A little Pinkie

[Terrance Flaherty]

"Tha predicted a fair passage back to the Tents, indeed we have wagered
a pistole,--"  M&D.363

Even the RC is gambling in America. It seems that P has some very deep
religious stuff in mind with all this gambling, gaming, and wagering.
Same as the verbal contests and dancing, like the wedding scene in GR. 

"In a tiny hilltop village the gambled for my clothes
."

	--Barabbas & the Messianic Trio 



No historical period or culture on the globe lacks the means for
gambling, and it was often associated with death and rebirth. One
Egyptian tomb-painting (c. 3500 BCE) depicts a nobleman in his
after-life playing a dice board game of hounds and jackals. A Sumerian
board game was found in a royal cemetery dated to circa 2600 BCE.
Antelope ankle bones, presumed to have been used as dice, are often
found in prehistoric tombs and burial caves around the world, perhaps
for afterlife recreation, or so the dead could "re-create" life.
Icelandic and Hindu mythology mirror many Native American myths that
claim that the gods destroy and recreated the world on a diceboard. In
other words, Albert has been sniffing drain pipes again cause god do be
rollin dem bones. 

Playing boards or fields are themselves altars of the sacred. Johan
Huizinga, author of Homo  Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in
Culture, said that magicians, priests, and gamblers all begin their work
by circumscribing the consecrated spot. There is no distinction between
marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes
of sheer play. The turf, the tennis court, the chessboard, and the
pavement hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or
the magic circle. Game diagrams were built into roofing slabs of a
temple in ancient Thebes, carved into the cloister seats of medieval
English churches, and pecked into survey markers for the grid underlying
the pyramid city of Teotihuacán.

Gonna go round in circles, cocks in a circle, boxers in a circle, dogs
in a circle, rottweiler, doberman, Pinkerton guard, a circular fence
round Buzz's junk yard. But I ain't allowed to gamble or game. Maybe I
join the army. 

The ancients might have noticed a pattern to winning and losing, that
certain rituals seemed to affect this pattern. From this, players may
have surmised that some invisible force controlled the outcome of the
game. This same force, perhaps, also controlled the weather, famine,
fertility, or the celestial bodies. They personified the forces as
superdeities and gambled to control or appease them.

http://www.nmia.com/~kgabriel/professional/myths.html