Posted by: 94stranger | December 6, 2007

Umpire Bull/No Bull, Joy, homemade illustrations

For kapherus, with thanks

90-u-bull-no-bull-4m.jpg

kapherus, I will bring this out of the closet, at least for a while, and add to it one other homegrown illustration, since you wonder… Honestly, with this level of artwork, I don’t think I was going to find a market for these poor cards - though whether I will, even with the classy illustrations, remains a moot point. Maybe the error is cosmic in nature, and Rainring is more appropriate to life on another star. Perhaps I need an entry in the hitch-hiker’s guide? Anyhow, I almost think you like bull/no bull better than me! I groan inwardly when it comes up!

Of course! - ‘mistake’ is no more than the expression of an attitude or point of view. How else do the mice steer the ship of Earth, except via the options left by our ‘mistakes’. (I hope you are a Douglas Adams buff, otherwise all this will be a bit pointless.)

foundations_joy.jpg

Posted in Psyche, art, autobiography, dreams, fantasy, images, intuition, life, mythology, oracle decks, personal, rainring, rainring-cards, random, tarot, unconscious

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Responses

Hi 94stranger,

I love this card! Very clever! I particularly love the bowler hat, umbrella and briefcase. Very British…for some reason it reminds my of that old British TV series from the 1960s called The Avengers. :)

I would love to hear your explication of this card. Is that a flower the little guy is using to tickle the bull’s horn?

Kapherus

By: kapherus on December 4, 2007
at 3:54 am

Yes, certainly a touch of the Avengers there!
The English gentleman is holding up a flower, which the bull is looking at rather suspiciously - ‘tickling’ is a reflection of limitations in the draughtsmanship more than anything else!

Meaning: this card is the only two-way divided card in Rainring, and as such it is partly a satire on the black vs white mentality - a world composed only of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, if you like.
Bull means either down to earth, practical, matter of fact, or else fake, not genuine, not to be trusted etc as in bullshit. No bull, on the other hand means either totally out of touch with the Earth and by extension antagonistic to life on Earth - all these enlightenment heads for whom the material world is a disaster area and whose extreme male side cohorts, even as we speak, bend their energies towards destoying our planet, whilst protesting, of course, that they are doing no such thing. (It’s only two or three years, after all, since they were claiming that global warming was nonsense). The second meaning of no bull means, honest, absolutely so, having integrity, true, etc. - the opposite of the other meaning of bull.
In the end, therefore, the card which should have been the clearest in the pack - only two options instead of four - becomes the most opaque, as one has only one’s intuition as the guide in trying to fathom which meaning applies in any given case.
Curiously, Alex, the guy who did all the graphics, introduced a twist of his own. When he sent me the proofs ready to go to the card printer’s, I discovered that he had inverted the mentions - each being at the wrong end of the card. I decided that I was going to let the mistake pass into history (not the only time, believe me). So now we have the mention ‘bull’ assigned to the half of the card with nothing in it, and the mention ‘no bull’ assigned to the half containing the animal.

Offering a flower to a bull is, I supose, somewhat akin to the fool in the tarot walking gaily towards the edge of the cliff. I’ve never tried to spell out what this was for, but I think it’s intended to imply that practicality, as symbolised by the bull, needs not only its predominence of hard-headedness, but also its dose of whimsy or folly - we seem to be approaching jester/joker territory again!! In fact the gentleman seems to think that a sportsmanlike adherence to the rules of the game, old boy, such as politeness, will jolly well sort out the potential for loutish behaviour present in a large, uncivilised, quite possibly unenglish bull.

The other Rainring stalwart not available to perusers of the web site is the unicorn carthorse, but that is another story.

By: 94stranger on December 4, 2007
at 11:49 pm

Hi 94stranger,

The card is brilliant. Thanks for the explanation. I did get the “bullshit/no bullshit” and “substance/no substance” references, but I completely missed the significance of the flower. I definitely see a sense of innocence there now that I missed at first. Did I mention how much I love this card? :)

I wonder if it really was a mistake that the mentions ended up inverted on this card. Have you considered the possibility that you may have chosen so on some level? Not to get too airy fairy, but perhaps the card chose it for itself as part of the Rainring Collective Consciousness? In any case, I think your decision to allow the change is a testament to your connection to the natural flow of Rainring.

Would you agree that with the inverted Mentions, this card now provides 6 or more possible interpretations?

The unicorn carthorse…I like how your mind works!

Kapherus

By: kapherus on December 5, 2007
at 4:19 am

kapherus,
The responses to your comments have ended up in the text of the revised post!
You can half-see the unicorn carthorse at
http://www.rainringcards.com/Foundations/The_New_Card_Reader-16.aspx

By: 94stranger on December 6, 2007
at 2:23 am

the drawing is delightful. primitive, like folk-art. i prefer it to more polished images.

By: ybonesy on December 6, 2007
at 3:22 am

love the joker card…

By: connetta on December 11, 2007
at 1:26 am

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