In the previous article I started talking about free will and prediction. There I talked about some factors that influence our freedom of decision.

Another incredibly important aspect is information. We orient ourselves by interpreting available information. If our free will were absolute, our knowledge of how the world works and how we move in it would not matter, because we’d be able to reach any result regardless of the initial conditions.

This is patently absurd, yet it is maintained by some diviners (appropriately, those who are incapable of deriving specific information from the divination process). It kind of reminds me of one of the definitions of God in the Book of the 24 Philosophers, where it says that God is that whose will is equivalent to his power and knowledge (or wisdom).

This was a fancy way of saying that God’s every action is always exactly the right one at the right moment because the fact that he wants it is the same with the fact that it can be done and also the fact that it is the right thing to do. This may be very true of God, and if we conceive (as I do) that the divine is immanent in the world, it is also true of humans, but only in so far as they understand themselves as limited fractions of this whole process. In so far as we crave things and don’t know how to get them, this view of the world is fairly deceiving, especially if you plan on charging people who expect to be given reliable information.

From a more mundane and practical standpoint, we have limited knowledge (or wisdom) and this always changes from moment to moment. As our information changes, so do our decisions. This has nothing to do with “destiny”: if we did not adjust our behavior to match our knowledge we’d already have died out. It is about survival.

The First Spread

Here’s an example. As I mentioned in my journal section, my husband and I are looking for a bigger home. We had eyed an apartment some weeks ago that seemed perfect, and upon visiting it, we were even more convinced to buy it. Some days ago I asked the tarot if we would be able to buy it.

As can be seen from the cut (Strength and Justice) we were very determined (Strength) to buy (Justice).

The opening of the spread repeats the statement by showing that we are gung-ho about buying the apartment (Stars and Chariot) but that we are not considering everything (Moon) as we head toward the handshake (Lovers)

The second line shows the clarifying (Sun) intervention of a woman (Empress) who will bring certain less than pleasant aspects to light (Devil). The result is that my husband (Pope) will lose all interest in buying (Hanged Man)

This is exactly what happened. Two days after I did this spread, my husband came home and told me that one of his friends from an Enneagram group he is in has some experience with real estate and could help us decide. We set up a Zoom meeting with her, where she went through the apartment’s documents with us and raised some serious red flags we had completely missed that would have turned buying that apartment into a financial and bureaucratic nightmare. Needless to say, my husband (and I) lost all interest after that.

As you can probably guess, nobody forced us NOT to buy. Nor did destiny force our hand. In fact, we probably could have gone on with the deal, and fairly quickly (Strength + Justice in the cut of the first spread can signify a signed contract). But we would have been idiots.

And note how skewed my question was: we were completely besotted with the place, so I asked if we would be able to buy it, not if it was a good idea to buy it. The tarot clearly overrode my question and told me that certain unknown facts would surface that would influence our decision. Note also that the tarot did not say that we should not buy (my experience is that divination reflects reality, not what reality should be). The tarot said that we would change our mind.

The question is: were we destined to change our mind? Well, it is complicated, and the complication arises from the fact that the moment of divination is a very special moment, where spirit reflects on itself through the diviner. I will need to come back on this issue in more detail in some future articles.

The thing is, though, that we were not forced to change our mind: we simply realized it was the smart thing to do. Sure, you may say, if we had been more gullible, or if the apartment had completely blinded us out of our wits, we would have gone on with the deal anyway and regretted it later.

But being gullible or not is neither a choice nor an imposition: it is part of one’s being, at least to an extent, even if it is originally a learned behavior. The tarot simply computed the available information, both that which we could change and that which we had no control over, added the information about who we are at our core, and came to the conclusion that someone like my husband and I, in such a situation, would probably change their mind upon receiving better data.

The tarot predicted our behavior in the same way your mom who knows you are obsessed with chocolate icecream can predict you had chocolate icecream for dessert after dinner with your friends: it is a prediction based on knowledge of your nature and of the available information. The difference between your mom and the tarot is that the tarot (like all oracular forms) has a wider and deeper view of reality. The Tarot is, in a way, like a cosmic botanist who knows a red rose bush will sprout from this or that seed, even though this knowledge does not force the rose to be red. It is simply part of its nature.

The Second Spread

By the way, today before writing this article, I did a second spread just for kicks (the tarot is very tolerant of my shenanigans) to ask if that apartment was seriously off the table, as I am still a bit in love with it. Here’s the result

In the cut we have Death and the Wheel: definitive change (the Death card can never be undone, just like real death). The spread itself is even more blunt. The Devil and the Moon show hidden dangers, and the contract, signified by Justice, is blocked (Hanged Man) thanks to a woman (Popess / High Priestess). Note how much more concise and harsh the spread is compared to the first one: it’s as if the cards were saying “Dude, really, knock it off already…”

Side note: I don’t know exactly why my husband’s friend came up as Empress in the first spread and as Popess in the second one. My best guess is that the tarot didn’t want me to get confused in the first one: if she had come up as the Popess, I would have linked her to the Pope, and would not have interpreted him as my husband, but since in the new spread neither I nor my husband show up, the cards were free to use a more natural significator for her.

MQS