7.31.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated July
August twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is
a reading service intended for people who are blind or
have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
Please join me now for the first article, titled The

(00:23):
Colorful History of Tarot is as mesmerizing as the decks themselves.
The original meaning behind the cards, first created five hundred
years ago, still remains elusive, but that didn't stop our
reporter from traveling to Milan in an effort to find out.
By John Last, not far from one of Milan's last

(00:47):
remaining medieval gates is a tiny shop door sandwiched between
shuttered store fronts. Cross the threshold and you'll enter a
gilded world of esoteric symbols, stars, skeletons, and fools. This
is Il Menegello, the workshop of some of Italy's last
known great Terot artisans. Inside on the register is a

(01:12):
portrait of its original owner, Oswalda Menegazzi. While Tero may
be a game or hobby for many, for Menegazzi, it
was always first and foremost about the art. Before his
death in twenty twenty one, he had become world famous
for his painstaking, hand pain and reproductions of some of

(01:32):
the world's most ancient and storied terot decks. His desk,
a mess of paints and materials, is just as he
left it. On a rainy day last spring, I met
his niece, Christina d'orcini at the shop. Since Menegazzi's death, Dorcini,
an art historian and tarot expert in her own right,

(01:54):
has taken over guiding visitors through the master works created
by her late uncle. Among the stacks surrounding us are
three tarots, a cat themed taro, a Hebrew tero, and
a tiny teracha defumatori smoker's taro, wherein a characterization of
death can be seen enjoying a curly pipe. Menegazzi published

(02:18):
more than one hundred such decks, including many of his
own invention. Each deck offers us los grigno di sapianza
a treasure trove of wisdom. Dorcini says. What unites these
diverse decks is their standard form, generally seventy eight cards
separated into fifty six numbered minor arcana, much like modern

(02:41):
numbered playing cards and twenty two trumps the major arcana,
each with a mysterious character. Every card is rich with symbolism,
adorned with pentacles, stars, chalices, and wands, bearing names like
the World, Justice and Temperance, and featuring enigmatic characters like

(03:02):
the Fool, the lovers, or the Hermit. These cards may
have started life in fifteenth century Italy as a sophisticated game,
but in the past five hundred years they have taken
on an entirely different meaning. It's the ambiguity of these
figures that has drawn fortune tellers, who use combinations of

(03:23):
images to open a window into the future. Dorcini, following
her uncle, is skeptical of such uses. We don't do readings,
declares a sign near the cash register, a frequent point
of contention with visitors to the shop. Like her uncle,
Dorcini was first drawn to these cards by their beautiful

(03:45):
artistry and by a historian's desire to understand the origins
of their imagery. Tero was a figurative culture that was
born here in Italy, in Milan, she says. But to day,
the symbology of each card is really difficult for us
to understand. In fact, Menagazzi's shop has become famous for

(04:07):
his decades long quest to collect, study, and meticulously reproduce
the historic decks that originated many of Taro's most common figures.
Some of these old decks, with just a few surviving cards,
are extremely rare. In twenty twenty one, Menagazzi became the
first person to reproduce one such deck in nearly six

(04:31):
hundred years. A few days after I first held one
of Menagazzi's reproductions, I traveled west to Turin, where, for
a few short minutes I was able to look at
the original in the former stables of an Italian royal palace,
I met Frederica Pazzi, the director of scientific laboratories at

(04:53):
the Center for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage
Lavenaria Reale. Here, a team of twelve scientists works to
analyze everything from large scale paintings to ancient Egyptian sarcophagi,
as well as some of the oldest tarot cards in
the world, on which they perform material analysis. Upstairs in

(05:16):
the conservation lab, the restorer applies paint removable to allow
for future correction with the tiny brush. Researchers around the world,
including Pozzi's team, engage in a kind of historical detective
work with these cards, collaborating with six different institutions, the

(05:37):
Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the Yale University Library,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art,
Yale's Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, and the
Art Institute of Chicago, and drawing on other collections in Italy.
Pozzi was part of the first team to use advanced

(05:59):
image techniques, including macro x ray fluorescence spectroscopy, to discover
invisible layers in the tarot cards. Researchers from Yale managed
to discern Stationer's watermarks to definitively date one of the
world's oldest tarot decks to an impressively narrow range between

(06:20):
fourteen thirty seven and fourteen forty two. These decks, known
collectively as the Visconti Sportza decks, offer the earliest blueprint
for the modern tarot, incorporating many of the same suits
and trumps. Historical documents suggest the oldest of these, the
incomplete Visconte de Madrone, deck, was commissioned as a wedding

(06:44):
present for the daughter of Filippo Maria Visconti, then Duke
of Milan, and her groom Francesco Sporza, founder of a
powerful family. For many years, historians speculated that a deck
as n usually fine as this one may have simply
been meant as a piece of art. Yet Pazzi's research

