Anne Marie Mamontoff points out: This escape and the succeeding diffusion of Indian wisdom may be represented by Garuda, the eagle of the human members, a prodigious mount of Vishnu, which flies from East to West.
GIPSIES
«On the origins and on the first immigrations of the gipsies there are only the hypotheses.
Apart from those invented by the gipsies themselves, the hypotheses more antique are found in the note of the people who gave hospitality to them.
But only the study of linguistics brought us a scientific-based answer showing that the origin of the gipsies is Indian.
».
The gipsies are universally noted as a card fortune-teller for antonomasia, since it has been believed that they have divinatory virtue in their vein.
The term ‘zingaro’(this is Italian term to call gipsy) (in french ‘tsigane’ and in germany ‘Zigeuner’) derive from the Greek term ‘athinganoi’ which means ‘untouchable’.
Some traditions report a connection between the cards of Tarots and the gipsy world. In attempting on an ethmological explanation of the term ‘Tarocco’, we separate between the world ‘Taro’, ‘Tarot’ and the term ‘Tantra’, an Indian mystical technique, aimed at the obtainment of a contact with the divinity which dwell in each human to find a harmony with all creation.
The sources appropriated of an Indian sacred game, which could be placed in relation with the images colouring the cards of the Great Arcana of Tarots.
According to Sergius Golowin (see an image of the gipsy deck designed by Walter Wegmüller below):
«In the thirteenth century the Islamic conquerors destroyed the main schools and centres of tantrism and massacred the citizens: ‘The People who had the possibility, escaped to Nepal, Tibet, Assam, Burma, southern India, Ceylon and Java. In this way the golden age of the tantrism in India was terminated. Some element of the original tradition was kept only in Tibet, in Nepal and in the valleys of the Himalayas’ […]
It is interesting to find that in the legends handed down from some European tribes of gipsies, the ancestors of these people were always presented in eternal escape from the invaders responsible for the devastation of their homeland; the memory of the nomads associates such legends with different historical events, confusing sometimes dates and personages».
According to this hypothesis, the ruling caste of India may be reunited in a nomadic group, the gipsies, and might have promulgated the antique knowledge, and later merged, in a specie of the prototype of a card. The subsequent migrations of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, may have rendered possible the introduction of the system of the western world.
Many associate divinatory cards with the gipsies, natives of Hindustani and expelled from Italy at the beginning of the fifteenth century by Timur Lenk, the Islamic conqueror of the major part of Central Asia and of eastern Europe.
The Italian researcher, Calocci, pointed out that the cultural axiom, which always linked the game of Tarots with the gipsy populations, attributed also to four suits of the Great Arcana denominations descending from the Indian language:
Spade (Swords) – ‘Spathi’ may derive from the Sanskrit expression ‘Sa-patri’, or ‘covered with leaves’;
Bastoni (Wands) – ‘Pal’ may derive from the Sanskrit expression ‘Pallav’, namely ‘leafy branch’;
Denari (Pentacles) – ‘Rup’ from the Hindustani term signifies ‘money’;
Coppe (Cups) – ‘Pohara’ from hungarian ‘cup’.
The migrations of gipsy tribes to the West (the fifteen century) moved past Indo, Afghanistan and the Persian deserts (nowadays Iran), arriving at the Persian Gulf, the delta of river Eufrate and the deserts of Arabia, to arrive later in Europe.
The sources witness of the presence of nomadic tribes in Crete, Corfù and in Balkan before 1350, while in the first half of the fifteenth century the documents show that they appear in the north of Germany (Hamburg), e in Rome (1422), in Barcelona and Paris (1427).
...but now, after having met the untouchable and their arcana, we have to set off for another journey...
