Today I bring you a brief post with some recommended reading. On this past week’s episode of Gosick, we found out the purpose of the Queen Berry. Rather than working as a social experiment as I predicted, instead it served as a divination tool. They used the results to predict which nations would band together and succeed in World War I. Naturally, because this is an anime, they were right. Some among you might scoff and reason that no one should ever put their faith in such things. You’re probably right. However, fortune-telling and its ilk were quite pervasive during the war years.
I doubt it was quite like this though...
You see, we have a saying. “There are no atheists in fox holes.” The aphorism means that in times of great distress, and few things are more stressful than a war, all people will seek aid from a higher power. A blanket assumption is a bit unreasonable. However, I think we can say a large portion of people will look somewhere. People want to know everything will turn out okay. Some need reassurance while others may wish for guidance. If “ordinary” people can’t give them the answers they want, then they would naturally turn to the extraordinary, whether divine or occult in origin.
Interest in the occult actually increased during World War I. In their largest concentrations, police estimated over fifty practitioners of fortune-telling occupied a single metropolitan area. The widespread adoption of it had authorities concerned. It wasn’t just ordinary citizens turning to divination either. Soldiers and high-ranking officers also paid them visits. As I said, people wanted reassurance, and overall these fortune-tellers provided it exactly as advertised. If you’d like a little more in-depth information, you can check out a passage from Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture by Owen Davies, pages 266-269. It’s available as a free preview from Google Books.
As for Gosick’s next episode, I’ll be out-of-town all weekend at Ohayocon, so it’ll have to wait until I get back. Have a nice weekend everyone!
Interesting thought process! The Rider-Waite tarot deck (by far the most popular divinatory tarot) was also created in 1909, five years before the war began. It was the tail end of the spiritualist/Hermetic fad in England, but this stuff still had strong influence.