The red and blue jackals

In comparing different historical Tarot de Marseille decks, one quickly discovers that color is one of the most variable elements. It would be hard to find any feature of any card which is the same color in every single Marseille-style deck. Even such basic things as the Sun being yellow are not universal.

However, in every single one of the Marseille and Marseille-like decks in my files, the two dogs on the Moon card are colored the same: the one on the left is light-blue, and the one on the right is pink/buff/flesh-tone. (How exactly the eight colors of the standard Marseille palette are realized varies from deck to deck.) The one exception is the relatively late Lequart Pochoir deck (1890), which is wildly idiosyncratic in its color scheme -- but here even the Lequart doesn't stray far from the consensus, making the dogs blue and red rather than light-blue and pink. Take a quick look at the gallery below and notice how variable the colors are for the moon, the crayfish, and almost everything else in the picture, except the dogs. 

Recently, while searching for something else (Tarot, but otherwise unrelated), I came across a passing reference by Wilfried Houdoin (whose historical Tarot de Marseille facsimile decks I highly recommend) to a very similar pair of colored dogs found in manuscripts of Kalīla wa-Dimna, an 8th-century Arabic adaptation of the Sanskrit Panchatantra, a collection of animal fables dating back to 200 BC or earlier.

Kalīla wa-Dimna, 1220 (above) and 1310 (below)

As the examples above show, there is some variation as to which dog (jackal, actually) is on the left and which on the right, but the Arabic names are constant: The red or pink jackal is Kalīla (Sanskrit Karataka) and the blue one is Dimna (Sanskrit Damanaka).

I've never read Kalīla wa-Dimna, but I do have some passing familiarity with its source material, the Panchatantra, and anyone who has read that will know there is not the slightest chance that either Karataka or Damanaka could have been blue or would ever have been portrayed as blue in Indian art. Why? Because one of the stories told by this pair of jackals revolves around the idea that there is no such thing as a blue jackal, that a "blue jackal" might as well be a creature from another world!

Briefly, the story of "The Blue Jackal" concerns an ordinary jackal who, fleeing from dogs, jumped into a vat to hide and found that it was a vat of blue dye. When he came out, he was blue and scared away the dogs, who did not recognize him as the jackal they had been chasing. Taking advantage of his new color, the Blue Jackal told all the animals that he was a celestial being sent from Indra to be their leader, and they believed him. His first act as King of the Beasts was to banish all the jackals, lest any of them recognize him. Some time later, though, while he was holding court, a pack of jackals happened to be passing by in the distance, and they started howling. The Blue Jackal, unable to restrain himself, joined in the howling. Thus was he recognized as an impostor by the other animals, who turned on him and killed him.

Searching the Wikipedia article on Kalīla wa-Dimna (flagged with "This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed"), I can't find the words blue, dye, or color anywhere, so it appears that "The Blue Jackal" didn't make the cut when the Panchatantra was translated into Arabic. Could the convention of portraying Dimna as blue have been influenced by an Indian illustration for "The Blue Jackal," misunderstood as portraying a different Panchatantra jackal story?

In the story from which Kalīla wa-Dimna takes its name, the two jackals are brothers who work as doormen in the lion king's court. The ambitious, smooth-talking Dimna successfully gains the favor of the king and becomes his most trusted advisor. Later, when a bull becomes his rival for the king's favor, Dimna sows distrust between the lion and the bull and tricks the former into killing the latter.  Through all this, Kalīla is constantly warning Dimna to abandon his ambitious schemes, but Dimna always ignores him. In the end, Dimna's duplicity is revealed, and he is first imprisoned and then executed.

The similarity to "The Blue Jackal" story is apparent; both Dimna and the Blue Jackal use deception to rise higher than their appointed station in life, and both come to a bad end. In some versions of "The Blue Jackal" I have read online, the Blue Jackal even becomes the most trusted advisor of a Lion King, so it appears that the two stories have sometimes been conflated. Perhaps an Indian illustration of the Blue Jackal enjoying a position of high status among the animals was misinterpreted by the Arabs as depicting Damanaka/Dimna, and the original idea that a blue jackal was something highly unnatural was lost. (Perhaps jackal coloration once varied more in the Middle East than it does at present, or than it did in India; cf. the black jackals of Egyptian art, corresponding to no extant species. Gray, or "blue," might have been seen as an unremarkable color for a jackal.)

Whatever the origin of the red and blue jackals seen in Kalīla wa-Dimna illustrations, I think it is reasonably likely that they had a direct influence on the Tarot de Marseille. While the Major Arcana are Christian and European through and through, the Minor Arcana (and our modern playing cards) undeniably descend from Arabic cards brought into Europe in the 14th century with the invading armies of the Mamluk Sultanate. If this bit of Arab Muslim culture was incorporated into the Tarot wholesale, we should scarcely be surprised to see hints of that influence in the Major Arcana as well.