The Hanged Man of New York City

David Blaine has suspended himself upside-down in New York’s Central Park, where he’ll hang for three days and two nights. Like the Norse god Odin, he risks blindness as a result.

It’s kind of amazing how often tarot imagery and myths play out in real life.

PS: Read the news stories, and you’ll discover a new interpretation for the Hanged Man card: sinus pressure!

Death by the Sword

Remind me not to go to Saudi Arabia on my next book tour.

Saudi Sheikh: Kill Hosts of Horoscope Programs

Member of the High Judicial Council in Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Salah Al-Fawzan, has called to kill the hosts of TV horoscope programs on the grounds that they “practice magic.” Al-Fawzan contends that, according to Islam, they are guilty of “a crime whose perpetrators must be put to death by the sword,” and that “it is forbidden to pray over their bodies.”

The Etymology of the Fool

All of the tarot cards are associated with the four ancient elements — earth, air, fire, or water.

The Fool is associated with the element of air. Normally, that association stems from complicated astrological and kabbalistic formulations.

I just learned, though, that the Fool’s association with air could be based in ordinary language, too. The American Heritage Dictionary describes the connection:

The pejorative nature of the term fool is strengthened by a knowledge of its etymology. Its source, the Latin word follis, meant “a bag or sack, a large inflated ball, a pair of bellows.” Users of the word in Late Latin, however, saw a resemblance between the bellows or the inflated ball and a person who was what we would call “a windbag” or “an airhead.” The word, which passed into English by way of French, is first recorded in English in a work written around the beginning of the 13th century with the sense “a foolish, stupid, or ignorant person.”

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Tarot and Politics

Lately, I’ve been thrown off balance by the number of tarot readers who venture into politics online. Today, someone I admire greatly for her kindness and generosity promoted a Deepak Chopra essay on Sarah Palin that was so vitriolic and mean-spirited that it literally took my breath away.

You can go read Chopra’s work for yourself, if you like. It’s a pretty straightforward attack on conservatives. Chopra writes that Republicans represent the shadow side of life, and he says that Republicans base their opinions on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.