GREAT HOO!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks a lot. I search it, but I cant find.

THANKS and welcome

hoo wrote: - I do have a deep and abiding interest in the Mantegna deck and I look forward to joining in on some of those "lively discussions". I have the modern Llewellyn version and it's a beauty.

I have that deck, I credit it for opening the door to the muses for me. And Apollo of course.

I think it was my first foil deck, I like the foil decks.

Forgot to say that the name "hoo" reminds me of Sutton Hoo and a study I did of St. Elegius from the Tarot of the Saints using the Merovingian coins they found at Sutton Hoo, some of which were probably made or designed by Elegius.

Perhaps the new member hoo is an actual entity released when Sutton Hoo was dug up? Yes, an ancient soul, alive at the time when people actually knew who Melpomene was and could spot her easily in the Mantegna Tarot.

I'm thinking this might be so anyway.

cadla wrote:Forgot to say that the name "hoo" reminds me of Sutton Hoo and a study I did of St. Elegius from the Tarot of the Saints using the Merovingian coins they found at Sutton Hoo, some of which were probably made or designed by Elegius.

Perhaps the new member hoo is an actual entity released when Sutton Hoo was dug up? Yes, an ancient soul, alive at the time when people actually knew who Melpomene was and could spot her easily in the Mantegna Tarot.

I'm thinking this might be so anyway.

I had a run in with St. Elegius when writing an essay on local parish churches. He's depicted in a wall painting. First time I met him.
http://www.robertmealing.com/?p=694

I think of the Who's down in Whoville when I see Hoo, but I like Sutton Hoo much more, so I'll join you in imagine buried ships, viking kings, and sunday metal-detecting pensioners.

Well, I have no personal memory of this Sutton Hoo you speak of. But it could go a long way in explaining my unreasoning phobia for penshioners with metal detectors.

It is a little spooky however, being on this forum. I had just stumbled across a digital facsimile of the Ghisi book at the Herzog August Bibliotek. I decided to google and see what I could find out. I followed a link to this forum (which I have perused before, but never joined), and this thread. When I read mjhurst's post and instructions for playing the game Labarinto, I realized that my uncle, who was a real clown, taught me this exact card trick when I was a little boy. I had little interest in magic tricks then however, and I'm afraid I must have disappointed him. But now, after all these decades, here I am, discovering the antique sources of that very thing, by accident.

It's a common trick, not really spooky, very much people are taught this trick in their youth ...for instance me and my children. You can imitate the principle with playing cards, there are different patterns. One is

21 cards
the "victim" shall choose one
You count them down in 3x7 blocks
the victim shall say, in which of the 3 blocks it is
You take this block in the middle and count them down again in 3x7 blocks
the victim shall say, in which of the 3 block it is
You take this block in the middle and count them down again in 3x7 blocks
the victim shall say, in which of the 3 block it is
You take this block and it is the 4th card from top (the 11th card totally ... the middle)

Yes Huck - this is exactly what my uncle taught me. Spooky only because at the time I did not care so much about it, but that now I find myself returning to it from such a different angle so late in life.

RE Labarinto, I just found a neat post on a magic forum discussing Ghisi's book in the context of the history of magic, in magicians terms. Pay special attention to the posts by 'Dick Christian' beginning with

Here is a brief extract from my award-winning article "Notes On The History Of Book Tests" which appeared in the April 2008 issue of The Linking Ring (the official magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians)

http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/view ... orum=15&15
where he states

Although the invention of the book test is most often ascribed to the noted 19th century magician Johan Nepomuk Hofzinser (1806-1875) who is said to have devised at least four such tests, the discovery by Vanni Bossi of the Italian publication Il Laberinto produced by Andrea Ghisi in 1607, and now believed to be the earliest known to be in print, is evidence that such tests existed some 200 years before Hofzinser.

I am only an expert procrastinator and not actually a prestidigitator, but it appears from a quick google that this man is a professional magician. The excerpt from his article posted on 'The Magic Cafe' looks to me as if this man is an expert on the answers for the exact subject of this thread, including the particulars on the use of the instructions posted by 'mjhurst' on the first page of this thread, 'Huck"s succint 21 card instructions directly above, and so the actual opening question posed by Adam Mclean
Which was-

It (Labarinto) has always intrigued me. Has anyone been able to solve the secret it poses, which is something to do with the arrangement of these figures into arrays ?

Also in Dick Christians post, Reginald Scot's book 'The Discoverie Of Witchcraft'- 1584 is cited. Here is a link to an 1886 reprint of that.
http://www.archive.org/details/discoverieofwitc00scot

hoo wrote: I am only an expert procrastinator and not actually a prestidigitator...

robert wrote: I had a run in with St. Elegius when writing an essay on local parish churches. He's depicted in a wall painting. First time I met him.
http://www.robertmealing.com/?p=694

That was fascinating, how haunting to see those colours and images on this little chapel and read the history of it. I can understand why it made such an impression on you.

I think of the Who's down in Whoville when I see Hoo, but I like Sutton Hoo much more, so I'll join you in imagine buried ships, viking kings, and sunday metal-detecting pensioners.

I was hesitant to say that I also remembered the Who's down in Whoville, but yes, I shall don my clamus and think of Merovingian kings and hoo.

I shall don my clamus and think of Merovingian kings and hoo.

wOw ! But I'm having trouble picturing you in a 'clamus'. There's no wikipedia page or any other definition online, and it's not even in my 'Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary'. Not an english word I guess. There is a metal band with the name Clamus and even clamus.com and a clamus.org ('under construction"). But that's all I get from Google. So please, tell me 'Cadia', what is it ? What are you wearing ?

RE Labarinto -
After discovering the link of this game to the history of stage magic and legerdemain, I began musing. Everyone should know that the Tarot, and all cards share a certain history with card tricks and "card cheats". I myself bought a Tarot deck from the window of a curio shop which turned out to be rigged so that the fortune teller could perform various well known stunts with it. You can read all about these in the many many magic books written over the last 2 centuries, from Robert Houdin to Jean Hugard to Henry Hay. People do magic tricks with cards and people play games with cards and people use magic tricks to cheat at card games. A great book called 'Marked Cards and Loaded Dice' by Frank Garcia goes into detail on this.

With the game Labarinto and the 'Book Test' described in the link in my post above, we can see just how intimate the history of Magic really is with the history of Tarot. Magicians themselves are the historians of magic. Tarot fares little better. Academia tends to ignore both.

I have spent most of this year studying 'Emblem Books'. Tthe iconography of these books shares all of the elements of the Visconti deck, the Mantegna and the Minchiate, etc. etc. The Tarot predates the very first emblem book by about 100 years. But in the several books I've read on emblems which attempt to define, decipher and discover the origins of their iconography, I have only seen the word Tarot mentioned once.

Further, I rarely read any direct reference to Magic and Legerdemain in pieces on the Tarot. And instructions for magicians card tricks rarely seem to feature the Tarot decks.

It seems to me that the popular culture of the Renaissance has some very atmospheric, and romantic, possibly scandalous, and very real secret connections and mysteries, just waiting to be discovered...