branchandroot

Bent Cards

I said I wasn’t going to address the card game on this page. OK, so I lied. A few cards caught my attention.

Most of the cards are nice and straightforward. This kind of dragon, that kind of warrior, etc. A few, though, particularly the ones that come from various mythologies, are peculiar.

The minor peculiarities I just kind of noted in passing. For example, in the anime, Rishid plays a card named Apophis which was supposed to act as a temple guardian. Apophis is the name of the serpent Re does battle with every mid-morning, and a representative of chaos. Mild peculiarity.

Two, however, really struck me as odd.

Dian Keto

The card shows a plump and well-endowed female clasping an ankh. Now, Dian Cecht (the source for this card) is indeed the healer and physician of the Celtic gods. He’s also male, and the ankh does not appear anywhere in Celtic symbolism. By a truly ironic twist of fate, the English version changed this card to a fully clothed male, sans ankh. Here’s a side-by-side comparison. I do not for a moment imagine that this was for the sake of mythological exactitude.

Maha Vairo

This card first caught my attention purely because I saw it rendered into English as Mother Willow, and when I went to check that did not seem to be the name’s origin in Japanese. In fact, I couldn’t find those words in Japanese at all. Nor could I really think of a likely English phrase that this might be a transliteration of, since Mother Willow doesn’t quite fit. So I got curious and did a little brainstorming and a little shot-in-the-dark googling. Maha was the easiest to find; it’s Hindi for great, rich, abundant. A lot like tai. Well, that pointed me in the direction of the Hindu gods, but I couldn’t find any that seemed to incorporate vairo. When I searched the two words together, leaving out the YGO results, I got three passing references to a Buddhist divinity/saint type called Maha-vairo-cana. Searching vairocana got me two very different results. First was a handful of name-meaning sites that said vairocana is a feminine Hindi name that means “king of demons”. Well, OK, all the card sites seem to agree that Maha Vairo is a female card. The other result was a huge slew of sites about a (male, of course) buddha named Vairocana, all of which indicated that the name meant “coming from the sun”.

Neither set of sites gave any etymology for those meanings. After extensive struggles with the online Hindi-English dictionaries available, I concluded that cana can mean “king” and that, therefore, vairo probably means “demon” in someone’s dictionary even if I can’t find it. Etymologically, that leaves us with a light spell caster named Great Demon, which was just weird. So I turned to the visuals.

Maha Vairo does sit in a loose variation of a lotus. Those blade-wing-thingies behind her head do bear some resemblance to the frame one often sees around Buddhist figures. The beads around her neck and the bindi on her forehead are right on. Vairocana is one of five figures associated with elements (earth, air, water, fire, void in this cosmology), and his association is with the sky (air) and the sun. That fits with Maha Vairo being a light spell caster Of course, Vairocana is generally indicated, iconographically, with a prayer wheel, which I can’t find on the card anywhere… unless it’s that red thing in her left hand which seems doubtful.

The balance seems to indicate that buddha Vairocana is the source of Maha Vairo, which gives us another card that has been gender-flipped.

All this struck me as worth scribbling down, which is more or less what makes me an acafan.