Chapter 4
My persecutions begin, and have still not ended. A game of Tarot.
I left my native town of Carpentras in 1796 to come and settle in Avignon. I stayed there for a few years in a middle-class [1] town house. While I was there a girl came to stay as a servant. When I had settled in and the house was furnished, she offered to lay out a game of Tarot for me. Eventually I agreed, and she brought in a woman by the name of Mansotte to read the tarot cards for us. And it seemed one of them added a sort of enchantment to the cards, one that put me in the hands of the goblins. By promising mortals a taste of knowledge of the present and future, they draw them into their diabolic web, and it is soon too late to repent.
This is how these two women, both disciples of Satan, operated: they brought out a sieve, the sort you would use for sifting flour, to which a pair of scissors were attached by its points. A white paper, folded, was placed in the sieve, and neither of them would tell me what it contained. The two rings of the scissors were held by Mansotte and myself, so that the sieve was, by this device, suspended in the air. As the sieve moved, I was asked different questions. “Will you be happy?” “Will you inherit some money?” “Do you like money?” and a thousand similar questions, not worth listing, though perhaps useful to those who were trying to gain control of me. [2]
While we played the sieve game, they put out three pots, one of which contained tarot cards from the table, cards that showed the images of people. Blindfolded, I was asked to choose the cards to spread on the table, and then throw a few more into a pot. They covered this pot with a plate. The second pot they seasoned with salt, pepper and oil, the third with laurel. Then the pots were placed on a shelf, open, and the witches pretended to draw cards from the pot to interpret, though they had already learned what they needed from their magic, borrowed from the goblins in the forms of wizards who create these cards.
Friends, don’t fall into this trap, I hope my example will show you what to avoid and how I might escape my circumstances. Only with the help of God the Creator will I be free of this curse.
[1] M.B. uses the word “Bourgeoise” here, staying at “a Bourgeoise house,” which is a word that goes quite a lot of different directions. I’ll go with “middle class,” but it carries a bit of “opposed to the working class,” “rich pretenders,” “urbanites,” “materialists,” and may be a word that cannot ever be perfectly translated. Given that he inherited his uncle’s estate and unwittingly comes across as “aristocratic privilege” repeatedly during his memoir, a more negative slant on the word would probably work.
[2] “Coscinomancy” is divination using a sieve and shears. A pair of scissors was balanced so that when two people held it, it was impossible to have it stay still, and as it jittered around, it could be used to answer simple questions. Picture below from Agrippa.
Recent Comments