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The Holy Baseball Tarot Deck
“Kether,” says Osborne, the 12-year-old pitcher. “You’re falling asleep.”
Baseball is poetry. The chi between the bases, like the meridians between acupuncture points on the body, resonates a kind of holiness of the diamond self: the diamond body of the baseball diamond. The diamond sutra is a mantra of “Strike, you’re out, play ball, batter up.”
“Swing the bat effortlessly,” I tell them.
“The umpire hates us,” Osborne says, hitting me with his glove. I smell the leather as his glove covers my face. This is his first year in Little League, and he hates losing.
“Which incarnation is this for you?” I ask him.
“You said it was my first incarnation as a baseball player,” says Osborne. Some other boys are on the dugout bench, looking bored.
“And you said you used to be some guy named William Blake,” snorts Osborne. “You’re Blake the Flake!”
“I was,” I say. “I wrote flaked-out poetry, and made a crazy tarot deck about God and Adam.”
“Strike!,” yells the umpire from behind home plate as one of our players takes a bad swing.
“But now you have a baseball tarot deck,” says Osborne excitedly. His short black hair seems to want to leap off his head when there is mention of my Holy Baseball Tarot Deck.
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James Wickson left this comment about 1 year ago
I have noticed quite a large number of articles on Tarot cards on Chronogram.com. However, as a player of Tarot card games, I am disapointed that Tarot's ongoing tradition of card playing is neglected in your online publication. While I applaud Robert Place's largely accurate article on Tarot history, he makes no reference to the fact that people, especially in continental Europe, are still playing card games with Tarot decks. One is led to believe falsely that the Tarot card game is defunct! The Tarot game is still played primarily in France and Canada and there is also, thanks to the internet, a slow but growing following in the USA and in other countries around the world. Another error in Place's article concerns the suits of the Tarot. There are in fact modern European Tarot decks containing the playing card suits of hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs.
While I am not opposed to the actual practice of Tarot reading, I feel that the media's continued one-sided focus on this practice misleads the general public about Tarot's true nature and creates stereotypes which inhibit cultural exchange and innovation. To give you an example of some the damage caused by these stereotypes, I will state that I have had to contact internet filter software firms such as SonicWall about their unfortunate habit of putting card game websites such as letarot.net, tarotux.org and webtarot.fr into their "occult" category.
Keep in mind my purpose is not to condemn divination, but to urge you become more even handed in your Tarot coverage and let Chronogram's readers become aware of the fine pastime of Tarot game playing.
Best wishes,
James D. Wickson
What is Tarot? http://oudler.livejournal.com/tag/tarot
tarotgame · Tarot, Tarock, and Tarocchi Games http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/tarotgame/