Occult Archives - M.A. Guglielmo

The Tarot Garden of Tuscany

M.A. Guglielmo — Sun, 21 Aug 2016 13:02:44 +0000

The Tarot Garden, or Il Giardino dei Tarocchi, wasn’t my first choice for a tourist stop during my recent trip to the Italian countryside.

Or my second, or my third.

My most recent vacation had been planned as a restful stay with my family in the rolling hills and farmland of Lazio, the province of Italy where Rome is located. A week in a Renaissance-era home, idyllic day trips to medieval hilltop towns—sounds relaxing, doesn’t it?

The trip was anything but. I’m not a terribly confident driver overseas, and local roads dominated by S-curves and honking locals irritated by my slow-poke driving style rattled me. I completed one white-knuckled ride after another, exploring towns like Orvieto, with its stunning cathedral, and the Etruscan tombs of Tarquinia.

The schedule for our last full day called for a visit to a beach, followed by a stop at the nearest tourist attraction on our list, an outdoor park filled with giant modern art sculptures. Getting to the coast was challenging enough. Finding the remote location of the park almost didn’t happen. Hours of driving had left all of us stressed, irritated, and grumpy. By the time we arrived, my family was close to revolt over my inability to decipher the rental car’s hapless navigation system, and I wasn’t in a particularly good mood to appreciate modern art.

We stepped out onto a dusty parking lot into the heat and humidity of July in Italy, and I seriously considering turning around and going home. But we had finally found the tourist destination we had spent hours looking for, so we paid a rather steep admission fee and walked up an elevated path to the Garden.

We turned a corner, and stepped into a psychedelic paradise of splashing water and riotous color. We had arrived in the Tarot Garden of Niki de Saint Phalle.

Sculptor, painter, filmmaker and wild child Niki de Saint Phalle wanted to create a sculpture park by and about women. The enormous structures she designed and built are based on the twenty-two figures of the Major Arcana in the Tarot deck.

My Tarot deck, waiting for me to use it to reveal the mysteries of the future. It’s been waiting for quite some time.

Like most people, I had never thought much about the real history behind the Tarot, the deck of 78 cards (divided into the Major and Minor Arcana) used for the art of divination known as cartomancy. My sole experience with the cards was my role as designated fortune-teller for a baby shower I helped host many years ago. I selected a set of Tarot cards based on examples of female divinity in history, skimmed the included instructions, and then set off to read everyone’s fortune. Despite my skepticism, I enjoyed providing the unorthodox baby shower entertainment. Reading out possible interpretations led to two-way conversations with my friends about our hopes and plans for the future, and putting a positive spin on most cards wasn’t difficult.

In researching the Tarot for this article, I dug up my old card deck. This woman-focused edition features goddesses from cultures all over the world, including a lovely print dedicated to Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of sex and warfare.

The goddess Inanna, who made love, and war. Don’t mess with her.

It turns out the actual history of the Tarot dates back to 15^th Century Italy, where the decks were used for parlor games by the wealthy, not fortune telling. These hand-painted cards became known as tarocchi. Their predecessors came from the Middle East, with the Mamluk playing cards that spread to Western Europe. Prior to that, cards known as Ganjifa in Persia may have influenced the Mamluk version. The origin of the first set of playing cards is shrouded in history, but is thought to be 9^th Century China or even earlier.

Although the real story behind the Tarot doesn’t have the glamour of an ancient divination technique dating back to the ancient Egyptians, the storied cards have inspired art on the creepy and miniature scale of Aleister Crowley’s the Book of Thoth deck, and on the whimsical and grand scale of the Tarot Gardens.

Yes, those are quite massive mammary structures.

We spent a pleasant afternoon in the Garden, climbing around and even into the gigantic sculptures decorated with mosaic tiles and glittering mirrors.

Water dripped and splashed, and hundreds of visitors posed for selfies in front of the structures.

My personal goddess deck of the Tarot, as it turns out, fits in well with the park’s themes of exploring and celebrating the female body.

If you’re visiting near Tuscany and have a car, the park is well worth the search if you want a different kind of art experience in Italy. Not sure if you’ll get there? Lay out your cards and see if the future holds a trip to Il Giardino dei Tarocchi.

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The Emerald Studded Sword of Ancient Persia

M.A. Guglielmo — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 17:47:44 +0000

Shamshir-e Zomorrodnegar, the emerald-studded sword, is mentioned in the Persian epic of Amir Arsalan. In the story, Fulad-zereh, a giant horned Ifrit, is led astray from his duties as head general to the King of the Peri by his fondness for beautiful women. In love with the queen, he takes advantage of the King’s death to turn the heir to the Peri king’s throne and all his castle’s inhabitants to stone. After spending time flying around trying to whisk away more lovely ladies, he learns that the hero Amir Arsalan is the only one who can slay him. The Ifrit’s powerful witch of a mother enchants his body to resist all weapons, with one notable exception: Zomorrodnegar.

