Teheuti
Cardlady, certainly there's a sense that the past is somehow superior in both history and myth.cardlady22 said:
The Power of Myth
Flaxen
It's a fascinating question.
I think part of it is also to do with a very human desire to feel part of something bigger. Whether that is expressed as the divine mystery or as being part of a long lineage of 'adepts', both tap into a human wish to be somehow 'other'. By believing that tarot was passed to us by the ancient Egyptians, we tap into an 'unbroken' line of occult knowledge that other people don't really get.
I think part of it is also to do with a very human desire to feel part of something bigger. Whether that is expressed as the divine mystery or as being part of a long lineage of 'adepts', both tap into a human wish to be somehow 'other'. By believing that tarot was passed to us by the ancient Egyptians, we tap into an 'unbroken' line of occult knowledge that other people don't really get.
Teheuti
Rex, your pointing to the unconscious intrigues me. It touches on the Shadow - bright or dark - within us. Which, of course, is why people get so angry and unreasonable when it is questioned. Could it be that myth elevates the Shadow?RexMalaki said:
This reminds me of Jung's Red Book, a work that sounds crazy and, indeed, at times Jung thought he was going mad. But Jung realized that the only way to map the unconscious was to enter it fully and consciously - to bring back the treasures from that realm. It seems to me that the only way to understand what people are seeking in and through the tarot is to enter the myths.
Cerulean
It is a story! It is a game! No, it is super-stition
The gaming cards and tarots are lovely decorations for play, full of whimsey. They are a gambler tease to play the game. They have a visual quaintness, but I rarely care to play such games, I have little interest-just me. If someone else wants that niche, good for them!
The folkloric cards and tarots that I've encountered are halfway homes of inherited emblems and cartomancy. I think there might be some poetic metaphor that meets imagination and a common storytelling motif of romance and superstition. One common mptif is what happens when the stranger comes to town. The association of cards with romantic stories still happen...In a funny excerpt of twentietj century, Brother from Another Planet, the stranger encounters a young card shark who tells a story with just playing cards. Does that moment seem magical and fascinating? I was riveted during that small period and if the only way you can explain the experience is by magical means--my associative mind jumps mistakenly to other allegorical parallels. The old storytellers of Japan had story screens like big cards. Ah, so people of Japan invented cards that held the Western heritage wisdom of the ages disguised for centuries in a game, waiting for discovery! Only exotic Westerners would recognize its true heritage...well, for hana fuda, and unsen karuta, this happens to be true. They do have a gypsyish heritage from sailors, gamblers and the like from West to East.
A few salty grains of pure salty sense and romanticism is mixed in many of us. One person's own spin can co exist with my own mix and myth. A few thousand years allow different beliefs to just be stated peaceably. What is not yet fully understood is re-invented and even if you write things down, we have to tweak and cartomancy is the art of drawimg the cards amd readimg them together like a story
I need to pop back to my Etteillas to remember if the Egyptian story was in the first edition. My Decler and Dummett adds delight amf clarity. More later...
The gaming cards and tarots are lovely decorations for play, full of whimsey. They are a gambler tease to play the game. They have a visual quaintness, but I rarely care to play such games, I have little interest-just me. If someone else wants that niche, good for them!
The folkloric cards and tarots that I've encountered are halfway homes of inherited emblems and cartomancy. I think there might be some poetic metaphor that meets imagination and a common storytelling motif of romance and superstition. One common mptif is what happens when the stranger comes to town. The association of cards with romantic stories still happen...In a funny excerpt of twentietj century, Brother from Another Planet, the stranger encounters a young card shark who tells a story with just playing cards. Does that moment seem magical and fascinating? I was riveted during that small period and if the only way you can explain the experience is by magical means--my associative mind jumps mistakenly to other allegorical parallels. The old storytellers of Japan had story screens like big cards. Ah, so people of Japan invented cards that held the Western heritage wisdom of the ages disguised for centuries in a game, waiting for discovery! Only exotic Westerners would recognize its true heritage...well, for hana fuda, and unsen karuta, this happens to be true. They do have a gypsyish heritage from sailors, gamblers and the like from West to East.
A few salty grains of pure salty sense and romanticism is mixed in many of us. One person's own spin can co exist with my own mix and myth. A few thousand years allow different beliefs to just be stated peaceably. What is not yet fully understood is re-invented and even if you write things down, we have to tweak and cartomancy is the art of drawimg the cards amd readimg them together like a story
I need to pop back to my Etteillas to remember if the Egyptian story was in the first edition. My Decler and Dummett adds delight amf clarity. More later...
