Just don’t use tarot cards for that. Last time we did I got a full house and 12 people died!
Very creepy. I’m sure some of these saints gave small children nightmares.
She has eyeballs in the usual place. Whose eyeballs are on the plate?
The eyes in her head are glass eyes.
Not just the saints.
One of my aunts had a very large, very gory/realistic crucifix on one of her walls. When I first encountered it as a child I reportedly screamed mightily in horror and spent some time terrified of that aunt because she had a guy NAILED to her bedroom wall!
(I was about 4 or 5)
Speaking of eyes, when I was a kid my parents had a picture of St. Thérèse de Lisieux on the wall, similar to this one:
The eyes followed you around the room. Wherever you were, the eyes were looking at you. As an anxiety-prone fifth-grader, I didn’t understand how that was possible except by supernatural means, and it scared the ever-loving pee out of me. She’s a harmless, low-key, benign saint who died in a convent in her 20s from TB or something. But that picture terrified me.
There was a lot to be scared of when you were a Catholic kid in the 1950s-60s. Don’t know how it is now.
Damn right. The nuns were always telling us horror stories. I heard all those “oleander will kill you” stories from them.
The nuns were the source of some of the horror! Those fucking rulers hurt.
Sister Swamp Fox (i.e. Frances Marion) played first base on the novitiate softball team, and she’d whirl around from the chalkboard and hurl the chalk at the culprit…usually Michael Zarella.
Another weird image was of the Virgin Mary crushing a snake. This was based on a prophecy made to Eve after the Fall that a woman would eventually crush the snake’s head.
I used to have a Chinese version of that image. It was actually kinda cool.
Best of all was St. George slaying the dragon, especially since he was my namesake.
Yee haw!
May God have mercy on this thread and close it.
That’s giving Discobot a lot of credit.
Your name is “Dragon”? Cool.
dragan is a fairly popular slavic name.
i would read lives of saints as i kid. better than fairy tales (unless you were reading irish fairy tales), most ending with some sort of “they died horribly” death.
She is also the patron saint of bell-ringers, because the depiction of her breasts on a plate sometimes looked like bells.
Well, now I want to find 52 of these and divide them into four suits so I can play poker with 'em. It’ll take a lot of research to decide if St.Onan outranks St. Vinnie, the Jack of Chalices…
But worth it for a rousing game of Vatican Hold’Em.
Just don’t use tarot cards for that. Last time we did I got a full house and 12 people died!
Sounds like a Steven Wright line. Hmmm, wasn’t there a scene from Firesign Theatre set in the Old West, where the grizzled old-timers in the saloon are playing poker with tarot cards?
All I remember (from 40+ yrs ago) is “It was No Limit, Pentacles Wild. I seen him deal a high priestess off the bottom of the deck…”
Serbian and Croatian, if we’re being specific. I’m not sure I’ve met any Dragans from outside the Balkans.