I Wouldn't Want to Play Cards with Him

by BogusMagus

god does not play dice

A planned, designed and built universe seems like a place in which we can maybe get our own way. We can try grovelling to the Creator (act god-fearing) or pleading ("if you just let me have this, I'll never behave that way again") or even bullying ("if you don't help me I won't believe in you any more!") 

Some find themselves occupying an uncreated universe, without beginning or end,  but may still figure they can achieve some control by seeking power over fellow beings (human or unhuman) or even the elements or events of that world. 

Others do not wish to directly manipulate the world at all, or do not even think it possible (perceiving it as random, chaotic and unpredictable) but they still  may dream of anticipating the future, or perceiving some pattern in events, which could prove useful and avoid a sense of helplessness.

Watching random events in search of patterns can feel very soothing or entertaining. A great many games employ chance events in just this way.

Only in the last few decades have we begun to create mental models in which patterns can emerge spontaneously from chaotic or complex beginnings. Far-from-equilibrium states actually offer more opportunities for mutations to emerge, or improbable fluctuations which can let the system escape to higher order - allowing something new to arise, in ever-surprising fractal variety.

On a Roll

People try to get an edge in a random and evolving world, with no gods to pray to for help, so cheating can always comes into the mix, too.  It can prove hard to cheat in games of pure skill (like chess), but games of chance (craps) potentially allow anyone to win so we have more motivation to try to "beat the odds". Some games lie between the two extremes, and have elements of both skill and luck, like Poker or Backgammon.

Chance plays an important part in many games, so you probably want good randomising tools to keep it fair, especially when you risk something on the outcome (your money or your life). Very basic and ancient games use just the body - scissors, stone and paper games, for instance. Sometimes simple objects may get used, as in the "guess which hand contains the hidden object" or "how many in my hand?" type of game. People who consistently outguess you at these games can seem spooky and "telepathic" but body language and anticipating people's habitual patterns explains most of it to me. Games like Poker depend on reading such "tells" (unconscious giveaways) as well as the luck of the draw, and the ability to hide or disguise your own "tells" when bluffing others. Even strategic games like chess that depend almost entirely on brain-processing, with very little left to chance, contain a psychological element like most simulated war games. 

Fair Enough

Games have rules to make things fairer and more interesting for everyone. They may define who can play, with what and for how long; they can define the playing area, and the allowed moves, etc. Before the evolution of specialised boards or playing counters people have played games using whatever came to hand. The African group of Mancala games can use pebbles, beans or dried goat droppings, and the board could get scratched in the sand, with little pits made with the fist. Eventually people made up permanent playing boards for such cattle-rustling simulations as Omweso. The same games might well have educational advantages, too (counting, strategy, etc). 

Sheep knuckles, used for playing jacks, have also got used for dice, preceding clay or wooden cubes with engraved numbers. Since those humble beginnings much work has gone into creating a truly random type of dice, with no bias.  

Checkers and backgammon use flat counters (like coins or mosaic tiles), but do need a board. You can play Dominoes and Mah Jong straight from the hand, and playing cards may well have developed as cheap or light alternatives to such games and pieces. 

Current research suggest that both paper-making and printing started in China. Carved woodblocks could produce regular, consistent and unique printouts, equally useful for producing paper money or playing cards. The portable nature of such products seems to have had advantages, in spite of their relative fragility. Cards have often had an educational aspect (flash cards, alphabet cards) and cards and other woodblock prints preceded "bound" books. Matching games - twinning pictures, or putting the quote with the poet, etc - train the observation and memory, just as other types of games train concentration and deductive skills. 

Patience, and shuffle the cards

Not all games need other players. You can pit yourself directly against the random world through shuffling the cards, and playing patience games. You can also play as part of a team (Bridge) or all-against-all (Poker).

Some people see a deck of Tarot Cards as a mere party trick for a mock séance (like a Ouija board or pop astrology). Others think of it as a useful psychological projection and decision-making tool.  Yet others think of it as uniquely powerful - granting it an occult reputation and spooky aura - and if you deny its ancient traditions they just dismiss you as one of the uninitiated. 

