February 2020 – IsleVue

John Iacovelli February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 Death, Major Arcana, The Tower

The Tower, the Black Death, the Antichrist and the Apocalypse

Recent scholarship indicates that the first wave of the Black Death which swept Europe in the fourteenth century convinced Petrarch that apocalypse was nigh. He identified Avignon, site of the immense Papal Palace built by Pope Clement VI as a contemporary Tower of Babel. The flowers on the papal coat of arms of Clement, sculpted on the exterior of the palace, bear a remarkable resemblance to what Waite calls the “mystic rose” on Death’s banner. This provides not only a minor tarot mystery, but an insight into Waite’s “curation” and re-use of the jumble bag of historical tarot symbols in his seemingly unbounded endeavor to inject Christian mysticism into the modern tarot he and Colman Smith popularized so successfully.

Recurring Card Patterns and Probabilities Feature Image

Tarot

John Iacovelli February 25, 2020 Tarot Math

Recurring Card Patterns and Probabilities

If you’re like me, you have no doubt looked at what seems to be a wildly notable pattern of cards having something dramatically in common in a spread, and wondered, “what’s the odds of that?” We’ll start with a simple example. In a three card spread, what are the odds of getting three Eights? I’ll tell you. The odds are 19,019 to 1. If you see some cards and know they had odds against them all appearing together of nineteen thousand to one, you’re going to pay attention. And in fact, the 19th and early 20th century experts took note of these patterns. You’ll find that Waite, in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, has an entire section on "The Recurrence of Cards in Dealing." He even provides additional meanings for these patterns. For example, in the case of those three upright Eights, Waite writes that it signifies marriage. Waite most likely was looking at a layout of ten cards. Given seven additional opportunities to draw an Eight in a ten card layout, the odds drop all the way down to 175 to 1. But more than just numeric patterns, we can also ask what the odds are for getting all the cards associated with Capricorn. Or if we see four of the six cards associated with Venus, we can look up the odds of that. Fortunately modern spreadsheets provide something called a hypergeometric function which allows us to answer questions like these. And you’ll be able to download a spreadsheet in which you can plug your own numbers.

Tarot

John Iacovelli February 22, 2020February 23, 2020 Hermit, Major Arcana

Two Questions On the Hermit

Two questions about the anonymous but enlightened hermit: (1) who is he and (2) why the six pointed star? Less mysterious but also important is the question of why Waite included the very, very negative secondary set of upright divinatory meanings in the Pictorial Key to the Tarot? As we examine the questions, we’ll find links to Father Time, the Christian God the Father, and the head of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. We’ll also stumble across that famous number, 666. In the end, the identity of the Hermit is in the eye of the beholder, since he seems to hold more than one identity. But that may be appropriate for a major arcanum associated not just with prudence, but also with dissimulation and treason.

Tarot

John Iacovelli February 7, 2020February 9, 2020 Air, Aquarius, Binah, Christian mysticism, Major Arcana, The Star, Venus

The Star, Goddess at First Light

You’ve got to hand it to Pamela Colman Smith on this one. She took one of the least attractive cards in the Tarot de Marseilles deck, and without substituting any major new elements, turned it into one of the prettiest cards in the RWS deck. But new or old look, The Star raises many questions. Who is she? What Star in particular? Why eight points on the star? Why eight stars? Its order in the majors is important, for one. It is first light after the darkness of The Tower. This is why it’s dawn. And the Goddess appears to be the female goddess from the dawn of civilization herself: Ishtar. There are a number of reasons for the eight stars of eight points each, some of which Waite rolled into his mystical Christian skewing of the tarot. Waite was as heavy-handed on this one as Colman Smith’s hand was deft. The Star is one of those cards where stories and myths abound; and it is through those stories and myths that we can understand it better.

Tarot

John Iacovelli February 4, 2020February 25, 2020 Tarot Math

Distribution Probability Counts by Spread Sizes

Given a fair-sized spread—say ten cards—we sometimes might say to ourselves, “hmmm… that’s a lot of swords there…” or “gee, not a single court card…” Those insights can and do affect the “bottom line” of a reading. Knowing, for example, that in the spread you just laid out for your client, Mars is very heavily represented can provide a rather important insight. Though deck designers often try to give us clues, it might be easy to miss something like that. Some decks even print the zodiac, planetary and/or qabalistic symbols on each card, specifically for this reason. This post isn’t going to give you any startling revelations. It’s just an odd, longish table I drew up to calculate, using standard deviation functions, the minimum-maximum numbers of the types of cards we should expect, in layouts between 1 and 16 cards in size. You’ll find breakouts for the classical elements, the Zodiac signs, the planets, the major and minors, the court cards, and, last but not least, reversals. If you find it helpful, great. If not, no worries… we’ll get back to those deep analysis type posts soon enough; this is just my way of takin’ a break. 😉