The theory took root, and people invented age-old esoteric techniques of Tarot divination which they were willing to teach to new initiates for a purely nominal fee, and now everyone takes it for granted that we have always been
It could have been worse. Imagine the potential for harm if the fraudsters had picked on the 10 cards of the Rorschach deck instead, and announced that by shuffling them and dealing them and following some elaborate rules for exegesis, one could fathom the customer's psychological state and mental health. We dodged a bullet there.
Anyway, you can see how wires were crossed at the Old Entomologist the other night when Another Kiwi dealt out hands with his new deck of cards.
"A cow pooping coins into a chalice is a reference to wealth from the dairy economy if ever there was one," I said. "I assume that the left-hand card represents the Past since it also contains a giant raspberry, a man with a roll of toilet paper undergoing hypnotherapy, three cotton reels and a novelty tea-pot, which all in all is almost frighteningly accurate.
"So the right-hand card must reflect the Future, and the three-headed lute-playing pigeon from hell predicts that I will get to the Leonard Cohen concert after all, though fish-&-chips may be all there is for dinner that night."
"No," sez AK. "It predicts that you're paying for the next round, since my full house beats your crap hand."
I think he makes the rules up as he goes along.
He may also be in denial, hiding from what the cards foretell for what will happen next time he takes Mrs Cat to the vet for an injection.
UPDATE: Bonus irrelevant Steps in the Evolution of the Disembodied Dog Head
Left: 1507.
21 comments:
...you know, if I just labelled figures randomly, without a legend, the reviewers (hhhkkhppttoooi!) would laugh (and not in a good way). and how does one get from z4 to 19 without any intermediate steps (they would ask, sarcastically)
[wv "wasinedi"... well, no needier than you, peabrain!]
how does one get from z4 to 19 without any intermediate steps (they would ask, sarcastically)
They would not need to ask if they had more experience with iKea assembly kits.
Yes, it is getting increasingly difficult to find vets who make house calls... twice.
The needle in the leg seems to have added the power of the sun to Mrs. Cat's rage.
~
I'm thinking the Rorschach Deck would be unwieldy to shuffle. Art's nice, though.
I just don't get the "little men in boats" part. Maybe I should ask my mom.
The world would be a better place if Charles Williams had had a chance to incorporate Oblique Strategies into a work.
the reviewers Only the third reviewer would be so insensitive
It's always the third reviewer!
The fascinating part about this Tarot-cards-are-Egyptian business (for sufficiently broad values of "fascination") is that it's a late flowering of a Renaissance obsession with Egyptian script. They got it into their heads that hieroglyphs were a universal language of visual symbols, and to understand them would undo the Tower-of-Babel proliferation of tongues and recapture the original language of Adam. Dürer tried illustrating the distorted 2nd- or 3rd-hand descriptions of hieroglyphs that were available, and Colonna of the Hypnerotomachia, and of course Athanasius Kircher, so it's as if the episode was designed to appeal to as many of my fixations as possible.
All this ties in with the medieval Art-of-Memory tradition -- the whole Memory Palaces idea -- which was enjoying a late refulgence at the time; if you wanted to shape your mind in desired directions by memorising emblems and sigils, then it made sense to memorise these extra-potent Egyptian symbols. But tl;dw.
Is the man necessarily 'little', or is the boat just a little bigger than it seems?
If I recall, I was learning something about 'perspective' just the other day...
The cloaca of that three-headed man-eagle is pretty suggestive!
How does it strum that oud without fingers?
Maybe it's a three-headed man-condor and fashions its own plectra?
The cloaca of that three-headed man-eagle is pretty suggestive!
It could be worse.
Dear me, comments are all over the place.
Wowsers.
Odd.
I distinctly remember leaving a comment here about how the man might very well not be so little when compared to the boat due to the effects of perspective, as I have heard in detail in the explaining voice. Now, not only is that comment not here to have it's praises sung, and to have wise people and Tigris gaze in wonder at it's mathematical symmetry, but there are a large single - digit number of posts apparently gone missing with it.
For the claim is for 13, and the observed total is a mere 4. All the mathematical is leaking out of the punctured symmetry...
I see your 13/4 and raise you 16/14
Let the record show that I made a mother joke.
Mother Wowsers
Lost her trousers
Eating bread and jam
When Mother Wowsers
Milked her Cow, Sirs
She took it on the Lamb...
Oh, crap. I HOPE I don't have to explain it...
Let the record show that BBBB is the only one going on about "strumming one's oud".
to have wise people and Tigris gaze
Grrr. Also: mine are all straights.
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