Who's for giving "the Gypsies" their due?

[Fulgour]

Tuu-Bad

I wonder if THOTH devotees cringe at the mention
of "Gypsies" because the Thoth was originally titled:
The Tarot of the EGYPTIANS (Thanks, Lady Harris!)

Here's a blurb for Le Tarot des Gitans

This is a set of French tarot cards In excellent condition. There are 78 cards in the game. The French name is "Les Tarots des Gitans" which means the Gipsies tarot.

Historians associates gipsies to Egypt and Greece. Voltaire himself in the XVIII th century presents Gipsies as the descendants of ancient priestesses of ISIS the black goddess that we find in the gipsy cult under the name of Sarah the Egyptian. Gipsies are also called ROM (Sanskrit word meaning "Free man").

About 1000 years ago they travelled to India and through Asia to Europe stopping in Syria, Egypt, and Persia.

In 1417 a group of nomads with dark features, came to Germany, and Holland, this is where the word "Flamenco" came from as the Deutsch speak Flemish. They came to Paris in 1427.

Today, still, even though they adopted the religion of the places they have been, gipsies stay true to the universe of the elements to which they belong and face day after day : water, fire, earth, air, the sun, the moon and the stars.

Published in 2000, by De Vecchi in Paris. Beautiful graphics by M. Ameli.

Sorry, Crowley (oompa-oompa)...
there's no Kabbalah either.

 

[Rosanne]

"I think continually of those who were truely great,
Who from the womb, remembered the souls history
Through corridors of light........."(Stephen Spender)

Well tracked Fulgour- Well tracked!! ~Rosanne

 

[Cerulean]

Hello Kraw, you did ask this back some time ago.../Romani collected tales

1. Card Games and the Far East

Kraw asked:

Unlike chess, there are no Chinese or South Asian variants of Tarot, I believe.
Has anyone out there encountered any evidence of a non-European deck prior to the 20th C.?

I realize the Far Eastern answer is playing cards, about 1600, off the port of Nagasaki and the gambling game that exists is called Flower Cards, Hana-Fuda. It's clearly traceable back to Portugese playing cards and trade ships.

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=55927

I have not researched Chinese gambling games with tiles such as Mah-Joong very well, but there's interesting correspondences to seasonal flowers, four suits, etc., and they are prior to the 20th century.

My apologies for not exactly answering the tarot portion, but I've not unearthed anything closer yet.

2. Romany romantic tales

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Romanies

The first site, on Sacred Texts, would be a collection of folklorist research and 1417-1421 is said to be a starting point of Romani observed in Western Europe

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/roma/gft/gft004.htm

I don't know the accuracy, but perhaps from such rough nuggets, ideas and seeds might grow.

Best wishes,

Cerulean

 

[katong1]

Kraw-daddy

Anything of that period in Nagasaki would indeed be nuggets from the Portuguese.

Majiang has nothing resembling trumps, and features on the contrary some tiles marked only by indigenous hanzi/kanji. The Chinese enjoy a venerable and deep tradition of fortune-telling and augury-mongering, but majiang has never been a part of that.

 

[Fulgour]

I recently read where Alfred Douglas recommended
a book by Basil Ivan Rakoczi by the title of:

The Painted Caravan. A Penetration into the Secrets of the Tarot Cards.

The blurb of the book says it contains "numerous
designs by the author, based upon ancient Gypsy
tarot packs." It was published by Loucher in 1954
and now rare, generally sells at a very high price.

*

Here are some selections from a review:

...twenty-two 'mason-marks' are to be found on the stonework of Rosslyn Chapel, and twenty-two is also the number of the Greater Arcana (the Great Secrets) of the Tarot, which...may relate to the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet. Could this suggest 22 steps of initiation? This notion is supported by Basil Ivan Rakoczi, who states: "The Gypsy Master teaches that the Greater Arcana or Trumps Major of the Tarot represent the twenty-two steps upon the way of Initiation."

