a reference to the dangers of hubris and the fragility of our lofty aspirations.

From what I understand, the modern Tarot decks themselves are a fusion of two different decks, with deck that served as inspiration for the Minor Arcana having spread to Europe from the Egyptian Mamluk decks. Card games often use a priority/trump system to determine the relative value of different suits, which is how each suit became associated with a different social class (Cups/Clergy being closest to God, then Swords/Nobility, then Coins/Merchants, then Clubs/Laborers). We see a similar priority in modern card games as well, with Bridge following a Spades (Swords)/Hearts (Cups)/Diamonds (Coins)/Clubs (Wands).

You can see in constructing the table for the Deck of 60's Minor Arcana they've used the Tarot as a starting guideline, but have needed to expand it out to six elements instead of four. Some entries, like Cups/Clergy/Water are identical. Others are split across two (Air/(Nobility + Military) into Air/Military and Lightning/Nobility.)

In some cases this works out quite cleanly, as in the case of lightning (the rulers and architects of our society). In other cases, it's less clear. Halone's spear carved out the ice palace in Euphrosyne, with heroes and gallant knights living within its walls and with cowards and deserters in the hell below its icicles. But instead of being associated with the military, Ice/Spear is associated with chains and prisoners.

I think the difficulty in trying to extrapolate how this deck works is that parts of the interpretation provided around the deck in that table seem to follow what we know about the twelve, while other parts of the table seem to diverge from what we might expect lorewise in favor of fitting with the Tarot system it was derived from. You could make a case that, over the years, inhabitants of Eorzea introduced their own interpretations into the mix, accounting for some degree of discrepancies. But it's hard to tell which interpretation you should go with.

Either way, it would be interesting to know how they developed the lore around the deck of 60, and how the design of Tarot decks inspired its creation.