A SHAGGY DOG STORY
- Anastasia Kashian-Smith
- Jul 5
- 3 min read
This was going to be a much longer post, with a lot more interesting details about some of the weird and wonderful synchronicities mentioned below, that have surrounded the Magic Lantern Sibilla since I started working on it with Caitlin nearly 4 years ago - and which still keep coming!
Honestly, I feel like your Basic Mad Scientist with this one - "It's Alive!!!"
However, today Mercury, in his guise as Lord and Patron of Spanners Inserting Themselves Wherever Work Is In Progress, and Microsoft, Lord of the (Misplaced) Files, conspired together to stop that happening. So I shall be rewriting the (very large) portion of these notes that crossed the Styx (or is it the Lethe? I keep forgetting...) earlier today, and posting them later in the week under the subtitle of Part Two, as if that's what I meant to do all along.
In the meantime, you have (I think!) one day left to vote for the Magic Lantern Sibilla in the Tabi Carta Awards online. Because we're worth it. Buy a copy if you haven't already, and in the next post I'll show you how you can use it to interact with some stunning period drama on Netflix and Prime Video...
Way back when, in a time now lost in the shrouded mists of Antiquity, even as long ago as 2022, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I was approached by Caitlin Matthews, seer, scholar, and leading expert on the Small Oracles of 19th century Europe, to aid her in creating a new deck to accompany her massive, and authoritative, year long course on the Italian “Vera Sibilla” – a system which had hitherto remained largely unknown to English-speaking diviners.
I knew that it would absorb most of my energies for a considerable length of time, and that it almost certainly wouldn’t pay very well, if at all. The book had been a labour of love for Caitlin – 8 years worth of love, in fact – and the system is complex, and requires a certain amount of dedication from the student. We knew from the outset that it would take time to amass converts to this beautiful, precise, intricate, Three-Volume Novel of an Oracle, not exactly the sort of diet that appeals hugely to a market fixated on instant gratification and endless novelty.
Of course I said “Yes”.
It took me a whole year to complete the new images, making me the first person outside the Matthews household to live with the course over the recommended time-scale, and over the course of that year there occurred numerous instances of what, for lack of a more scientific term, one might describe as “Synchronicity”; real people contemporary to the original deck started spontaneously to appear in the cards, with and without my permission, or indeed conscious involvement, nearly always with some extraordinarily apt connection both to the card meaning, and to the period and location in which we’d decided to centre our “new” version, that time and place being the Reunification of Italy in 1861 (give or take a few years either side) which of course agreed pretty exactly with the first printing of the earliest standard Vera Sibilla.
All of which was both satisfying and gratifying. Nothing says “You got it right!” when working with historical materials better than coded Communiques from the Beyond, am I right?
And then came The Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – or in our case, The Dog in the Small-Screen Adaptation.
I couldn’t precisely tell you why I picked the Irish Wolfhound for the figure of Loyalty in the Magic Lantern Sibilla. It isn’t a particularly Italian breed (clue would be in the name here!)
It IS a breed peculiarly associated with concepts of Fidelity and Loyalty in Celtic lore, however, and as a child who literally wept at the alleged tomb of Gelert, the legendary hound who was wrongly accused of the murder of his Master’s baby son (look it up; but - spoiler alert – it’s a massive tear-jerker, and the Dog Dies in the End) I may have been rather predisposed to visualise any generic Faithful Friend in this form. (Plus, a rather famous Welsh craftswoman, who also happens to be a near neighbour, has kept the delightful beasts for at least the last 50 years – doubtless the noble and romantic associations of the hound appeal to the aesthetic ideals of one who went on to forge the wedding jewellery of at least one Princess of Wales. In any case, I can assure you that the sheer size of a Wolfhound, coupled with its ridiculous and incongruous gentleness, makes quite a lasting impression when you’re 7 years old, and rather shorter than the animal.)
And I thought that was all there was to it.
Fast forward a year.
(To Be Continued...)
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