“Blondness” as Perfection?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here’s a lightweight bit of fluff with a serious undertone. While many statements in The Grand Etteilla compilation that I recently finished reading are outdated to the point of being irrelevant to the modern practice of divination (if not actually laughable), this one stands out as particularly ludicrous. It definitely falls into “Gimme a break!” territory.
Talk about a politically-incorrect assumption, made worse by the fact that it takes itself so seriously compared to the more recent fondness for similarly egregious “blonde jokes!” In The Grand Etteilla, the accident of being blond-haired is seen as the pinnacle of human advancement: high-born, probably wealthy, morally impeccable and entirely trustworthy (at least when the card is upright). I can only surmise that this appreciation of “blondness” draws its peculiar view of superiority from a shallow correlation with the virtues of gold (or perhaps a misplaced admiration for the Nordic or Germanic stereotype). I’m casting a “jaundiced” eye (excuse the awful and entirely intentional pun) on this notion. At least in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Waite satisfied himself with outward appearances and didn’t make such outrageous claims of pedigree.
In practice, these qualities are for the most part reserved for the Cups royalty. As I anticipated, the dark-haired Swords are menacing in deportment, sinister in character and ethically suspect in contrast to the exalted station of the Cups court (on which the authors spared no superlatives). So what are we to do with this antiquated outlook besides simply ignore it? I’ve mentioned previously in discussing Waite’s court-card “allocations” that these attributes most likely came from an 18th-Century Northern European point of view and no longer have much “real-world” legitimacy.
At most I would treat them as very minor tidbits of supplemental information. If the reading projects the presence or arrival of another person in the situation, these traits could indicate whom to watch out for in a very general way. Otherwise, it’s ridiculous to trust a person solely on the credentials presented by blond hair, or distrust them if it is brown, black, red, gray or white; quite to the contrary, it’s probably why some image-driven salesmen lighten their hair, and who trusts a salesman? My brother, a high-powered regional sportswear rep, once cropped his white hair very short and announced that he looked like Billy Idol (his wife responded sarcastically that he looked like a chemo patient).
Thankfully, in the court-card section of The Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley wasted no words on useless attempts to describe appearance in physiological terms, only mentioning the clothing and accoutrements found in the images. Instead, he focused on the moral qualities of the court cards in a way that is useful from a behavioral standpoint. Although I will probably buy the Etteilla book in hard copy so I can tab it for easy reference, it will remain mostly a curiosity in this regard. There is a good deal more to it than these insipid presumptions.
As a postscript, I have to add that I’m now almost finished reading Alliette’s own book, Etteilla or the Only Way to Draw the Cards, and although he makes ample use of court-card hair color in his examples, I have not found any mention of character traits arising from these properties. They are physical features stated only as observable facts for the purpose of identification, with no judgmental commentary. Unless there is another “Etteilla” work where it appears, it’s beginning to look like the concept of “blond superiority” was a fabrication of one of the three 19th-Century authors of the present compilation. Despite an often inflated sense of his own merit as a diviner, Alliette seemed a little too pragmatic for this kind of nonsense.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 25, 2022.
