Pendu
Hi everyone! First post here. I just got the Medieval Tarot, designed by Guido Zibordi Marchesi, and I’m totally in love with this deck! I think its peculiarities need to be discussed, so I’m hoping this provoke some feedbacks.
The first card that got my attention was, of course, The Fool. There are a couple of absences that I find really interesting: no cliff, no dog, no crocodile, no landscape and above all no bag!
Traditionally, the bag contains the germinal elements of all the subsequent arcana. I think this deck maintains this concept in a very clever way: look at the floor tiles, it’s a random collage of the different tiles that will appear in all the following cards. These elements are already unfolded, but the Fool must recognize them; here the Fool doesn’t need to unpack anything, he just have to watch his steps (and here, I think, the general concept of the missing cliff it’s preserved). The walls are made of different pieces too, which reinforce the idea of heterogeneity: there’s no distinctive law, no ruling unity, no coherence, just the juxtaposition of different components.
The body gesture is awesome, with his limbs almost dislocated in erratic movements. It’s a dance, not a graceful one but a crude, violent, rough dance. My first thought was: St. Vitus’ Dance, the medieval social phenomena where people entered in some kind of trance and just danced nonstop (sometimes for months) until they fell apart from exhaustion or died (there are a lot of fascinating stories about these cases of collective madness). I think the general idea of this is to stress the lack of direction the Fool has, his instability, and the surrender to irrational forces. It’s like he has all this energy, but it’s dispersed.
Love the long ears in his hat, I think in the old days the fools were depicted as wearing hoods shaped like horns or donkey ears… a reminder of the Dionysian nature of their madness, their animal nature. Dionysus has much to do with Tarot’s Fool. I particularly like the Nietzschean way to put it: Dionysus is the life drive, but in a way beyond measure: it’s the unformed, the chaos, the indeterminacy, the blind forces of Nature, the joy and the violence of the life-death cycle. That drive can be scary, even dangerous, and that’s why we should find the way of channel it in ways we can stand. This card shows us what happens when Dionysus takes over us, which is in line with the keyword offered in the LWB: Frenzy.
Next to the shiny and optimistic Rider-Waite-Smith Fool (focused in the new beginnings, in the potential, in the adventure), the Medieval Fool stress the indeterminacy, the turmoil and the loose instincts.
The first card that got my attention was, of course, The Fool. There are a couple of absences that I find really interesting: no cliff, no dog, no crocodile, no landscape and above all no bag!
Traditionally, the bag contains the germinal elements of all the subsequent arcana. I think this deck maintains this concept in a very clever way: look at the floor tiles, it’s a random collage of the different tiles that will appear in all the following cards. These elements are already unfolded, but the Fool must recognize them; here the Fool doesn’t need to unpack anything, he just have to watch his steps (and here, I think, the general concept of the missing cliff it’s preserved). The walls are made of different pieces too, which reinforce the idea of heterogeneity: there’s no distinctive law, no ruling unity, no coherence, just the juxtaposition of different components.
The body gesture is awesome, with his limbs almost dislocated in erratic movements. It’s a dance, not a graceful one but a crude, violent, rough dance. My first thought was: St. Vitus’ Dance, the medieval social phenomena where people entered in some kind of trance and just danced nonstop (sometimes for months) until they fell apart from exhaustion or died (there are a lot of fascinating stories about these cases of collective madness). I think the general idea of this is to stress the lack of direction the Fool has, his instability, and the surrender to irrational forces. It’s like he has all this energy, but it’s dispersed.
Love the long ears in his hat, I think in the old days the fools were depicted as wearing hoods shaped like horns or donkey ears… a reminder of the Dionysian nature of their madness, their animal nature. Dionysus has much to do with Tarot’s Fool. I particularly like the Nietzschean way to put it: Dionysus is the life drive, but in a way beyond measure: it’s the unformed, the chaos, the indeterminacy, the blind forces of Nature, the joy and the violence of the life-death cycle. That drive can be scary, even dangerous, and that’s why we should find the way of channel it in ways we can stand. This card shows us what happens when Dionysus takes over us, which is in line with the keyword offered in the LWB: Frenzy.
Next to the shiny and optimistic Rider-Waite-Smith Fool (focused in the new beginnings, in the potential, in the adventure), the Medieval Fool stress the indeterminacy, the turmoil and the loose instincts.