Teheuti said:
Teheuti
Cerulean, Ah hah! Since, when we read the cards we make up spontaneous stories, why wouldn't we be drawn to made-up stories about the cards? Story-telling is part and parcel of the whole experience. Whimsey is essential to the whole phenomenon - which is what James Wanless was getting at, perhaps.Cerulean said:
Starshower
Mary, am I right in thinking that you are using the word 'myth' here in its (changed) modern colloquial sense of lies? In contradistinction to literal 'facts'?
In my understanding, Myths are truths of a different order: archetypal (& sometimes allegorical, or at least symbolic) non-literalist expressions of great truths ... abstract universal Truths about human experience that many people can tap into, even across cultures. This meaning is how I understand the oft-quoted Jung to use the term. Necessary & universal Truths - rather than mere contingent facts & events.
If you are asking why people prefer exotic fictions to plain history, then I have to agree wholeheartedly with Sherryl, Flaxen, cardlady & Cerulean, who express my feelings better than I could.
But I also think that many people in all cultures across the globe have a deep need to experience truths expressed in the Great Myths, which embody & express all our human Big Questions, conundrums, struggles & triumphs ... rites of passage ... deepest fears & highest aspirations ... in larger-than-life, archetypal stories which last for hundreds of years at least, and in their essence, unite us as humans, despite our cultural differences.
For me, these Truths are 'Mythos' rather than 'Logos' (as written about by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Karen Armstrong etc) - i.e. big ideas expressed poetically rather than literally (especially in pre-literate societies) and are contained wonderfully in the images of the Tarot.
(Sorry I didn't directly refer to the Wanless video clip, which didn't address either meaning, & which I found trite & self-serving.)
ps I've nothing against making up stories, which I & many millions love to do! But I wouldn't glorify most with the name 'Myth'.)
In my understanding, Myths are truths of a different order: archetypal (& sometimes allegorical, or at least symbolic) non-literalist expressions of great truths ... abstract universal Truths about human experience that many people can tap into, even across cultures. This meaning is how I understand the oft-quoted Jung to use the term. Necessary & universal Truths - rather than mere contingent facts & events.
If you are asking why people prefer exotic fictions to plain history, then I have to agree wholeheartedly with Sherryl, Flaxen, cardlady & Cerulean, who express my feelings better than I could.
But I also think that many people in all cultures across the globe have a deep need to experience truths expressed in the Great Myths, which embody & express all our human Big Questions, conundrums, struggles & triumphs ... rites of passage ... deepest fears & highest aspirations ... in larger-than-life, archetypal stories which last for hundreds of years at least, and in their essence, unite us as humans, despite our cultural differences.
For me, these Truths are 'Mythos' rather than 'Logos' (as written about by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Karen Armstrong etc) - i.e. big ideas expressed poetically rather than literally (especially in pre-literate societies) and are contained wonderfully in the images of the Tarot.
(Sorry I didn't directly refer to the Wanless video clip, which didn't address either meaning, & which I found trite & self-serving.)
ps I've nothing against making up stories, which I & many millions love to do! But I wouldn't glorify most with the name 'Myth'.)
Teheuti
Since this is the history section we try to focus on facts, so from this perspective they might be considered lies. But, I agree with you that —Starshower said:
Exactly, so what are the essential "big ideas" being poetically expressed in the usual tarot myths of origin?
Even Jim's little story is based on or implies a bigger myth, which is what I'm trying to get at. In other words, what are we reaching for or longing after via the core tarot myths, even when ineptly expressed?
"A myth is an outer lie but an inner truth; history is an outer truth but an inner lie."
Debra
The larger myth is that the cards originate with the gods and carry their coded messages.
The more personal myth is that owning and using a deck puts me in line with ancient seers and magicians. It just isn't the same, thinking that "my" divination originates in a bourgeois parlor game.
For an individual, I don't know what could be bigger than the power to commune with the gods. Makes you special, y'know?
So we're all Mercury, I guess.
The more personal myth is that owning and using a deck puts me in line with ancient seers and magicians. It just isn't the same, thinking that "my" divination originates in a bourgeois parlor game.
For an individual, I don't know what could be bigger than the power to commune with the gods. Makes you special, y'know?
So we're all Mercury, I guess.
