Magicians and mini-Magicians

I have a new post up at The Magician's Table discussing the Magician card of the "Grand Etteilla" family of Tarot decks.

Against my better judgment

My curiosity finally got the better of me, and I clicked on the page that made a picture of a group of happy white people in blackface the number two Google image search result for happy white people.

Hoo boy.

It's a Medium article -- also duplicated, without the blackface pic and with a somewhat less confusing title, on HuffPost -- called "Dear White People, Boycotting Netflix Won’t Make You Any Whiter Than You Already Are," subtitled "But, you can try." (Why this article about white people trying to be even whiter is illustrated with a photo of white people trying to be black is anyone's guess. You know, editors!) The author, one Ezinne Ukoha, unfortunately failed to specify preferred pronouns, but I infer from the Twitter handle @nilegirl that Ezinne is a name given to girls along the reedy Nile and will refer to her accordingly.

At first I assumed the article would be about that Netflix kiddie-porn thing that's been in the news recently, which I believe was produced by a woman of color and is therefore totally racist to boycott -- but actually it was written way back in early 2017, when the thing to boycott was apparently a TV series about how white people are bad. (How quaint! Simpler times, people.)

I was afraid that reading the thing would be a waste of my time, but it turns out Ms. Ukoha -- who describes herself as a "Juggling Wordsmith" -- is the kind of writer that only comes around once in a generation. Behold what is almost certainly the single most awesome sentence ever to grace the English language:

First off, the times call for a bold ushering of unabashed throttling towards all the reasons why being Black in America has afforded such anguish at the behest of those who commissioned themselves superior enough to mandate our misery.

Richard Dawkins once wrote that when he finished reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, he immediately turned right back to page one and read it again. It was that good. That's how I feel about this sentence. As soon as I had reached the end, I immediately felt compelled to go back and read it again from the beginning. And again. And again. Like all great literature, it is inexhaustible, and repeated rereadings can only deepen one's appreciation.

I know it's offensive to call a black person "articulate," and I would never dream of giving offense here, so I'll just repeat the descriptor Ms. Ukoha herself has chosen: she is, without a doubt, the mother of all Juggling Wordsmiths, throwing her word-hammer, word-anvil, and word-tongs about with all the casual dexterity of a chef tossing a salad.

Later in the article, the Juggling Wordsmith calls out a CNN reporter for one of those hilarious gaffes white people are always committing.

On the same day Dear White People started to trend— CNN’s Chris Cuomo was taken to task for poorly defending his right to report the facts above the threatening clout of "fake news."

"I see being called 'fake news' as the equivalent of the N-word for journalists, the equivalent of calling an Italian any of the ugly words that people have for that ethnicity."

Facepalm! Listen, Chris Cuomo, let me explain something to you. The N-word is like the freaking Holocaust of insults. It has no equivalents. You don't compare anything to it. You--

Oh, wait.

Crap.

Anyway, back to the article. Here's another virtuoso sentence from the Juggling Wordsmith -- not quite as awe-inspiring as the first, but then sequels never are.

Your whiteness doesn’t scream through the streets as we battle the pain of our steps that are commanded by the streams of blood that leave footprints leading to the next victim who dies for the sake of being Black — while being White and right keeps the body count fatefully cohesive.

Dude, she gave White and Black equal capitalization! That's actually kind of cool. Oh, right, it was 2017.

Your whiteness has never protected the Black man who once occupied the Oval Office from the deluge of insults that overwhelmed his official capacity even when he was the very best human draped in the Technicolor of hope and victory.

Checkmate, privilege-deniers. As humans draped in the Technicolor of hope and victory go, Obama was undoubtedly the very best, but a deluge of insults can overwhelm the official capacity of even the best of us! And what a contrast with the white presidents who came before and after him -- George W. Bush and Donald Trump -- who, protected from deluges of insults by their white privilege, were always treated with the utmost respect.

I could go on. Every sentence is so perfect that I just want to quote them all -- but of course that would amount to imperialistically appropriating the labors of a person of color, so I'll stop here and just say read the whole thing.

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By the way, if you do a web search rather than an image search for happy white people, the first result is an article called "'If Your Hair Is Relaxed, White People Are Relaxed. If Your Hair Is Nappy, They’re Not Happy': Black Hair as a Site of 'Post-Racial' Social Control in English Schools" -- but this time I'll resist the temptation.