(07:07):
has shown that the surviving cards bear signs of regular use,
worn edges, lost pigments, separating layers. Her lab has confirmed
that several cards are replacements, suggesting that their owners wanted
a full deck and corroborating the idea that these cards

(07:27):
were meant for gaming. Some scholars, like the tarot historian
Andrea Vitali, argue the figures on such cards were meant
to offer escala mystika or mystical ladder, instructing wayward gamblers
in moral and ethical precepts, or else perhaps satirizing those

(07:48):
precepts by allowing fools and lovers to trump popes. All
this evidence suggests that the earliest tarot deck may have
been used for little more than a portly card game,
an exquisite plaything for the super rich, and yet Tero
has never been so simple to define, nor its origins clear.

(08:11):
In Milan, at Manegatzi's workshop, I'd held one of his
reproductions of the Solabusca Taro, the earliest complete tarot deck
that survives to day, dating to the late fifteenth century.
What had struck me about it was just how unlike
the modern tero it is. In place of the standard

(08:33):
major arcana is a series of entirely different and unsettling images,
obscure figures from antiquity or famous villains, like the Roman
emperor Nero reveling in the burning of babies. The occultist
Peter Mark Adams called the deck stubbornly and irredeemably odd,

(08:54):
writing that even after prolonged study, the deck retains its strangeness.
For Adams, that oddness suggests that there is a foundational
purpose to these cards other than simple entertainment. After all,
Tero emerged during a very specific point in European history,

(09:14):
when the wealthy courts of Renaissance Italy were retaining armies
of scholars to recover hidden wisdom from ancient texts. In
the centuries following the production of Visconti's exquisite deck, Taro's
popularity as a game increased, and its production moved to France.
Some time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there a

(09:38):
new school of artists, thinkers, and card readers began to
see taro as infused with a deep occult significance. It
was in this milieu that occult writers first began to
experiment with the idea that cards like these could be
a key to greater wisdom. In seventeen seventy, Jean vale

(10:00):
Baptiste Aliet, under the pseudonym Atailla, published the book How
to Entertain Yourself with the Deck of Cards, providing one
of the world's first guides to cardimancy, that is, fortune
telling with cards, a method still used by many fortune
tellers to day. Around the same time, Antoine Corte de Gaballin,

(10:21):
a French pastor, used a section of his Opus le
Monde Premative The Primitive World, published from seventeen seventy three
to seventeen eighty two, to rewrite Tarot's origin story and
suggest for the first time that these cards were far
more than just a game. If we heard that there

(10:42):
still exists to day a work of the ancient Egyptians,
one of their books that escaped the flames which devoured
their superb libraries, and which contains their purest doctrine about
interesting objects, everyone would without doubt be eager to know.
He wrote. If we added that this book is very
widespread in a large part of Europe, that for many

(11:05):
centuries it has been in the hands of everyone, the
surprise would certainly increase. It was the Taro Court de
Gabayen suggested that contained just such a book. Court, to
Gabayen's entirely speculative account, which counted Louis the Sixteenth among
its readers, spurred a European craze for all things ancient

(11:28):
and Egyptian, and forever tied the origin myth of Taro
with the stereotype of gipsy fortune tellers, whom Gabayen credited
with preserving the cards over millennia and carrying them into Europe.
In reality, there is absolutely no evidence for roma in
the origin of Tarot cards or for any significant role

(11:51):
in their spread, says Iguil Esprin, a professor at Stockholm
University who studies the role of the roma in the
European history of magic. In the mountains just southwest of Bologna,
a small stone house is home to the international Tero Museum,
founded by Marina Pultronieri and Ernesto Fazioli in two thousand seven. Inside,

(12:18):
Fazioli leads me around a narrow space crammed with pieces
of Tarot art and decks donated from around the world.
There are Tero pop up books, Tarot embroidery, and even
Tarot cards you can eat and drink. Each one is
simultaneously a reinvention and a reference to Tero's past spiritual uses.

(12:42):
The seed of a card is universal, Fazioli says, yet
each artist has a different goal. The psychiatrist Karl Jung
in nineteen thirty three attributed the suggestive power of Terot's
imagery to its use of psychological images archetypal symbols like
crumbling towers and stumbling fools that can take on infinite

(13:06):
meanings in combination with each other. Not long after Jung
offered that assessment, Taro became a centerpiece of America's New
Age revival and underwent thousands of subsequent reinterpretations as a
tool for spiritual practice. The mother piece Taro, in print
since the early nineteen eighties, reimagines the deck through a

(13:29):
feminist lens. The Black Power. Taro, more recently, produced by
the artists King Kahan and Michael Eaton, reconstructs the major
arcana around images of black icons. Collaborative decks like the
Slow Holler Taro enlist dozens of artists from varied, regional,

