Curses and Naipes, 16th century
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2279/is_n149/ai_17782418/pg_12/?tag=content;col1
p12-13
Maureen Flynn
1995
She mentions the use of curses and association with card games (Naipes) and why it might have been so closely aligned -- perhaps this is of interest of how or why such was more common practice:
Best regards
Cerulean
What follows is an excerpt from Ms. Flynn's 1995 paper: (I can find the text, but not the title yet--hopefully this is of interest:
Levy-Bruhl's analysis of the religious credulity behind traditional gambling sheds light upon many of the apparently contradictory or duplicitous statements uttered by Spanish Catholics over naipes. It suggests that the cries of these anxious men against the Christian God were probably not so much repudiations of the role of the divine in their lives, as defensive blows designed to hurt the very supernatural force which appeared to have turned against them and left them losers in a world of hardship. This would explain why the name of God was not absent from the gaming-house, but omnipresent and ready to fall from the lips of players abandoned in the sport of life. To Spaniards, as to Levy-Bruhl's "primitives", gambling was "a serious act, a tragic, even religious act": "It was one of the most intense of mystical experiences, because it was one which gave them the strongest sense of being in immediate contact with invisible powers that had their fate in their hands".(62)
This perspective on gambling also elucidates why the game appealed to the downtrodden, to men and women whose luck had run dry and who wanted desperately to reverse their fate. By laying on the table their remaining fortunes, they might have been soliciting divine intervention as a final declaration about their status. If they won, the wager was a way for them to reassert their prerogatives over the misfortunes that had occurred in the past; and if they lost and failed to reverse the tide of catastrophe, they could express, through cursing, at the very least their disappointment and anger that God had rejected their pleas for grace.(63) Back in the sixteenth century, the Dominican friar Luis de Granada recognized the psychological discharge involved in cursing when he compared it with other indiscretions:
Women don't commonly lose themselves in swearing, but they frequently fall into another trap. They challenge God when doing their daily chores by complaining about their toil and their poor living conditions and so question the justice of the Lord. They mutter that they do not like the life that was given to them and speak ill of the day they were born.(64)
Blasphemous men, like these overworked and contentious women, were not sceptics of the sacred, they were merely angry about their lot in life and expressed it in a form of verbal defiance that was generally reserved to their gender in the early modern period. Instead of tears and complaints, the socially appropriate form of contest for women, men articulated their emotions in direct verbal jousting with supernatural forces.
This point was made explicit by an unfortunate card-player named Alonso de Alcozer in 1548, when participating in a game of naipes with a small group of companions. In despair Alonso watched his life's savings disappear before his eyes and cursed the Lord aloud. Across the table, the winner of the game, still piously respectful of divine intervention, advised Alonso to commend himself to the Lord and to the souls in purgatory, a comment that only served to worsen the situation. The enraged Alonso then screamed out the plain truth that "I renounce God because he cannot serve me well . . . in these wretched times, God doesn't show any kindness to the poor, he favours the rich and gives them all the advantages".(65)
Like other losers at naipes, Alonso attributed his defeat to the unsympathetic hand of divine providence rather than to chance. Blind fortune, it appears, was truly an elusive and unretainable concept in the minds of pre-modern Spaniards. Their remarks never exceeded the limits of accepted religious views; they could only invert their beliefs.
In this sense, blasphemy was essentially a form of play, and of play as Johan Huizinga has described it in Homo ludens, with its own implicit, unconscious logic.(66) This involved a sporting with language through inversion of normally pious verbal delivery, making use of the same imaginary constructs as prayer. By juxtaposing the holy with the profane in calling the Virgin Mary a whore, for instance, blasphemers bruised pious sensibilities and travestied conventional images in order to violate the sacred boundaries that otherwise defined their faith. This is why Aron Gurevich calls blasphemy "the carnivalized side of religiosity".(67)
Blasphemy was a form of play in another sense as well, for it served many of the same psychological needs that have been associated with the power of fantasy among children. Long ago, Anna Freud was the first to recognize that a particularly important function of play is to assist children in dealing with potentially disturbing psychic events. Children, she noted, often re-create in their play-life situations that they have found frightening in real life. By setting up imaginary situations in which the fears and anxieties that they feel are momentarily simulated, they then quickly reverse the power-struggle through some sort of conquest. As an example, she offered the case of a seven-year-old boy who denied to himself the authority of his intimidating father by transforming him mentally into an enchanted lion. This lion roamed around in fantastic escapades with the boy, frightening everyone with whom it came in contact. The boy himself was immune from fear, however, for he had succeeded in taming the terrifying beast and turning him into a protective and loving friend.(68)
It is not altogether implausible, therefore, that blasphemy served similar purposes of denial and imaginary reversal for Spanish Catholics in the past. Blasphemy may, in fact, have been one of the few escapes into fantasy that remained in the psychic life of adults in this period of authoritarian religion. By hurling insults at God, either by denying his existence altogether or by condemning the way in which he had managed the course of human events, men and women who were caught in anxious situations could strike back at the perceived source of their pain and assert mastery over their condition. Their outbursts of arrogance and independence would have served, then, to cancel out of their minds the impotence that they felt at the moment. These brief fantasies of rejection were enough to console wounded egos without disturbing in the least a sense of "objective reality", allowing blasphemers to claim honestly that they had always maintained a stern belief in higher forces. As Juan the sacristan noted, "everyone knows that there must be a first cause", even when they deny, as he did, God's existence with a pensamiento fantastico.(69) The universe, they proclaimed with an irony that only the dispossessed possess, contained forces superior to their own miserable fortunes.
BLASPHEMY AND THE PLAY OF ANGER IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN*