Spanish Tarot - High Priest's Staff

Rosanne

Abrac- it is a small oval under a larger one with a straight peice out the top with a small knob on it- it looks like an inverted figure eight, but it is very ornate not plain like your card- which is why I like your explanation of the gourd.~Rosanne
 

Abrac

Thank you for posting that info Rosanne. :) It sounds very much like the artist could have drawn on this source as well.

I am beginning to think this is a totally unique creation which has several different sources as its inspiration. Like all good art, it fuses many ideas into a simple, single image.
 

Fulgour

kenji said:
I believe this staff is only a dechristianized papal cross or crook.
For the first 500 years, Christianity was rather pleasant.
It was tolerant and catholic, in the truly universal sense.

Then the tax collectors and sermon writers got involved,
which is a bit ironic: for many that is all of Tarot history.
 

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Abrac

kenji said:
I believe this staff is only a dechristianized papal cross or crook.
As for dechristianized, I definitely agree.

I am leaning more and more toward my original assumption of this being a sort of stylized version of the Egyptian crook and flail. The "collar" on the staff corresponding to the crook, and the prod at the end of the staff, corresponding to the flail.

In a general sense though, this is simply a design made from combining male/female elements. A practice exteremely common in Pagan art.
 

venicebard

Fulgour said:
For the first 500 years, Christianity was rather pleasant.
It was tolerant and catholic, in the truly universal sense.
You must be dreaming. This was the period when it was purging itself of gnosis itself, and of the Gnostic warning against having a priesthood (whose corruption was inevitable and now, of course, fully realized), hence of whatever tolerance and universality it had in the beginning. Moreover, once it became the state religion of the (evil and tyrannical) Roman Empire, did it not assume the intolerant stance all state religions assume?

I will grant you but one concession: the form Christianity took in Britain was somewhat different and did not come under the heel of Rome fully till later. Hence, if you were to limit consideration to the insular Kelts, you might have a point. Indeed the British-spawned Pelagian 'heresy' was a revolt of gnosis against the dismal view of Augustine that man cannot avoid sin, insisting instead that man could avoid sin if he so chose. Indeed even I, Gnostic enemy of orthodoxy, revere Arthur as protector of said form of Christianity, this in spite of the fact that I have more real affinity for such as Myrddin and Gwenddoleu (Myrddin's liege), who defended the right to be pagan against the forces of Christianity in Britain a century after Arthur.
 

Fulgour

Besides the Confessions, Augustine's most celebrated work is his De Civitate Dei (On the City of God), a study of the relationship between Christianity and secular society, which was inspired by the fall of Rome to the Visigoths in 410. Among his other works, many are polemical attacks on various heresies: Against Faustus, the Manichean; On Baptism; Against the Donatists; and many attacks on Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism.
Troubles brewing...but "Christianity" was widespread,
and it took hundreds of years to make it truly awful.
 

Abrac

Caduceus-

[Late 16th century. Via Latin from Doric Greek karuk(e)ion , from kērux “herald.”]

Fulgour, I think you were probably on the right track all along. The most obvious thing this could be is a herald's staff, which by definition ties it back to the caduceus.