Why This Way?

Brace yourself, because I'm about to get sort of theoretical

At base, Shadows in the Fog is a Structuralist game, founded upon principles developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in many of his books, particularly The Savage Mind and the four-volume Mythologiques.[1] You don’t need to read these, necessarily, although they’re certainly fascinating and brilliant. But the manipulation of Tarot cards in Shadows in the Fog was formulated with these ideas in mind.

Tarot cards can be understood as what Lévi-Strauss called mythemes, units of mythic meaning and structure that can be deployed in a wide variety of settings. To explain this, let’s first look at mythemes as they stand between percept and concept, using Lévi-Strauss’s famous analogy of the bricoleur.[2]

A bricoleur is a kind of hobbyist handyman who makes things out of found objects, tail-ends of old projects, and a certain “devious” ingenuity. You might think of a non-silly Rube Goldberg cartoon, or the wonderful Honda commercial “The Cog” (check out the film here in QuickTime to see bricolage in action). The bricoleur has a shed or basement full of bits and pieces, and his “game” is to build whatever he wants using only the contents of the shed. He can’t go to Home Depot and buy things, so he often has to use objects that aren’t quite appropriate for his purpose; this then requires other objects to counterbalance the inappropriateness, and so forth.

Consider an electric iron. It can be used to press clothing, of course, but it can really be used for anything requiring a heavy weight or a source of local heat or, if the bricoleur is clever, both at once. So on the one hand the iron is limited: it can’t be a refrigerator. On the other, it is free: it can be anything requiring weight or a local high heat source. If you’ve ever seen someone make a grilled-cheese sandwich in a dorm room using an iron, thus following the rule that you can’t have a hot plate in your dorm, you’ve seen simple bricolage in action.

Now consider a piece of oak, let’s say a table-top from an old table someone was throwing away. It’s got a big ugly stain on one end, which is why the bricoleur’s neighbors were chucking it, but to the bricoleur it has lots of possibilities. Suppose he decides to make a pedestal out of it, cutting it into strips and putting the stained part in the shed for later. Now once he’s done with the current project, and takes apart the pedestal, he has a number of strips of polished oak, and a stained one. But now he can’t use them to make a smooth table-top: he can’t put the pieces back together without a join. So these objects carry their history of past uses. They have had a use and they can have future uses. And the more uses to which an object is put, the more determined are its potential future uses.

The big point is that these objects stand in between limitation and freedom, constituting a relation between history and possibility. Furthermore, one can string these objects together to make a big machine, drawing on the history and extending the possibility of each object.

Now Lévi-Strauss thinks myth and ritual work like this. For example, the reason that some tribe has an elaborate system for classifying flowers, let’s say, is that this is part of the “shed”: it’s a way of putting all the objects into categorized boxes in your mental toolshed for later use. Thus the more you know about each flower, the more precisely you can use its attributes and qualities to advantage when building your mythic machines.

But this is a game, not a set of myths. So how does this actually have anything to do with Shadows in the Fog?

Tarot cards are mythemes, objects in your shed. Initially, you don’t know all that much about them; all you’ve got is Waite’s (or whoever’s) descriptions. So the classification is limited, and thus the potential uses are very broad.

Over time, as people, places, and things get marked by use or by explicit marking, the specifics of the cards as relations get increasingly defined. On the one hand, this means that each card can be used for fewer things; on the other, it means that precise use of cards becomes more powerful. The more you generate a history of use for each card, the more you can effectively generate future uses.

Let’s construct an example.

Sir David Fulsham (played by Sarah) is trying to break into a house, and he ends up with a lot of Concessions. Sarah decides that a policeman has seen Sir David entering, and is coming up the steps to discuss it with him. In the course of the conversation, Sarah plays The Emperor, and says that she means this in terms of authority: Sir David asserts his authority, as a member of the nobility, to make the policeman bow to his will.