Starshower
Thanks for that reply. My immediate response would be to echo what you said to cardlady22:
" certainly there's a sense that the past is somehow superior in both history and myth."
Perhaps the "essential "big ideas" being poetically expressed in the usual tarot myths of origin?" are those found in many cultures across the globe about humans (starting with Kings, High Priests, Oracles & specially Chosen Ones) being descended from the Gods / God? From Jupiter / Jove / Zeus? From 'God-the-Father' / 'Mother Goddess'?
Many believe that there was, in our earliest human history, a 'lost Golden Age', when mankind 'walked in the Garden with God' & conversed with the Divine - before some tremendous, cataclysmic, cosmic catastrophe somehow spoiled things & led to mortality, disease, suffering, death, & even natural disasters.
Most cultures seem to begin with some kind of Emanationist aetiology, where we all start with a Divine spark, but then tragically everything goes awry through forces of 'evil' (like the Christian idea of the Fall).
We seem to need an explanation as to why bad things & 'evil' happen in a potentially perfect, Divine world (at least in our hopeful imaginations.) Like little children, we look around with mounting horror at this damaged world & cry "But it's NOT FAIR!" ... & seek scapegoats, or at least a supernatural explanation. It's all SO sad.
Then we invent systems galore to try to struggle back to Eden / the Golden Age (or Mummy's /Daddy's arms.)
Could that folk memory of ancient, long-held beliefs, deep in our collective unconscious, be what makes so many of us look back longingly to 'ancient wisdoms' / Atlantis myths / descent from Divinity/ies / Aliens etc?
And could that fanciful spiritual nostalgia itself be, on a macrocosmic scale, a reflection of what every human goes through from around 6 or 7 years old, when the developing self-conscious ego breaks off from the original sense of Oneness with Nature & the parents?
To me, it seems that individual developmental psychology is writ large in our cultural Myths / religions & spiritual systems, like Mystery School & magical initiations, ordinations, shamanic trainings, Kabbala, etc. And (again, I may be wrong - just my thoughts here) the Tarot development itself & the myths attached to it also express all that, in microcosm.
Growing up, as individuals & as a species, is inevitable - but so hard to do!
(Sorry to ramble. Been alone too much. I'll stop now, I promise.)
" certainly there's a sense that the past is somehow superior in both history and myth."
Perhaps the "essential "big ideas" being poetically expressed in the usual tarot myths of origin?" are those found in many cultures across the globe about humans (starting with Kings, High Priests, Oracles & specially Chosen Ones) being descended from the Gods / God? From Jupiter / Jove / Zeus? From 'God-the-Father' / 'Mother Goddess'?
Many believe that there was, in our earliest human history, a 'lost Golden Age', when mankind 'walked in the Garden with God' & conversed with the Divine - before some tremendous, cataclysmic, cosmic catastrophe somehow spoiled things & led to mortality, disease, suffering, death, & even natural disasters.
Most cultures seem to begin with some kind of Emanationist aetiology, where we all start with a Divine spark, but then tragically everything goes awry through forces of 'evil' (like the Christian idea of the Fall).
We seem to need an explanation as to why bad things & 'evil' happen in a potentially perfect, Divine world (at least in our hopeful imaginations.) Like little children, we look around with mounting horror at this damaged world & cry "But it's NOT FAIR!" ... & seek scapegoats, or at least a supernatural explanation. It's all SO sad.
Then we invent systems galore to try to struggle back to Eden / the Golden Age (or Mummy's /Daddy's arms.)
Could that folk memory of ancient, long-held beliefs, deep in our collective unconscious, be what makes so many of us look back longingly to 'ancient wisdoms' / Atlantis myths / descent from Divinity/ies / Aliens etc?
And could that fanciful spiritual nostalgia itself be, on a macrocosmic scale, a reflection of what every human goes through from around 6 or 7 years old, when the developing self-conscious ego breaks off from the original sense of Oneness with Nature & the parents?
To me, it seems that individual developmental psychology is writ large in our cultural Myths / religions & spiritual systems, like Mystery School & magical initiations, ordinations, shamanic trainings, Kabbala, etc. And (again, I may be wrong - just my thoughts here) the Tarot development itself & the myths attached to it also express all that, in microcosm.
Growing up, as individuals & as a species, is inevitable - but so hard to do!
(Sorry to ramble. Been alone too much. I'll stop now, I promise.)
Starshower
Yes, Debra - I totally agree! We want to be special ... we are stardust ... we come from & want to return to the gods. Wish I could say things simply. 