All games of chance can seem highly significant when you play them, and I mostly think of Tarot as simply one of the many card games.

Tarot does certainly have mysterious and uncertain origins, but we don't know who invented chess or backgammon, or most jokes, games or pastimes, either. It does appear to have started out as a card game (you can still find people playing it in Europe). The 52 "standard" playing cards and the 78 Tarot cards do not exhaust the possibilities however. If you research the history of playing cards you can find packs with 24, 32, 36, 40, 48, 54, 62, 75, 97, 144 and even 384.  These games use a bewildering variety of pictures and symbols, depending on the culture or country of origin. Some certainly function as memory aids, or contain teaching tales, or record historic events, and some seem purely numerical. So I don't deny the possibility of "secrets" getting embedded into the Tarot pack design - but the modern occult interpretations appear to have arisen in the 18th Century amongst people unaware at the time of the range of cards and games in the world, who did little research but "intuited" the Ancient Egyptians as the source. I don't have space-time here to dispute that issue - the Web contains plenty of information about the occult reading of the Tarot - by devotees of this or that particular set of cards.  Thorough research does reveal the sheer variety and inconsistency of such attributions, however (although many claim to know the definitive set, or to have reconstructed the original, or "rectified" one of the existing decks). OK, whatever. You can't argue with True Believers.

Coming up next

 Predicting the future or helping with decisions has often involved the same tools as gambling. The turn of a friendly card, the toss of a coin, the roll of a dice. Tarot has no unique claim, here. Any random or natural event can serve as an omen or portent or augury. Apparent patterns must eventually emerge from true random sequences, but we can interpret these as runs of good or bad luck, or improbable and therefore significant happenings. If we don't intuit how randomness works then we need an explanation for the improbable, and that can lead to belief in "gods" or lucky charms - and hidden influences like "fate" or "destiny".

 Most humans, however, don't jump to such conclusions when playing games with fellow humans. They need to eliminate cheating first. Cards, in particular, lend themselves to cheating (unconscious or conscious). Their reverse side must appear identical and indistinguishable, but plain backs can contain imperfections in the manufacture, or marks acquired in the course of play. The eagle-eyed or attentive can use these as clues to the identity of the card. We may even read such things unconsciously. Conscious cheats can add marks of their own, of course - (here my early conjuring training comes into play) - from subtle additions prepared in advance (dots of ink hidden in the pattern, or pin-pricks which the dealer can read like Braille) to small nicks and bends and smears which can get added during play. 

Endless subtlety of thought has gone into such matters, but as a conjurer I can't give too much away.

Like any dealer he was watching for the card

that is so high and wild

he'll never need to deal another

"The Stranger Song" (© 1968 Leonard Cohen and Sony/ATV Music Publishing)

Apart from knowing more than other players about the identity or position of certain cards, cheats can adjust the "randomness". No shuffle has ever proved perfect.  The common overhand shuffle leaves clumps of cards in sequence, but the riffle shuffle, done perfectly, simply alternates the cards. In fact, cut a pack in half and do a perfect riffle shuffle eight times and the deck will end up in its original order (and yes, people exist who can do that!) The best random shuffle involves spreading the cards on the table top and sliding them around (although that gives cheats a good chance to read the cards and possibly hold some back ).  Distrust of these facts leads to the "neutral" blackjack dealer in the casino, or the "cut" done by someone other than the shuffler, which at least changes the starting point for the deal (although many ways around that "safeguard" exist). A skilled cardsharp can still hold back a useful top card (second dealing), or deal from the bottom of the deck, etc. The history of gambling contains many stories of people trying to work around these attempts to ensure a fair (random) distribution of the cards. A "cold deck" (pre-arranged to favour the dealer or a dealer's associate) may even get swapped for the deck someone so carefully shuffled and cut, just before the deal. You wouldn't believe some of the stories, and methods.

Just for laughs

 But enough of serious and risky cheating. Benign cheating for entertainment we call "card tricks". They have a history almost as old as card games. The essence of many of these tricks (thousands of them) remains simulating improbable events (rigging the odds). Some also produce apparently impossible outcomes, of course.

