nisaba
In another sub-forum, I was reading a thread on the Emperor and Death, and it got me to thinking about the Emperor and Death in the MRP Fairytale deck. I had to pull the deck out anyway for a different reason, so I had another look at these two cards.
Every time I use this deck, much as I love it, I am always disappointed by the Emperor. To me, in the Tarot deck, the Emperor should be a card of power and command. Yet the fairytale used, is the Emperor and the Nightingale, a story about a vain ruler on his deathbed at the mercy of his vizier, who hears a bird singing in his garden, and tells the vizier to capture the bird in a cage for his listening pleasure. Of course, the bird pines and doesn't sing, and eventually they set it free. The vizier has a mechanical nightingale built on clockwork principles, but the emperor does not find its mechanical song healing. Messengers are sent out, the length and breadth of the kingdom until the little bird is found, and informed of the Emperors impending death, he flies back and sings outside the window of his sickroom. The emperor dies anyway, but presumably dies happier.
I've known this fairystory since childhood, and to me it has always been sensationally beautiful but also very, very sad - the Emperor never recovers, and the bird flies away never to be seen again. As soon as I saw this card I was thinking: Shouldn't this be the Death card, the transition from illness and pain to death and rest?
So I pulled out the Death card. Its story is Godfather Death, which I originally knew as Death and the Soldier. In the tale, a boy's father accepts Death as the godfather of his last child - in the version I knew, a soldier returning but foot from a battle to his home town met Death in an inn, they had some kind of dialogue, and death ended up in the soldier's debt. Whichever version you are familiar with, Death feels an obligation (of love or debt) to the young man, and looks after him, setting him up as a healer, telling him that if he stands at the head of the bed the person will recover, but if he stands at the foot of the bed, the person will surely die. No one but the soldier/godson can see the figure of Death in the room. He becomes famous as a great healer, able to tell who will recover and who is beyond all help.
And that, too, is a brilliant choice for a Death card. Looking at teh two images, Death has the Grim Reaper escortin g an obviously young and vibrantly healthy man into a subterranean chamber lit with candles that represent human lives - a lovely allegory of the Otherworld and Shamanic journeying, but not really, to my min d, the image of Tarot-Death.
On the other hand, the Emperor shows an ill, pain-wracked and grey-skinned old man in a sumptuous bed obviously dying, a jewelled bird drooping by his bedside, a living bird outside the window singing his heart out to the moon,
with the figure of Death by his bedside, holding the dying stub of a candle (symbolising life) and reaching his skeletal hand out to the forehead of the emperor in a tender embrace.
An image of power? An image of command? No. An image of death and transformation.
I love this deck, I love it a lot. But to me it has two different Death cards (I'm sure Gregory would agree you cannot have too many Death cards!) and no Emperor. Strangely, none of the spreads I've yet done with this deck have needed a conventional Emperor!
Every time I use this deck, much as I love it, I am always disappointed by the Emperor. To me, in the Tarot deck, the Emperor should be a card of power and command. Yet the fairytale used, is the Emperor and the Nightingale, a story about a vain ruler on his deathbed at the mercy of his vizier, who hears a bird singing in his garden, and tells the vizier to capture the bird in a cage for his listening pleasure. Of course, the bird pines and doesn't sing, and eventually they set it free. The vizier has a mechanical nightingale built on clockwork principles, but the emperor does not find its mechanical song healing. Messengers are sent out, the length and breadth of the kingdom until the little bird is found, and informed of the Emperors impending death, he flies back and sings outside the window of his sickroom. The emperor dies anyway, but presumably dies happier.
I've known this fairystory since childhood, and to me it has always been sensationally beautiful but also very, very sad - the Emperor never recovers, and the bird flies away never to be seen again. As soon as I saw this card I was thinking: Shouldn't this be the Death card, the transition from illness and pain to death and rest?
So I pulled out the Death card. Its story is Godfather Death, which I originally knew as Death and the Soldier. In the tale, a boy's father accepts Death as the godfather of his last child - in the version I knew, a soldier returning but foot from a battle to his home town met Death in an inn, they had some kind of dialogue, and death ended up in the soldier's debt. Whichever version you are familiar with, Death feels an obligation (of love or debt) to the young man, and looks after him, setting him up as a healer, telling him that if he stands at the head of the bed the person will recover, but if he stands at the foot of the bed, the person will surely die. No one but the soldier/godson can see the figure of Death in the room. He becomes famous as a great healer, able to tell who will recover and who is beyond all help.
And that, too, is a brilliant choice for a Death card. Looking at teh two images, Death has the Grim Reaper escortin g an obviously young and vibrantly healthy man into a subterranean chamber lit with candles that represent human lives - a lovely allegory of the Otherworld and Shamanic journeying, but not really, to my min d, the image of Tarot-Death.
On the other hand, the Emperor shows an ill, pain-wracked and grey-skinned old man in a sumptuous bed obviously dying, a jewelled bird drooping by his bedside, a living bird outside the window singing his heart out to the moon,
with the figure of Death by his bedside, holding the dying stub of a candle (symbolising life) and reaching his skeletal hand out to the forehead of the emperor in a tender embrace.
An image of power? An image of command? No. An image of death and transformation.
I love this deck, I love it a lot. But to me it has two different Death cards (I'm sure Gregory would agree you cannot have too many Death cards!) and no Emperor. Strangely, none of the spreads I've yet done with this deck have needed a conventional Emperor!