Two things we've learned in 2020

1. Satan thinks people are stupid. I mean really, really stupid. So jaw-droppingly, unbelievably stupid that I'm having trouble expressing it properly without resorting to profanity.

2. So far, we're not exactly proving him wrong.

Google is a joke -- an offensive ethnic joke

So happy to be white!

You've probably heard about the "happy white woman" thing. Here it is, quantified.

I ran image searches on the following strings (without quotation marks, though using quotation marks doesn't change much!) at Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Google and recorded the first 10 results.

happy black man:

• Bing: 10 happy black men
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy black men
• Yandex: 10 happy black men
• Google: 10 happy black men

happy Asian man:

• Bing: 10 happy Asian men
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy Asian men
• Yandex: 10 happy Asian men
• Google: 10 happy Asian men

happy white man:

• Bing: 10 happy white men
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy white men
• Yandex: 10 happy white men
• Google:
• 7 happy white men
• 2 happy black men (first two results!)
• 1 happy black man with a pregnant white woman

happy black people:

• Bing: 10 groups of happy black people
• DuckDuckGo: 10 groups of happy black people
• Yandex:
• 9 groups of happy black people
• 1 multiracial group of happy people
• Google: 10 groups of happy black people

happy Asian people:

• Bing: 10 groups of happy Asian people
• DuckDuckGo: 10 groups of happy Asian people
• Yandex: 10 groups of happy Asian people
• Google: 10 groups of happy Asian people

happy white people:

• Bing:
• 9 groups of happy white people
• 1 multiracial group of happy people
• DuckDuckGo:
• 8 groups of happy white people
• 2 multiracial groups of happy people
• Yandex:
• 6 groups of happy white people
• 4 multiracial groups of happy people
• Google:
• 6 groups of happy white people
• 3 multiracial groups of happy people
• 1 group of happy white people in blackface (second result!)

happy black woman:

• Bing: 10 happy black women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy black women
• Yandex: 10 happy black women
• Google: 10 happy black women

happy Asian woman:

• Bing: 10 happy Asian women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy Asian women
• Yandex: 10 happy Asian women
• Google: 10 happy Asian women

happy white woman:

• Bing: 10 happy white women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy white women
• Yandex: 10 happy white women
• Google:
• 4 search result screenshots
• 2 happy black men with pregnant white women
• 1 happy black man with a white woman and a mulatto baby
• 1 happy white woman with a black baby
• 1 happy black woman with a white man
• 1 happy white woman

pregnant black woman:

• Bing: 10 pregnant black women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 pregnant black women
• Yandex:
• 9 pregnant black women
• 1 multiracial group of pregnant women
• Google:
• 9 pregnant black women
• 1 pregnant black woman with a white man

pregnant Asian woman:

• Bing: 10 pregnant Asian women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 pregnant Asian women
• Yandex: 10 pregnant Asian women
• Google: 10 pregnant Asian women

pregnant white woman:

• Bing: 10 pregnant white women
• DuckDuckGo:
• 5 pregnant white women
• 4 pregnant white women with black men
• 1 pregnant white woman with a white child
• Yandex:
• 4 pregnant white women with black men
• 3 pregnant black women
• 2 pregnant white women
• 1 pregnant black woman with a black man
• Google:
• 6 pregnant white women with black men
• 3 pregnant white women
• 1 pregnant Asian woman with an Asian man

Draw your own conclusions.

New blog: The Magician's Table

Following a suggestion from Bruce Charlton, I have created a new blog, The Magician's Table, for my Tarot-related posts. The significance of the name is explained in my first post there, Writing the Book of Thoth. All future Tarot posts will be there, and all my old Tarot posts will eventually be copied there.

Out of the strong came forth sweetness.

Briton Rivière, Una and the Lion (1880)

In my last post (qv), I hypothesized that the Strength card of the Tarot de Marseille originated when a depiction of Samson -- long-haired, beardless, and labeled with the grammatically feminine title La Fortezza or La Force -- was misinterpreted as being a woman. (Something similar seems to have happened to no less a personage than Jesus Christ in the World card.)