 Because people who cheat at cards can't mimic impossible events and get away alive, they do need to simulate more-or-less probable events, and not get too greedy. The magician, on the other hand, has to produce something that cannot get dismissed as blind chance, mere coincidence or a "lucky guess".

 In an intriguing discussion about randomness and order that we had in the old MLA forum in Oct 2004, RAW added this information-rich comment:

 "I suspect that randomness exists only
in the holistic system [observer/observed]
and not in the observed alone.

Like predictability, or information/"

As humans seem to have an insatiable desire to know the future, and an equal need for help making decisions at crucial times, the history of fortune-telling for money has retained close links with the world of cheating, especially if the reader needs to please or soothe their client. Again, I don't entirely dismiss the possibility that certain people can "see" the future. Some people evidently make better decisions (gambles or calculated risks) than others. Using a random or natural event as a stimulus certainly works for creative thinking and fresh insights. Whether we allow someone else to read those events for us, or do it for ourselves, we can certainly find our way out of uncertainty, or learn something about ourselves - so I do not deny the use of Tarot for such non-game purposes. I can see how cards may get used as tools for focussing the mind, just as a candle, a mandala, a crystal ball, etc can help concentration - and the variety of intriguing images in Tarot cards may allow and encourage creative projection and day-dreaming. I just don't feel the need to see these as coming from some mysterious non-human forces, "gods" or magick. I realise that even in the 21st Century CE  such views remain a minority sceptical position as so many people still seem to like a linear, purposeful world, with a beginning (Creation) and a goal or end or outcome (intended by the Creator).

 I have always felt immersed in a mysterious realm, without beginning or end, without a creator or a target or end point. Taking such an extreme Darwinist (or Daoist) view doesn't make me a thought-bound extreme skeptic though (what Bob calls a Fundamental Materialist) as that seems like just another restricting belief system to me. I simply accept the mysterious nature of this world I appear to inhabit, and remain as surprised and delighted as anyone else by apparently meaningful and significant events, synchronicities and omens. Metaphorically I use the ideas of (say) telepathy as shorthand, but I still see them as field events - only puzzling because I cannot see the whole picture, at the same time.

 Bucky Fuller told us "Universe is non-simultaneously apprehended".

 The evolution of card games (including Tarot) seems fascinating to me as folk event, group artwork and craft piece. Just as in the evolution of plants and critters, breakthroughs still occur now and then: 

the complex patterned back, that bewilders the eye and disguises marks and flaws (although that also offers fresh opportunities to the ever-ingenious cheats, like the pattern on the right that fooled the casino experts); 

the double-headed card, which avoids having to turn cards over to identify them, and so perhaps offer clues to your opponents; 

the index of number and suit in the corner so one does not have to spread the cards so widely, etc; 

even a simple standardised design (with the peculiar One-Eyed Jacks and Suicide King) so people from different countries can play together (for many years all kinds of local variations existed, and you can still see unfamiliar cards and packs used routinely in different parts of Europe). New variations, new games, new strategies (and new cheats!) evolve all the time, along with new manufacturing methods and designs. Although most players resist change.

The Devil's Playthings

 It hardly seems a coincidence that paper-makers and printers have always had a subversive reputation, and have found themselves in conflict with authorities or censors. They form a far more interesting secret craft and guild structure (to me) than the stonemasons and Freemasons. Their use of watermarks as a discrete signature may also conceal heretical meanings,  for instance. McLuhan pointed out how much the printed book, and the newspaper, changed the world. I would like to point out the print materials that preceded bound books. I would argue that both paper money, and mass-produced playing cards (that can so often cause money to change hands) represent similarly powerful influences on how we have developed. The production and distribution of money has stayed in the hands of ruling classes, but playing cards have pervaded all classes and ranks, have appeared in the front-line in wars, in middle-class parlours, in low dens and palaces - and have both amused and corrupted people indiscriminately. Little surprise that the Churches have so often tried to ban the playing of card games (even when played for fun, and not gambling) and the State has taxed their sale. The Tarot seems, to me, no more nor less than just one of this family of suspected and persecuted survivors of " The People's games and pastimes versus the Church and State".