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Dave,
are you not suggesting that there are many individual expressions of one archetype, depending on earthly context? Mercury may indeed be the trickster one day, and the messenger the next.
 
Dr Angela Voss
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From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of kaostar [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2011 10:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] supernatural agents

absolutely re Jesper's last point on Tarot cards being real objects

I'd add that while the printed cards are indeed real objects the associated symbolism and meaning varies hugely (even between the same reader on different days, with the same card on the table in front of them) - the interpretations of a card  change often... and while the little guidebooks you get with many decks will say (for example) 'The Tower implies a subjectively catastrophic event with some kind of positive regeneration following later' (those being my words, not taken from any particular book)- each reader will have their own take on tendencies of what the Tower (and every other card) might mean to them when using the cards for themselves or others, plus the context of the surrounding cards in a spread comes in to play, and both of those factors change with experience (getting it "right" being perhaps a positive conditioning experience, that is remembered and reinforced with future "hits")

it's something that would possibly make a nonsense of any kind of scientific approach to study of Tarot readers- for example, imagine a lab experiment like this:

a selection of cards  (in a commonly-used arrangement, 'tree of life' spread or whatever) is laid out on a table

invited Tarot readers of a nicely varied age, ethnic, social class and gender range come in to the lab, one at a time (without any chance of conferring before or after with anyone) for a set period of time and look at the layout and the cards, and then "say what it means", which is taped and transcribed, and scored on (perhaps) a content analysis matrix, and some nice statistics produced

i suspect the 'results' would support the view that Tarot reading has pretty much zero consistency and measurement validity


which rather misses the point of what it's about, but it would be reported in a scientific journal as a negative finding (on those terms)

and *that* fixety of physical card design allied with delicious fluidity of individual meaning I find fascinating, it's something that we tend not to have very much in life, where objects and the symbolism behind them tends to be much more stable - for example i'm typing this while being overlooked by a postcard showing a classical-era stutue of Mercury; god of communication, knowledge etc {and a trickster : ) }- which is a pretty stable attribution over history. If Mercury was a trickster on a wednesday and a symbol of something else on each of the other 6 days it'd become very confusing...


Dave E




---------- Original Message -----------
From: Jesper Aagaard Petersen <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:26:53 +0100
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] supernatural agents

> >Does the supernatural agent only become an agent via its physical manifestations? In other words, does the immaterial need to somehow be >>>translated into materiality, and if so, is our use of ANT just one more form of psychical research? What of the psychological impact on >>human subjects? If a supernatural being is "taken seriously" by a human subject, is that enough to endow it with real agency - or does it >depend on who the human subject is?
> Dear all.
> Regarding both these questions and the interesting post on Tarot, I think you're selling Religious Studies and Anthropology somewhat short. Now, I have enjoyed ANT as well as Taussig's study on Devil worship enormously, but neither is *needed* to take supernatural agents seriously in an academic context. Any agent, supernatural or otherwise, has a real material presence in social discourse, and so, if taken seriously by a human subject, will influence "reality" with "real" agency. This intentionally sidesteps the ontological question, as there are several modes of being. Flying saucers is a good example; Santa Claus is another.
> It is similar with the Tarot. The cards themselves definitely do exist as physical objects, while the range of possible interpretations and systems of practice have a social being. So they exist as agents and so influence reality. If practitioners say they're magical, they are and should be studied as such. Whether they are "really" (as in "physically") magical is a theological question - very interesting, but not necessary for studying them as social and material agents.
> Best,
> Jesper.
> ----------------------------------------------
> Jesper Aagaard Petersen
> Research Fellow, Dept. of Archeology and Religious Studies
> NTNU, Dragvoll
> NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway
> Tlf. 0047-735-98312
> email: [log in to unmask]
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