I'm nearing the end of a week's holiday, & it's been a real holiday, which was much needed - a diversion into a different place, & without the need to do any 'tasks'.
However, needless to say the work of witch never ends & I've found a new project to get my head around. I recently discovered, while looking at pictures of vintage tarot decks on ebay, that there are such things as kipper cards. I had not heard of them, & indeed suspect they are all but unheard of in English-speaking circles, so this post, which I'm hoping will be the first of a series on these cards as I get my head round them, is purely intended to get me in at the vanguard of what I'm confidently predicting will be the next big trend in divination! Both larger & smaller Etteilla decks have been done to death, the Lenormand craze has been going on for some years now, we all know about Waite & Smith, but the name of Kipper is not so well known.
The contents of this post will be largely based on the little white book - actually printed on a number of the cards - that came with the Original Kipper Cards I bought from amazon.co.uk after I found they existed, and the German wikipedia page on the cards: of course interwoven with a lot of my own thoughts & opinions. I fully expected I'd have to get the cards from amazon.de & was pleasantly surprised to find they only cost £3.48 & were eligible for free delivery. Say what you like, short of making your own, this is the cheapest method of divination you're going to buy off the peg.
If I may confess to a hint of altruism, I'm hoping that my exploration of these cards will make it available in English - I suspect for the first time. I am hampered by the fact that I don't speak a word of German so am limited to translating the information line-by-line, using an online translator, & we all know how smooth & hassle-free that is.
The introduction to the cards indicates a few important principles of reading kipper cards: numbers 1 & 2 indicate the male & the female querent respectively. Apart from that the cards have individual meanings - but in a reading they are heavily influenced by surrounding cards, the cards' relationships to each other. The most important thing in reading the cards is combination. Combination is all.
There is a refreshing lack of pseudohistory about them - although they are supposed to be similar to the gypsy cards, whose history is totally unknown to me. I am not aware of who Kipper was, apart from that she was one of these renowned fortune tellers. They first appeared in 1890, sold by the stationer Matthias Seidlein in Munich. That edition is essentially the one still sold & that I bought, with one slight difference noted below.
Seidlein released further editions in 1900 & 1910, inscribed Drawn & published by F Kipper. After the F X Schmid company acquired the rights to the cards in 1920 (there is a refreshing Germanic roundness about the dates in this history) a technical error resulted in the first 22 cards being printed reversed.
However a new edition has corrected this mistake. The rights to the originals are now owned by the company ASS Altenburger, since 2000. Spoiling the rounded figures in this history, a completely new version, the Mystic Kipper, came out in 2006.
The deck consists of 36 cards, a number which places it well in the tradition of European fortune-telling. The Petit Etteilla has 36, as do the gypsy fortune-telling cards & the Lenormand cards. The only one of these three I haven't had a go at is the gypsy cards: I'm hoping I do better with the Kipper cards than the Petit Etteilla & the Lenormand, neither of which do anything for me. Incidentally there's a simple reason for the reappearance of 36 cards: before the growth of interest in fortune telling in the 18th century, & the occult surge of the 19th century, both of which led to the proliferation of tarot & oracle decks that we know today, you had a simpler choice of two divination tools. Either you could make one yourself: no shame in that, the only danger may be that it's too individual or eccentric. Perhaps it's a little late in this post, but I meant to express the opinion I've come to, which is that the purpose of divination tools is to open up your own perception as a practitioner, so that ultimately you don't need divination tools at all.
The other choice from making your own was to adapt something to divination, & there was a great tradition of fortune-telling the with the shortened piquet card deck, which plainly influenced all these oracle systems. The tarot - with its more luxurious 78 possibilities made for a more luxurious divination tool & attracted more outrageous stories to itself!
If I had to think of a word for these short fortune-telling decks it would be bourgeois: the things they depict happening are solid & respectable. Even the pictures on the Kipper cards depict respectable backgrounds: yes, I know there's a prison, but it seems to me part of an ordered society. The furniture is solid & the wallpaper embodies respectable 19th century aspirations. If Kipper was born anywhere, it was in a respectable sitting room, not a Romany caravan or a tavern.
More anon.
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Thank you for this history lesson! Very interesting. Kipper is a deck that I have real contact with, it's truthful absolute, it takes no prisoners. I like the old deck, I made one myself because I wanted one and had no money. You have a very nice page!
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