A Lost Tradition, rediscovered?

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 05 Dec 2002, and now archived in the Forum Library.

dangerdork	05 Dec 2002
I was studying Hindu art recently, and noticed that some of the gods, particularly Krishna, are portrayed with skin the same shade of blue as I arbitrarily chose for my High Priestess image ( http://www.geocities.com/dangerdorx/ ). One of the programmers I work with grew up in the Hindu tradition in rural India, so I asked her about the significance of the blue skin... her answer was too involved to relate here (bear with me), but a long conversation ensued about the tarot. She was not at all familiar with tarot cards, but after I had gone through a long-winded discussion of archetypes, history of the tarot, traditions of esoteric mysticism, etc., when I mentioned divination and the tarot she told me the following: In rural India (NOT seen in the cities or towns, only small villages in her region), there are occasional small travelling carnivals and festivals we Americans might relate to county fairs, and associated with those are sometimes colorfully dressed people who play musical instruments... (I knew the gypsies were originally a tribe who CAME from India, I thought at this point, but I didn't know there were any still there...) So suppose, my friend tells me, your cow is lost. You go to this man at the roadside carnival table, and you tell him your problem. He has a parrot in a cage and these cards with pictures on them (!) He whispers to the parrot, and opens its cage. Instead of flying away, the parrot hops down onto the table, and picks up one of the cards with its beak! The magician examines the card, in deep concentration, and tells you where your cow has gone. HOW COOL IS THAT??? So, I wonder, have the gypsies come full circle, and brought the tarot or its cousin BACK to rural India from whence they came hundreds and hundreds of years before? Or is this evidence that this tradition originated here with the original gypsies, as has been speculated (and usually discredited). Maybe this practice has continued all along as a quaint and obscure rural tradition, unnoticed by city folk and Westerners more familiar with the modern traditions of the tarot... Does anybody know anything about any of this? and where can I get THAT deck??? ;)

JC	05 Dec 2002
I've been told you can find fortune tellers in Hong Kong's night market who do the same thing with parakeets and canaries. I don't know if the Cantonese use tarot cards, but I doubt it. I'd bet they use some form of the I Ching or mah jong themed cards. I don't know what kind of deck the Hindu fortunetellers would use. Is the reason Krishna's skin is blue because they want to represent eternity? I read once that it's meant to remind the veiwer of the eternal sky.

dangerdork	05 Dec 2002
She explained several reasons that had been told to her, and that was the main one - the blue of the sky representing Omnipresence and eternity, blue as the ocean is blue.... That's interesting about Hong Kong with the birds too... one thing that intrigued me about this was that she pointed out you NEVER see it in cities or larger towns, only in rural areas and the smallest villages. This would seem to indicate to me a very old tradition surviving, instead of a relatively more recent, imported one being introduced - which you would expect to see FIRST in the ports and big cities....

allibee	05 Dec 2002
or maybe that's where our quaint English tradition came from, of calling our Royals, and general nobility, blue - blooded? I don't know when that tradition started over here, but it could quite easily have begun during the empirical days of the Raj in India???? allibee

Keslynn	05 Dec 2002
My aunt lived in Singapore for while and she went to a fortuneteller like that. My scandalized mother told me about it so I didn't hear any other details except for the parrot and the papers. Seems to be a fairly widespread thing. I wonder where something like that originated. :) Kes

Myrrha	05 Dec 2002
Once and only once my dear ferret picked a card out of a spread, shook it in the "kill-the-prey" manner and put it back, of course I gave that card extra weight in the reading. A friend of mine had an idea for paperclip divination, where you have a small monkey tip over a box of paperclips and then do a reading from the pictures they make. I really like the idea of having help from an animal in readings. Myrrha

juice	06 Dec 2002
!. The royal family/ies of europe have had a high incidence of hemophelia (the bleeders disease) for centuries now. It has been noted in several of my classes that that is the reason for the term blue-blood. 2. Tarot is old enough that the small town tradition of birds and pictures could have started in Itally/France and spread as a human walks to India or anywhere.

Pollux	06 Dec 2002
Quote: Originally posted by juice The royal family/ies of europe have had a high incidence of hemophelia (the bleeders disease) for centuries now. It all started because of Queen Victoria... ;) I think I don't like my genetics classes... :( I heard of this explanation for blue-blood too. Quote: Tarot is old enough that the small town tradition of birds and pictures could have started in Itally/France and spread as a human walks to India or anywhere. I am not so sure I get this, juice... could you explain again? Please! :D

HudsonGray	06 Dec 2002
Oh good, blue is for the ocean & sky. To me the color always looked like the person died. You know, where the blood sinks to the lower parts of the bodies & the rest of it looks ultra white with the blue cast.... I've been reading too many murder mysteries & watching too much CSI.

Kyrielle	06 Dec 2002
What I've heard is that "blue blooded" came from the old belief that noblewomen should keep as pale a complexion as possible in order to be beautiful. The very palest complexions tended to bring out the color of the bluish blood as it runs through veins. Or so I've heard. Could be wrong. -- Kyrielle

The A Lost Tradition, rediscovered? thread was originally posted on 05 Dec 2002 in the Talking Tarot board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Talking Tarot, or read more archived threads.