The emerald-studded magic shamshir had originally belonged to King Solomon, and both worked as a magic charm and inflicted wounds treatable only with a potion made from brains. Fulad-zereh’s brains, to be exact.

Not eager to have his only weakness exposed, the Ifrit keeps Zomorrodnegar for himself, but falls in battle to Amir Arsalan, who then creates a gruesome concoction of the burnt remains of Fulad-zereh and his mother. The hero sprays the potion over the petrified castle, rescuing the court.

A shamshir like Zomorrodnegar has a deeply curved blade and is typical of swords from the 16th century in Persia and India. Prior to the 9th century, swords in Persia were straight and double-edged. The curved edge of a shamshir facilitated slashing attacks while on horseback.

As over the top as jewels on a sword might sound, ornate weapons that worked more as pieces of art than the means to kill other people are hardly rare, as the example at the top of this post (from the Metropolitan Museum of Art) demonstrates.

Below are more examples of of 18th Century Ottoman shamshirs, complete with decorative scabbards:

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The Jinn Part I: Aisa Qandisa

M.A. Guglielmo — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 18:12:09 +0000

The Jinn of Middle East and North Africa legend bear little relationship to the Western caricature of a bare-chested figure arising from an oil lamp to grant wishes. Created before the race of man from smokeless fire, the Jinn, like humans, are mortal. They are born, they can marry and bear children, and they die, although they live much longer than humans. They have a societal structure and heirarchy, and follow different religions. Like humans, they face eternal judgement for their actions on earth, and therefore have free will to chose a life of good, or a life of evil.

In Morocco, one of the worst of the evil Jinn is a female spirit known as Aisa Qandisa. According to legend, she was a female shaman, or spirtual healer, who violated the tradition of dressing in white for 40 days after the death of her husband, when his spirit still hovered between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Her punishment was to become one of the Jinn she bargained with to gain her powers. Now a Jinn herself, she was tasked with haunting rivers and streams, taking the shape of a beautiful woman to lure young men to a watery grave.

Sitting beside the dying flames of a campfire, I listened as the director of our tour told me his own personal story of an encounter with this dark spirit. Years ago, as a young man, he left a party late at night to return home. Close to midnight, he crossed a small river, his car rolling over a rickety wooden bridge. His headlights glanced off the figure of a solitary woman, her palm raised up in a gesture to ask for a ride. Surprised that anyone, much less a woman, would be hitchhiking at such an unusual hour, he pulled his car over and invited her inside.

Looking back, he told me that nothing about the woman’s appearance seemed out of the ordinary. He chatted with her briefly about her destination and started up the car again, the wheels chattering along the planks of the bridge. After a short distance, he decided some music might make his new-found companion enjoy the ride more. He grabbed for a cassette tape, but it slipped from his hands and fell down in front of the woman’s feet. Expressing his apologies, he stopped the car, and reached down to pick the tape up off the floor.

As his fingers closed around the cassette, he froze. Instead of human feet, the horned legs of an animal emerged from below her dress. Bolting upright, he realized that his half-human, half-animal hitchhiker was a Jinn, and an evil one at that. A fragment of story his grandfather had told him flashed through his mind. Aisa Qandisa could be banished if a knife blade was thrust through thin air with only a single blow. Any more strikes, and the Jinn could never be defeated, now matter how powerful the weapon. He reached for small knife near his seat and thrust the blade downward, adding a prayer as he did so. His heart pounding in his chest, he looked over to see that his front seat was empty. The woman who had been sitting there had vanished. Shaken, he turned back onto the road, driving as fast as he could to Marrakech.

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The Hand of Fatima

M.A. Guglielmo — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 18:47:28 +0000

Now that you’re tossing and turning at night, worrying about the Evil Eye, you’re probably eager to hear about ways to protect yourself from it. In Italy, you might ward off Il Malocchio with the mano cornuto or sign of the horns :

The gesture also became a popular salute in heavy metal, and gained Satanic associations.

In Middle Eastern cultures, a similar hand protection symbol is the Hamsa (خمسة) also known as the Hand of Fatima, the Hand of Miriam, or the Hand of Mary, in Muslim, Jewish and Christian traditions. It’s an open right hand with the palm facing forward, sometimes with an eye in the center.

عين زرقاء the blue eye symbol that protects against the عين السد, the Evil Eye or Eye of Envy

The Hamsa is thought to predate all of these three religions and to have originated in ancient Mesopotamia. In Islam, the number five has added significance, and the five fingers may represent Mohammed and his household members, or the five pillars of Islam. Stylized versions are popular in design and jewelry. Traditionally, silver might used for the amulet, with its associations of purity.

So, if you’re looking to hedge your bets about the Evil Eye and perhaps add some luck, a beautiful Hamsa charm might be the perfect thing to shop for…

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