(13:49):
and marginalized identities to put their own spin on iconic images. Recently,
Taro's popularity has been surging again, driven partly by interest
and cardimancy on social media platforms like tik tok. Some
sellers say their sales have doubled or tripled in periods

(14:10):
of strife, including the two thousand eight financial crisis and
the COVID nineteen pandemic. Many practitioners are uneasy about such booms.
Jessica Lanyadou, an astrologer and Taro reader in San Francisco,
says too many think the cards can help micromanage our fate,

(14:31):
guiding every little decision through easy answers. A more common
annoyance for long time Terot devotees may be the irony
with which some new users approach the cards. People have
a way of saying, Oh, I'm too smart to take
it seriously, Lanyadu, says Helen Farley, a researcher who has

(14:52):
written about the history of these cards calls tarot a
mirror of the society in which it's being used. Peering
into that mirror to day we might see a more
atomistic world, with taro just another product to brand and sell.
Yet all around us taro is being reinvented. A light

(15:13):
upon the right deck and learn its history, and you
might discover a piece of our collective future too. And
accompanying that article the Divine Method. For millennia, curious souls
have examined a range of worldly phenomena, from the palm

(15:34):
of the hand to moldy cheese, to prophecy, supernatural knowledge
about their fates, or sometimes just for fun. By Sonya
Andersen Cairemancy reading the lines of the palm may have
originated in India before spreading to the Middle East and Europe.

(15:55):
Aristotle believed the creases of the palm indicated the length
of a life, and by the Renaissance, palmistry had become
so popular that it was denounced by the Pope. Shakespeare
had Othello tell his wife Desdemona that her hand argues
fruitfulness and liberal heart. Not all palm readings are so happy,

(16:18):
according to an English guide published around seventeen hundred, if
a small half moon shape is launched in some one's
middle line, there faded to suffer from cold and watery diseases.
Tassiumency reading tea leaves may have originated in China, Tea's
birthplace thousands of years ago, when people first began examining

(16:42):
the wet dregs left at the bottoms of their cups.
After tea arrived in Europe, tassiumency became a popular pastime
for English women, especially in the Victorian period. Industrious diviners
assigned meaning to images they saw in leaves, like animals, objects, numbers,

(17:02):
or letters, which they would interpret for curious souls. For example,
a mushroom shape, according to a nineteenth century guide, signified
a sudden separation of lovers after a quarrel tyremancy. This
funky divination method, first mentioned derisively by a second century

(17:24):
a d Greek citizen of Ephesus in present day Turkey,
works best with varieties like blue cheese and Swiss as
a diviner discerns fortunes from moldy veins and holes. According
to the modern practitioner Jennifer Billock, the niche method gained
popularity in medieval and early modern England, used to predict

(17:47):
the harvest, a child's future, or even a maiden's romantic fate.
A hopeful last Billock says, would carve suitor's names into
a block of cheshire and watch to see which molded fees,
indicating her first husband. And finally, crystallimancy, seeing visions in

(18:09):
a crystal ball is one way to scry or divine
the future from a reflective surface. Celtic Druids are thought
to have crystal gazed, and traveling romani people have practiced
the art for centuries after it resurged in Victorian England.
In nineteen o five. One scholar explained that a squire

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could see either a clear picture or a misty cloud
dissolving to reveal a vision from the future, but conditions
have to be right. According to a nineteen twenty's guide,
the scrying room should be temperate and charged with dull light,
and the seer must not have recently eaten next over

(18:53):
six hundred years, the golf ball has evolved from a
primitive wood sphere to a smart ball with cutting edge sensors,
tracing the centuries of innovation that sent the golf ball
on A Wild Ride through History by Miles Corwin. Historians
speculate that the first golfer was likely a shepherd who

(19:15):
grew bored with his work one day, swung his crook
and made contact with a rock that went flying. He
hit more, and purely by accident, one of the stones
disappeared into a hole. Legendary sportswriter Herbert Warren wind used
in nineteen forty eight. Once a second shepherd appeared to compete,

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or perhaps as soon as one of them began cursing
over a misdirected ball, golf was invented. The earliest man
made golf balls ever uncovered were primitive spheres made of
hard wood on the east coast of Scotland in the
fourteenth century. By the early sixteen hundreds, players were using

(19:56):
balls of cowhide stuffed with goose feathers. When doused with water,
the leathers shrank and the feathers expanded, and this rough
hewn ball would have flown well for the day, enabling
golfers to make truer shots, but the craftsmanship was expensive,
creating a sport primarily enjoyed by the well off. With

(20:19):
the advent of golf country clubs that required membership fees.
During the next century, it officially became a game for
the elite. The idea for a greatly improved permutation came
in eighteen forties. Robert Patterson, a young Scottish divinity student,
became transfixed by the possibilities of gudapercha, dried gum of

