Who is msimc?
Msimc
Card, candle, and astrology reading and supply business from Fullerton, Ca, opened in 2019
Read Marseille, Lenormand, Playing Cards, and other card styles
We read and write reports for about 3,000 vigil candles a year
We participate in around 14 live events a year. That number is growing.
We do online readings, phone, email, video, and setting of lights for various purposes and petitions.
We also keep a modest online shop—cards, candles, oils, sprays, and incense.
In this 21st century, we divine with various tools. Some of the tools are older than others. Some work for certain types of inquiries better than others. Each practitioner understands their own specialties and how they like to approach things—using cards as an oracular tool culminated through many shufflings of technology, spirituality, and psychology.
Based on sources that precede it, Le Tarot de Marseille came into a relatively consistent recognizable identity concerning images and style between the early modern period and the age of revolutions, roughly 1450-1850. It directly influenced the standard poker deck and served as the basis for the Rider Waite Smith and other decks.
What comes together to make the Reading of Marseille cards possible?
Cardstock
Printing
Gaming
Divination
Social Conditioning
Cultural Competence
The desire to understand
Paper card stock
Papyrus 4th millennium BC, Egypt
Paper, Eastern Han Dynasty 25-250CE
Amate in Jalisco 75 CE is a Mesoamerican bark paper. It has yet to have been known as geographically connected to the European use of paper. Therefore, it is not considered to be connected to European cards.
The quality of amate is considered better than papyrus.
Maya codices are pre-Columbian folded books of professional scribes under the patronage of deities like the Tonsured Maize God and the Howler Monkey Gods.
This illustrates the universality of archetypal and divine representation depicted on writing substrates.
Note that the Mamluk did not feature human figures. More on that later
Conquistadors and Catholic priests in the 16th century destroyed most codices.
Chinese paper spread to the Islamic world to replace papyrus
11th century in Europe, paper replaced wood and leather for writing
Note that cards of paper are simply unbound pages
Woodblock Printing
7th century AD in China on cloth, xylography
10th-century Arabic Egypt
Mid-15th century whole-page woodblock prints for books
Gaming
Egypt senet and mehen. The game of senet is thought to be over 5000 years old.
Dice games 2800BC
Mamluk, Nayb, Naipes, Naibi, Triumphi, Tarrochi
The game of cards became established in most West European countries by c.1375
Before that, in the 1200’s, Mamluk card patterns spread from the Islamic world via Italy and Spain into Europe. In 1379, the Chronicles of Viterbo recorded that a new game called 'nayb' was introduced from the East. https://www.wopc.co.uk/egypt/mamluk-playing-cards
The word for playing cards used in the Italian Renaissance (naibi) and in Spain even today (naipes) is of Arabic origin and derived from nā'ib.
The Egyptian Mamluk does not feature human figures.
In some forms of Islamic art, aniconism (the avoidance of images of sentient beings) comes in part from the prohibition of idolatry and the belief that the creation of living forms is God's job.
Religious Islamic art has been typically characterized by the absence of figures and extensive use of calligraphic, geometric, and abstract floral patterns.
However, the Mamluk features calligraphic texts. Along the tops of the cards, rhyming aphorisms are written:
“With the sword of happiness, I shall redeem a beloved who will afterward take my life“ -
“O thou who hast possessions, remain happy, and thou shalt have a pleasant life.” -
“Let it come to me because acquired good is durable; it rejoices me with all its utility” -
“Pleasures for the soul and agreeable things, in my colors, there are all kinds” -
“Look how wonderful my game is and my dress extraordinarily beautiful” -
“I am as a garden, the like of which will never exist” -
“O my heart, for thee the good news that rejoices” -
“Rejoice in the happiness that returns, as a bird that sings its joy.”
Divination
Intelligence
Birds build and decorate nests and do elaborate dances, promising one another an excellent future.
Homo Sapiens began 300,000 years ago
However, that is not when intelligence started
Stone Age spanned 3.4 million years
Kenyanthropus platyops (a 3.2 to 3.5-million-year-old Pliocene hominin fossil discovered in Lake Turkana, Kenya in 1999) may have been the earliest tool-users known.
Concept of the Divine, Concept of the Future, Tools, Planning, Belief, Agency, It’s about a promise, desire, or a wish.
What is divining
Extracting or triangulating the known from the unknown? Or vice versa?
Communing with energies and forces, divine.
Cowrie-shell divination.
Evidence of use as currency was 1300 BC, but it started long before that.
Yoruba prehistory precedes 11,000 BC
I Ching, Book of Changes 1,000 BC
2,000 BC Sumeria, Babylonia
Seal from Sumer in the 5th millennium BC. Azu= Water diviner, Water knower
Also, from the Sumerian culture, a death amulet seal shows the name Uzu-as' and is a resurrection amulet for the slave and seer of the Temple of the Sun, Uzu-as.' As part of the name, the word Uzu meant diviner, magician, or seer
We have evidence of human burials back to 130,000 years ago
Divination, as long as we have had a concept of the Divine and a concept of the future
Decks
Deck Dates
Mamluk, 1200’s, Egypt Save images or take pictures of these decks
Visconte Sforza, 1400’s, Italy
Noblet, 1650, France
Dodal, 1701, France
Conver, 1760, France
Grimmaude, Paul Marteau, 1930, France
Rider Wait Smith, 1910 England
Thoth 1943, Alester Crowly, Lady Frieda Harris, England
Visconte-Sforza
Around 1450,
They were commissioned by Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and by his successor and son-in-law, Francesco Sforza.
They significantly impacted the visual composition, card numbering, and interpretation of modern decks.[
There are 15 partial decks known
The restorers (not an exhaustive list.)
Paul Marteau: Grimmaud
Arthur Wait, Pamela Colman Smith: RWS
Jean Claude Flornoy: France (Roxanne)
Osvaldo Menaghazzi: Italy (Soprafino)
Pablo Robledo: Argentina (Dodal)
Hismans Sullivan: Tarot Sheet Revival
Agnes Kapler: France (handmade paper)
Yoav Ben Dov: (Conver Ben Dov)
Joseph Peterson: Photo restoration, Noblet