Visconti-Sforza Tarot, Tübinger Hausbuch, P. Madenié Tarot

As can be seen above, the earliest surviving Tarot cards (painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family) used Hercules rather than Samson as a representation of the virtue of Fortitude. The hero's identity is made clear by his short hair and by the fact that he carries a club. (Hercules first stunned the Nemean lion with his club and then strangled it with his bare hands; when Samson killed his lion, though, "he had nothing in his hand.")

While depictions of Hercules and the Nemean lion typically show the hero using his club or else grappling with the beast after the fashion of a Greek wrestler, Samson is almost universally depicted holding the lion's jaws open. This may seem strange -- wouldn't you want to hold its jaws closed? -- but reflects the biblical language. While Hercules bludgeoned and strangled his adversary, Samson "rent him as he would have rent a kid" (Judges 14:6). Pictures like the one in the Tübinger Hausbuch show him preparing to tear the beast in two.

The woman in the Tarot de Marseille also holds the lion's jaws open with her hands -- a pose specific to Samson, for a specific biblical reason. For me, this is conclusive evidence confirming my earlier speculation. The Strength card of the TdM came into being as a corruption of what was originally a picture of Samson -- the mistake being facilitated by his long hair and by the strangely androgynous faces so common in medieval and Renaissance art.

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But when it comes to the development of the Tarot, the oldest cards are not always the truest, and a mistake is not always just a mistake. There is evolution at work here -- perhaps literal memetic evolution by natural selection (where only such mistakes as improve the card are preserved and copied), perhaps something more mysterious.

Hercules and the Nemean lion is just a standard hero-slays-monster story, with nothing particularly interesting about it. Vico, though, sees it is a symbolic representation of razing the forests of Nemea so that the land could be cultivated.

In the Samson story, this connection between killing the lion and providing food becomes more explicit, as Samson returns to the lion's carcass some time later and finds honey in it. This is the basis of his famous riddle:

Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.

I have quoted a version that rhymes -- it's a riddle, it has to rhyme! -- but the King James version says, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness" (Judges 14:14). The answer, discovered by his enemies through the treachery of his Philistine girlfriend, is "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" (v. 18).

The woman in the TdM image cannot be identified as any particular historical or mythological person, but I have illustrated this post with Briton Rivière's Una and the Lion -- a scene from Spenser -- because that is who she (anachronistically) reminds me of. Waite apparently thought likewise; his Strength card includes the Spenserian detail of the lion's licking Una's hand.

It fortuned out of the thickest wood
   A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly,
   Hunting full greedie after saluage blood;
   Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
   With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
   To haue attonce deuour'd her tender corse:
   But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
   His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.

In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
   And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
   As he her wronged innocence did weet.
   O how can beautie maister the most strong,
   And simple truth subdue auenging wrong?
   Whose yeelded pride and proud submission,
   Still dreading death, when she had marked long,
   Her hart gan melt in great compassion,
And drizling teares did shed for pure affection.

And what is this but Samson's riddle completed? Out of the strong came forth sweetness, and out of the sweet came forth strength.

Samson and the Strength card

Rider-Waite Tarot

One of the deepest and most evocative cards in the Tarot is the trump called variously, Fortitude, Force, or Strength -- showing not some powerful warrior or strongman, but rather a peaceful, serene young woman gently and effortlessly controlling a lion.

As I say, an evocative image. Did it originate by mistake? By what I have taken to calling a Jungian slip?

Today I happened to be (virtually) flipping through the Tübinger Hausbuch, a German tome of the mid-15th century, full of medical, astrological, and geomantic lore, and lavishly illustrated. The picture below (left) caught my eye because of its striking similarity to the Strength card.

Tübinger Hausbuch (left); Pierre Madenié Tarot (right)

I have already noted the convention of depicting Samson holding a lion's jaws open and pointed out two examples from West Minster. The West Minster Samsons are, as is usual, bearded -- Nazarites didn't shave, right? -- but the Tübinger Hausbuch shows him beardless and with flowing golden locks, so that -- were it not for the familiarity of the image, and the helpful scroll in the background labeled "Samson der something-or-other," we just might mistake the Hebrew Hercules for a woman!

Could anyone actually make such a mistake in the Middle Ages, though? Surely the story of Samson, and the associated iconography, would be much too familiar to cause any such confusion.

But suppose we decided Samson was the perfect embodiment of the Classical virtue of fortitude and, instead of labeling his image Samson, wrote instead La Fortezza or La Force -- feminine nouns both. Then would a mistake become more plausible?