Now what does The Emperor mean? As always, it’s a relation, in this case between two kinds of authority. There is the policeman, an authority in one sense, and there is the nobleman, an authority in another. So it seems that The Emperor here indicates a power-relationship between types of authority.

A little later, John Keightley (played by Janet) encounters a policeman and wants him to do something. Janet plays The Emperor, again asserting authority. But based on the last use, it seems that John Keightley must already have some authority to assert. Fine, suppose Keightley is a Barrister, i.e. a courtroom official; he thus asserts that his authority as such should make the policeman do what he wants.

Now what does The Emperor mean? Much the same as before, but now it seems that the relation is specifically legal. In this last case, it was a relation within the law; in the previous one, it was also a legal relation, because as a Lord, Sir David is inherently a power under the law.

A little later, John Keightley again wants to make a policeman do something, but this time the policeman is a Detective Inspector. Simply asserting that Keightley is a Barrister isn’t going to help, because the Detective Inspector is an important legal authority outside the courtroom, and can’t be pushed around so easily. Okay, so Janet plays the Emperor again, and says, “Detective Inspector, I think you’ll find that the situation here is entirely level and square. [I give him the grips and handshakes of a Master Mason – he’s a Mason too, but not at that rank.]”

Once again, The Emperor has come to mean the assertion of one authority over another. The legal aspect declines a little, but on the other hand it’s an assertion of a higher authority than the law, and draws on the fact that Masonry represented a kind of higher power within the law because senior policemen were so often Masons.

Now let’s look at another example. Sir David Fulsham encounters a lady at the opera, and he’d like her to switch boxes. Sarah plays The Emperor, and says that Sir David is asserting his authority to make the lady move. But this jars considerably with the sense we’ve developed of The Emperor. The ploy may not work, or it may produce a kind of backlash: the lady leaves the box, but then summons an attendant (a local authority) to complain about this man’s boorish behavior. When we started the campaign, The Emperor could very well have been used in this way, but now it seems contrary to its meaning. Thus the accretion of history to the meaning of the card as a relation changes and narrows the way it can be used.

One final example. John Keightley encounters a gentleman at a bar who has some information, but the gentleman is not very willing. Janet plays The Emperor, and says, “I’m John Keightley, barrister-at-law; you’ll find my offices in Thavies Inn. The information you have could be critically important in a criminal case, and I urge you not to impede the law. ” Because Keightley is asserting the majesty of the law, and furthermore the gentleman is a Mason (a legitimate invention by Janet here), The Emperor fits perfectly, and the gentleman promptly tells all. Because the history of the card’s prior uses are so exactly in accord with this present usage, Janet’s invention that the gentleman is a Mason carries considerable weight, and furthermore this card-play should be tremendously successful. If Janet had done this without any history to the card, it’s possible that the man might (quite reasonably) have said that Keightley had no right to assert this sort of authority over a private citizen. Thus the history of card-use has both narrowed its future uses and also increased its power within that narrower range.

One essential point about cards, then, is that they don’t represent single things or situations; they are relations, not objects, signs and not meanings in Lévi-Strauss’s terms. This is, in fact, one of the weaknesses of the Assumption alternate rule (see next chapter): it encourages thinking of cards as specific things or ideas. When it comes to magical forces and powers especially, this greatly limits the ways in which a card can be used.

Let’s consider a famous card, The Tower, often taken to mean disaster. The imagery is of two people falling from a high tower which has been struck by lightning.

Now if we think of the card as simply a meaning, it’s difficult to see how it can be used in any but a limited number of circumstances. For example, in a combat situation, it could be taken as disaster for one of the combatants. But if we think of it as a relation, there are lots of possibilities opened up to the cunning player.

Suppose the card has been used for the following:

• A thug came to grief in a gunfight with a middle-class professional
• A spell to summon power from the Thames went catastrophically wrong, and the spell-caster was flung from the docks and drowned.
• An attempt to climb the tower of Big Ben went wrong; the climber fell to his death.

