Monday, March 25, 2013

Food poisoning & tarot

A question came up in the pub earlier this week during a discussion of what bad hygiene practices we'd seen in catering: surely as magical people we should have ways to discern potential food poisoning. I wondered which tarot card would indicate that the food you're about to eat would give you projectile vomiting. One of us suggested the Moon, as meaning 'your food isn't what you think it is,' but we agreed that that would be more one food sold as another, horsemeat sold as beef, for example.
I asked the deck which illustrates this post what card would indicate food poisoning & got 8 of Swords. Interesting it's a sword. But not the 10, the peak of the 'swordiness'. In fact you can almost feel swords in the way you feel when you have food poisoning.
The deck is the Tarocco Indovino 1.96: strange name, I know, but it's taken me some effort to find it. Some time ago I posted a review of the Tarot Genoves (Fournier), a photographic reproduction of a 19th century double-ended gaming deck. This tarocco is interesting as being out of the same stable yet totally different. The cards are of the pattern which is often called Piemontese: the pictures on the Majors & Court cards are split in two & double ended, just as they are in the court cards of a modern deck of playing cards. This seems to take me as near as I am going to get to a tarot deck which is clearly a deck of playing cards, yet without the altered images of modern French tarot decks. The Piemontese style is clearly related to the Marseille style: the 2 of cups is the same & quirks such as the pentacles not having numbers on the cards are carried over.
But this tarot is different: it has meanings printed on the cards, one one way, another the other. This means that 'reversals' are possible because of the different meanings, in Italian only by the way. Italian isn't one of my languages but from what I can understand they are very traditional fortune-telling meanings. Of course these have the shortcomings that key words always have of over-simplification. The Devil is 'a bad time' pure & simple. More like the bender before the hangover, to my mind. Alec Satin has a spread to interview a tarot deck & find out what it's about. Being me, let's ask this deck some more pertinent questions & get to know it. These decks were born in the gutter between a pub & a fairground fortune teller's table; I like them because they give down & dirty answers to down & dirty questions!
What card would indicate the waiter has spat (or introduced another bodily substance) into your food? 8 of Wands (= he's not bothered about your health or his job, but will go his own way).
What card would indicate someone is about to do you over with defective goods or forged money? 7 of Swords. Those swords are being worked today!
What card would indicate the place you're about to eat in should be closed down? 6 of Wands. In RWS I always feel the horse in this card knows something the man doesn't & is almost winking at us. The keywords here, ironically are 'pazienza, periodo fermo'.
Tarocco Indovino 1.96 is published by Dal Negro. 22 + 56. Standard tarot. The cards are about the size of normal playing cards, longer than my poker-sized Bicycle cards. They feel & smell of cardboard. Having failed to get one from amazon.it I bought one on ebay.co.uk & it winged its way from Milan well within a week. Not perfect if you want to read in a RWS/Golden Dawn/Thoth/Crowley tradition, but good if you want to strike out on your own or make out your grandmother was a strega!
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