(20:44):
the Malaysian sapadilla tree, which he found as protective filler
in a package from Singapore containing a statue of a
Hindu god. Patterson heeded the sapadilla gum and massaged it
until he had formed a sphere and later paid at
white The so called gutty ball was bouncier, easier to control,

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and much more affordable, making the game more accessible. The
inventor of the modern ball was Coburn Haskell, who had
an epiphany whilst rolling through the B. F. Goodrich rubber
factory in Akron, Ohio, spotting piles of elastic Haskell had
the idea of winding up some of the rubber yarn

(21:27):
into a golf ball. Haskell eventually added a solid rubber
corps and a cover. Legendary golfer Bobby Jones, co founder
of the Augusta National Golf Club as well as the
Master's Tournament, described the Haskell ball, first brought to market
in nineteen o one, as the most important development in

(21:48):
history of the sport. Jones was displeased, however, that the
Haskell ball required less skill and more strength for long shots,
and lamented that larger core were needed to accommodate the
greater distances the new balls sailed. Golfers eventually discovered that
stuffed golf balls were traveling farther than new ones. Dimples

(22:12):
were soon added between three hundred and five hundred, depending
on your taste, after physicists confirmed that air flowed more
freely over these balls, minimizing drag, and the increased spin
created more lift and recently, some players have begun sharpening
their game by using smart golf balls with embedded sensors

(22:34):
that enable golfers to collect analytics about their shots, identify
strengths and weaknesses in their game, and of course, to
help locate those pesky lost balls. For many enthusiasts, these
innovations make the game more appealing and even addictive, enabling
duffers on public courses to command drives and puts that

(22:57):
golfers floundering on the sandy Si Scottish links more than
six hundred years ago, could never imagine next. This majestic
monkey has become a beloved neighbor for millions in Vietnam.
For the critically endangered red shanked duke, proximity to an

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urban center has had surprising benefits. By Alex Fox. With
run stockings, white sleeves, a heathered gray vest, and an
orange mask fringed by a wispy white beard, red shanked
dukes look dressed for a swanky party. These spectacular primates

(23:40):
live in the tree tops of forests in Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia, where there have been a small number of sightings.
The duke's leafy diet means that its digestive system must
process a prodigious amount of fiber to turn foliage into energy.
The prime mate has a four chambered stomach like a

(24:02):
cow and relies on gut bacteria to break down the
ruffage through fermentation. This digestive machinery takes up a lot
of room, giving the animals a pot belly andiang. A
primate researcher for Singapore based conservation nonprofit Mandie Nature said

(24:24):
that When she first saw a red shanked duke in
the wild, she wondered if it was pregnant. I was told, oh, no,
that's a male. Unfortunately, these colorful primates are in trouble
as development and logging, mining, and agriculture have destroyed or
fragmented their forest habitats. The critically endangered monkeys are also

(24:50):
hunted for meat and for use in traditional medicine, and
are sometimes captured for the international pet trade. Researchers now
estimate the species population declined by more than eighty percent
in a thirty six year period from nineteen seventy nine

(25:11):
to twenty fifteen. A model for saving the species can
be found in Vietnam's Suntra Peninsula, just a few miles
from the city of Danang, with the population of one
point three million people. Suntra, also called Monkey Mountain, is

(25:32):
a forested nature reserve of more than six thousand acres
that is home to a large population of red shanked
dukes once thought vanished. When Ha Thang Long co founded
the Vietnamese conservation organization Green viet and twenty twelve, few

(25:52):
people in Da Nang knew about their stunning primate neighbors.
Since twenty thirteen, viet has put up nearly two hundred
posters with photographs and information about red shank dukes and
started leading wildlife tours inside Suntra. The campaign has grown

(26:14):
to include school presentations and wildlife photography exhibitions. This heightened
awareness became important in twenty seventeen when the Vietnamese government
announced plans to build luxury hotels in Suntra, threatening the
duke's habitat Green viet collected some thirteen thousand signatures opposing

(26:41):
the plan, which, along with efforts from the International Union
for the Conservation of Nature and Vietnam's Southern Institute of Ecology,
helped persuade the government to suspend it. As pride in
this monkey has increased. Untross red shanked duke numbers have

(27:03):
grown from roughly three hundred and fifty individuals in twenty
twelve two an estimated two thousand to day. Seeing the
beauty of the red shanked dukes connects people to nature.
Ah says, I hope more people see that animals deserve

(27:23):
to live on this planet just like humans do. Finally,
some fun facts about owls. Owls can rotate their heads
up to two hundred seventy degrees. Thanks to extravertebrate in
their necks, they have specialized feathers that allow for silent flight,

(27:44):
making them stealthy hunters. There are over two hundred different
species of owls found all around the world except Antarctica,
and owls have asymmetrical ears, helping them pinpoint sounds. This
concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for to day. Your

(28:06):
reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and
have a great day.