Okay, so clearly all these fit the description, Disaster. But there are other possibilities if we think of it as a relation. In every case, two adjacent spheres have commingled disastrously: the lower-class thug with the middle-class professional, the caster on the docks with the Thames beneath, the climber in the air with the land beneath. So we could in fact read this card as meaning a bringing-together of separate spheres. If the spheres are close together, this is disastrous, as we’ve seen. But suppose the spheres are far apart, and bringing them together is a good thing?

Sir David Fulsham (a Lord, as we know), confronts a thug (lower-class). The spheres here are far apart. Rather than interpret the Tower as disaster for the thug, Sarah could interpret it as bringing the two spheres into conjunction, making the thug feel higher-class than usual and read Sir David as a guy like him. This could cause the thug not to attack Sir David, but in fact to unbend and deal with him in a more constructive manner.

Now of course, it takes a cunning player to make this sensible, and Sarah’s going to have to do some fast footwork to get the idea across. To do this, she’s going to have to draw on all that history of the card’s usage: this is what Interpretation is really about.

If this seems like a strange example, incidentally, Lévi-Strauss has a neat case of it occurring among the Hidatsa, a North American tribe. For them, pollution (in the sense of impurity) has exactly this property, i.e. it brings together spheres normally separate. When a man goes hunting, for example, he is absolutely prohibited from touching his wife or his sister if she is menstruating, because the pollution of the blood will commingle spheres that should be kept separate: his arrows will not fly (air/earth), he himself will be hurt (predator/prey), etc. But if he goes eagle-hunting, which among the Hidatsa involves climbing down into a hole, tempting the eagle to descend to the ground, and then grabbing the eagle’s ankles, the hunter has a problem that the spheres are too far apart: underground and air are distant. He needs the eagle to descend, to come to the ground, because underground and ground are close. So the eagle-hunter is encouraged to touch a menstruating woman, even have intercourse with his wife if she is menstruating, because this will draw the eagle to the ground. Thus it’s not that pollution is a bad thing, it’s that it brings together spheres usually kept apart. If for some reason you want to do this, pollution is a useful tool.

Here you see the mythic bricoleur at work. He’s got an object in his shed that has had lots of parallel uses: pollution has brought together lots of spheres best kept apart. Now he needs to accomplish something that involves such bringing-together of spheres. Not deflected by the seemingly negative valence of pollution, he recognizes that it will serve his purpose admirably, and puts it to work in his ritual machine.

This is why people, places, and things get Marked by Trumps. You are building a history from which to derive possible relations. Initially, you’re likely to see Trumps in relatively simple ways, because all you’ve got to go on are some fairly broad single ideas rather than sets of relations. They seem to be objects, rather than tools. But the more you Interpret them in tricky ways, the more you can make them serve you. This makes them more powerful, although it also limits future uses. Eventually, your group will have a shared body of history and symbolism that can be put to work to create complex and subtle stories. The implications of any one relation will very often extend beyond what you want at this moment, but are now present in the card for the future.

If all goes well in Shadows in the Fog, and you keep focusing on Trumps as relations, you will be able to make “devious” use of them like good bricoleurs. So long as you see cards as things, you are constrained to use the iron to press your pants. Once you see that it’s actually a potential set of relations, you can make that grilled-cheese sandwich.

Notes

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). The translation is execrable—in fact, none of the four translators was willing to sign his name to it. If you read French well, you should read La pensée sauvage (Paris, 1964) instead; there are numerous reprintings, which you can get from Canada or France for cheap. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The Naked Man, all trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970-1980). These translations are excellent.
2. The term is untranslatable, but quite normal in France. That is, Lévi-Strauss is not trying to construct a difficult analogy, but a simple one. It’s just that Anglo-American culture doesn’t have anything like the bricoleur as such.

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-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004

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