Babe Tikvah

Actually Autistic. Jewish/Romani. Sensitive, sweet & unashamed. I’m unapologetic & I won’t shut up https://anchor.fm/elisheva.scorpio

[elishevatikvah]

When and how did you get your audacity

wish I knew bESTIE 😩

[elishevatikvah]

like we’ll meet again, fuck the man

[hardfeelingslove]

•i thought i need it•

[penny]

© / Quotes / Gifs 

[elishevatikvah]

your arms/palm tree

[magic-spelldust]

Normand Gaudreault

[elishevatikvah]

[marypickfords]

Beyond the Darkness (Joe D'Amato, 1979)

[elishevatikvah]

True Repulsed Appalachians

All people ever really want

Something different

Fuck the people that care

It’s what makes you look good

My doctor says I don’t need new meds

My therapist says it’s trauma and it will be fixed soon

It felt so clean

Almost an entire month

Screaming into the toilet bowl

Wanting your thoughts

Smoking a pack of hemp cigarettes

Laying on my bed

Mom says dinner’s ready

I’m not, though

I’ll take two moments of trying to cry

And two more of pretending I didn’t

Dehydrated

Please go get a drink of water

[normal-horoscopes]

Hey I saw your response to a different anon about tarot and I just wanted to say that many many many Romani who actually grew up with the traditions agree that white people shouldn't be using tarot. The history of tarot was indeed started as playing cards but Roma are the only ones who divined from it. There is still much descrimination today for doing traditional practices and seeing white girls living their dream doing tarot is extremely disrespectful. Seeing you call it racist for someone to call out CA was absolutely revolting. Please do not spread the hateful misinformation you are. Please listen to real Roma

Alright, I'm breaking character for this one because it involves me personally.

Again, as far as I know, saying tarot is endemic to romani culture is akin to saying moneylending is endemic to jewish culture.

As far as I am aware, the roma are not the only people to divine with tarot cards, and they did not invent the practice.

And again, the author of this blog is ethnically Romani. Although I am fairly isolated from the culture, I have access to people who aren’t. When I asked my culturally romani family members about this, they said they had never heard of this concept.

Now, that doesn’t inherently mean I am correct. I am completely open to the fact that I may be wrong about this. However, it does mean that I am going to have to ask for proof beyond “I saw some people say this somewhere“ because as far as I know, the earliest citation for romani people using tarot for divination people is from Elphias Levi’s Key of Mysteries (1861), and the earliest citation for divinatory tarot as we know it was from by Jean-Baptiste Alliette in approximately 1780, when he and Antoine Court published a guide for performing cartomancy with the Tarot of Marseilles.

Additionally, philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett noted, in his book The Game of Tarot. "it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy.”

So, If you have a primary source on tarot being used for divination by romani people prior to 1780, I’ll have to reconsider.

[flagellant]

"please listen to actual roma" also breaking character for this because I'm also Roma: all of this is correct and literally the first things you'll find in google, the history of tarot is VERY much known and catalogued, all of this is very easily and readily found. the idea that tarot is appropriating Romani culture is horrendously reductivist and racist, equating our past and our history to nothing more than 'spooky wooky occult fortunetellers'. The reason so many Roma used the tarot in history was because it was a way to make money on the road when we were legally denied the rights to property and settlement, and a card deck is portable as shit. Our history is one of making do with what was available to us, not one of some Mystical Otherworldly Expertise or whatever. Think for 2 seconds the racial ramifications of 'tarot is closed to Romani', please.

[acebreathesfire]

Another actual real-life Romani here to agree so hard. The idea that Tarot was invented by the Roma is patently false, and the idea that it is a closed practice is frankly risible. It became linked with us because fortune telling is a portable means of making a living, which was and remains important in eras and locations of nomadism, which was often forced on us. That’s it, that’s all.

[mindfulmagics]

Not Roma, but I did just complete a 60 page research paper on the history of tarot (and the I Ching), and all of the above is correct as far as my research showed

Yes, the Roma people did read tarot for work, especially when there weren’t many other jobs available to them. No, they did not invent the practice. Occultists in Europe did, several centuries after the oldest tarot cards we know about were made and spread across Europe as a card game (the oldest deck is from like 14th century Italy for a game called tarrochi, and in the 16th century, the Marseilles deck spread through Europe by the thousands as a game deck which at the time was called tarau, but I could have spelled that wrong)

In the 1780s, there was a revisionist movement among Occultists to find the “secret origins” of tarot which would unlock the secrets of the universe (sourced from Robert M Place’s the Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination). This meant that every popular and mystical worldview/belief system at the time, including Kabbalah and Hermeticism, were attributed to tarot, and the Roma people were believed to have brought the decks to Europe from Egypt (which, as I mentioned...isn’t true). The cards ARE believed to be descended from Chinese money cards (in the same family of games as Mahjong) and Arabic Mamlûk cards, but those were introduced to Europe WAY before tarot was used for divination

Do Roma people have their own traditions and practices regarding tarot? Probably. I’ve heard that from at least one person claiming to be a Roma tarot reader. But I don’t know for sure because if those traditions do exist, they would be closed to me so I wouldn’t have access to them. The cards themselves are not closed, though

If you want books recs to start looking at the history of tarot, Place’s book that I mentioned is great, as is Paul Huson’s Mystical Origins of the Tarot

[xoxorockergirl-blog]

[wxrthlxssbxtch]

[perte-blog1]

[mesmereyezer]

[elishevatikvah]

It’s not everyday you find a girl that’ll flash someone to get you out of detention

[spacemancharisma]

the body positivity movement needs to start moving hard into including disabled bodies and this is what I mean by that. yes, it was a good step forward to change the rhetoric from “your body is a good body if it meets these arbitrary aesthetic standards” to “your body is a good body because it completes these tasks for you” (ie: walking, eating, laughing, hugging, etc.) but that rhetoric is still not fully body positive, because it excludes bodies that do not do these things. the same as saying how we need to “focus on healthy bodies not skinny bodies” sounds good at first, but it completely misses the point that unhealthy bodies deserve to be appreciated too. disabled bodies are still beautiful and still fundamentally good, not because “your body is kind to you so you should be kind to your body”- because not everyone’s body is kind to them. but all bodies are still good bodies because they are what houses your soul. your body is what allows you to exist and live your life in whatever way you live it, and for that reason, it is a good and beautiful body. your body is what your loved ones see when they look at you and the love they feel for it as an extension of you makes it a good and beautiful body. your body doesn’t have to look a certain way or behave a certain way to be good. it is good just for being here.

[elishevatikvah]

I just be dealing

[elishevatikvah]

My best friend