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Initial Impressions: Toni Puhle's Kipper Book


katrinka

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OK, it just arrived, and I haven't had time to read it, much less work through anything. But flipping through it, it seems solid.

Only two caveats, and they are minor:

 

1. It's "niced up". I expected this, though, and it's not a major stumbling block as long as you're aware of it. The vast majority of cartomancy books are niced up, and this one does not look half so bad as many I've seen - it DOES acknowledge that bad things occur, on the card table and in life. What led me to this conclusion is the "Above/Below" bit in the Main Character section - Toni acknowledges that when the significators fall one above the other, the person represented by the top card is dominant. But many German readers take it a step further. Say the Main Female is over the Main Male: they say "She kicks him", meaning that she disrespects him. So it's not simply a matter of one deferring to the other when the rubber meets the road. It's more along the lines of "I'm taking the car tonight, I have a date." Laughing

 

2. I was really looking forward to the MC Spread, since I thought she would get into Master Cards. But "MC" here stands for "Main Character" - a 3x3 with the Significator preselected and placed in the center.

 

I'm not seeing any secret Bavarian stuff that has been unknown to the english speaking world up to now, but I didn't expect to. Hype is hype, ads are ads, and for those who don't like hanging around German groups and translating text, it WILL be new information. But all in all, it seems like a solid book. Not much white space, most of the pages are filled with text and illustrations. While there is information alluding to various combinations and placements, there are no endless combo lists, it seems relatively free of filler and padding.

 

And it's light years better than that Musruck hack job!

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EmpyreanKnight

Hey, I know the Card Geek! I hope she didn't pull her Kipper tutorial vids in her Youtube site with the publications of this book tho.

 

Also, thanks for calling attention to this book, katrinka. It will be useful for when I finally decide to dive into the Kipper system. :)

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My pleasure.  :) I'm about halfway through it now, she gives good explanations of how to get around the spread. Here's the table of contents, for a teaser:

 

Preface

1. Introduction

2. The Kipper Story

3. Where to Start

4. The 36 Cards

A. Kipper Keywords

B. Kipper Directional Cues

C. Types Of Cards

D. The 36 Card Breakdown

(What follows is a discussion of each card, they get a couple of pages each with explanations of how they're interpreted in various positions)

E. Kipper Characters

F. Significators

G. Stop Cards

5. How To Read

6. Spreads

(About a dozen of them, several Kipper-specific. Lots of detail on GT techniques.)

7. The Quotes

8. The End

Acknowledgements

 

I haven't seen anything wrong so far, and the information on the directional stuff is clearly spelled out, you don't have to infer it and then run to some group and ask if you're doing it correctly.

 

I've respected her reading ability since she answered my question on the objects around the Coffin in the Original Kipper deck. Kipper is full of little visual hints and cues about how the cards relate to the neighboring cards, and I knew that the fresh vs. withered wreath and the green leaves had to mean something, so I asked at a Kipper group and she answered. (That's how I learned, in dribs and drabs from German readers online and with LOTS of google translate. (Special thanks to Malkiel Rouven Dietrich, Kerstin Kolb, Serena at Kaph's old forum, and many others.) I got the card meanings initially, and then as questions arose, I asked. Doing this takes a number of years, and you have to figure out whether the person you're talking to knows what they're doing or not, and it's a general pain in the arse, so yeah - spend the 35 bucks at amazon for the book!)

 

OG91oTR.jpg

 

This is what she said: "The circular wreaths show the permanence of it – you can work through it, but you can never go back. The yellow wreath points to what caused it (the card on the left). The floral wreath below hovers above something that will be transformed rather than ended – the point of the coffin (bottom right) showing what will be affected."

 

I didn't really trust her for a long time, though - she came out of nowhere and friended me and a bunch of other readers on facebook, and then started this World Lenormand Association thing selling courses and whatnot. A lot of us thought she was yet another huckster building a mini empire with unsuspecting noobs. But she's actually a good egg!  :D Nowhere in that book do you see her saying that she will only tell you this or that if you buy her courses, or say that you have to use her deck. She tells you in the book to just use the directional cues on the cards you have.

 

That's a big difference from Alessandra Venturi - her Italian Cartomancy is currently the only decent Sibilla book in english, but it's full of her nagging you to buy her course and claiming to know secret Sibilla stuff that you can only get in the course, which I'm told cost about $500 when it was available and wasn't very good.  :o :o :o

 

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You have me sold on Toni Puhle's Kipper Book! It's definitely on my wish list now. The TOC looks very thorough and I didn't realise directionality was even a thing for Kipper cards. That's been an eye-opener all by itself. Thanks, katrinka[/member] :)

 

Just as an afterthought: Which Kipper deck are you using? It looks lovely and there are no borders.

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Yes, it's the Original Kippers, but I de-bordered them. They had some wear and the edges were grubby, so they got chopped.

Now they fit in that ouija mint tin!  ;D

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