In The Painted Caravan, Rakoczi also relates:

"But what is this word, Tarot? Is its root to be found in the name of the Tinker's secret language, the Shelta Thari, which was discovered by Charles Godfrey Leland and was, after much scholarly research by George Sampson, proved to be a Q-Celtic language; for, though the Tinker is decried by his brother Gypsy, he is, it is now thought, a descendent of ancient dispossessed land owners, the Picts, who, in turn, had inter-married with Phoenicians and had equally their roots (perhaps intertwined with those of the Gypsies) in the Orient?"

 

[Rosanne]

How interesting Fulgour!
I have been following with delight, but have been on another tack because of the Pommegranate fruit.
[Quote}From Wikipedia....
The name Pomegranate derives from Latin pomum (apple) and granatus (grainy). The genus name Punica is named after the Phoenicians, who were active in broadening its cultivation, partly for religious reasons. In classical Latin its name was malum punicum or malum granatum, where "malum" is an apple. This has influenced the common name for pomegranate in many languages (eg German Granatapfel, seeded apple).

Another widespread root for "pomegranate" is the Egyptian and Semitic rmn. Attested in Ancient Egyptian, in Hebrew rimmôn, and in Arabic rummân, this root was brought by Arabic to a number of languages, including Portuguese (romã) [1], and Kabyle rrumman.[/Quote]

They are native to Iran/India, and need that type of climate to fruit.They did well in Spain mostly- not further North. I found that on those Gitani Cards you mentioned there were some of these fruits, and then I found this interesting Woodcut Card from 15th century Germany, which is called the Queen of Pommegranates(Coins) and has the Scottish Thistle as well. It was the scarf that interested me initially. It is said in the clothing History books I read, that when Gypsy Women, came to the Courts they wore long winding scarfs around their heads-unusual for European women. Small clues no doubt, but interesting nonetheless. The wonderment continues! ~Rosanne

 

[catlin]

Majiang has nothing resembling trumps, and features on the contrary some tiles marked only by indigenous hanzi/kanji. The Chinese enjoy a venerable and deep tradition of fortune-telling and augury-mongering, but majiang has never been a part of that.

Well, there are coins, bamboo and of course the kanji writings on the tiles. So they look pretty similar to the Minor Arcana.

BTW there is the book of Derek Walters to go with the mahjongg cards and that is fortune telling. I am pretty sure that some Chinese has certainly used Mahjongg for fortune telling prior to Walters' book.

 

[Fulgour]

The gypsies were called "Egyptians" and, like the Celtic Gael,
they were credited with psychic abilities or 'second sight',
which the Australian aboriginals call 'sacred sight'.

Basil Ivan Rákóczi

The fact is that the Gypsies have wandered from the beginning of time
and the gift of clairvoyance has always been theirs. They did not steal
the esoteric wisdom of the Tarot in Egypt or anywhere else.

Rather, as one civilisation after another fell and, later, as the pagan
cults became the object of Christian persecution, their dying priesthoods
deposited the sacred lore in the hands of the Gypsies who undertook
to travel on with it, to hide it and only to transmit it to the trustworthy.

Who would suspect a mere Gypsy of possessing the accumulated wisdom
of Chaldea and Egypt, or of the northern Druids, or of holding the Yoga
teachings of the East in his head? So the Gypsy tribes became the
repositories for all that wisdom which was denounced as heretical by
the established order of the day.

The Gypsy took over the wisdom of the Gnostic, the Montanist, the
Donatist and the Manichean, ascending the heresiarchical ladder of
experimental mysticism to mediaeval sects such as the Cathars, the
Patarini and the Bogomils who, in turn, produced the creed which
threatened to change completely the whole face of Europe.

from: The Painted Caravan

 

[aibhlin]

I've been silent up till now but this romanticising about the roma culture is starting to piss me off, I've grown up around them and they're not particulary mystical or any of that, they're normal people stuck in a misogynic and opressive culture. I realise not all roma are like that, but the ones who wants to keep contact with their families have to stay in that culture and marry at a young age. Furthermore, the term gypsy is offensive and if you'd call a roma gypsy or zigienare where I grew up you'd be beaten up for it.

 

[Fulgour]

expanding consciousness

All of history isn't about just one day,
and all people aren't the same person.