The founder of BOTA, Paul Foster Case, proudly started his short book “Oracle of the Tarot” with the assertion that Tarot divination is not fortune-telling. The reason, he explains, is that fortune-telling is grounded in the belief in luck, chance or fate, while divination understands that everything is about our personality. The same statement is found at the beginning of the advanced BOTA course on tarot divination (Oracle of Tarot, without the ‘the’). Ann Davies clearly had a hand in rewriting it, considering how verbose the course is, but the substance was similar.

Paul Case was tapping into the spirit of the times when he made that statement. Since Tarot had the (mis)fortune of attracting the attention of XVIII and XIX century occultists, it hasn’t enjoyed a moment of peace: everyone wants to believe it to be not an obvious masterpiece of Renaissance art and Medieval philosophy, but an occult device made to transmit mystical knowledge unknown to most people (even though most people prior to the Enlightenment and the French revolution would have been able to tell you what the Tarot was about).

The same has happened to Astrology. Once a practical art for foretelling the ups and downs of actual life, it became the victim of the occult intelligentsia of the last couple of centuries and was turned into a hodgepodge of pseudomysticism, ill-digested psychoanalytic concepts and “it’s true if you believe it” New Thought crap.¹

But this is not the whole story. If one takes the time to study, say, the Golden Dawn system, one quickly finds out that their traditional way of reading the Tarot is grounded in fortune-telling (just read MacGregor Mathers’ example of the Opening of the Key spread). Even the BOTA system, which derives from it, preserves very concrete meanings to be strung together into sentences, despite Ann Davies’ attempt to turn divination into a form of Kabbalistic meditation.

In other words, the occultist attempt at reappropriating the Tarot and Astrology (which in part continues to this day with some bogus theories about the so-called Tarot of Marseille, but more on this in another post) is only partly responsible for the divination/fortune-telling dichotomy. Much of contemporary occultism is grounded in the psychoanalyzation of magic and spirituality, which, in turn, is a defense mechanism against the death of the classical spiritual worldview. Yet, for all its shortcomings, it at least preserves some core tenets of the magical worldview.

But the problem with this is that while it does preseve in some ways the roots of the worldview in which divination can flourish, it has lost the intellectual basis for defending it. Intellectually speaking, even today occultism is largely stuck in the pre-WWII era, with its myths of scientific positivism, of constant historical progress and of magic as misunderstood technology (while I would argue the opposite, namely that technology is misunderstood magic).

Essentially, what has gone lost is the philosophical framework that allows us to keep together divination as spiritual practice and divination as uttering of concrete, verifiable truths.² That’s largely because spirituality, in the post-XVIII-century Western world, was only allowed to survive as private indulgence in irrational behavior, a weakness to be tolerated.

Thus the split was born: 1) on one hand divination: a ‘serious’, and therefore unverifiable endeavor, a tool for vague self-reflection, cheap catharsis and shallow instagrammable aha moments. In other words, something that the small judgmental scientist constantly perched on most people’s shoulder could smile upon as at least benign, if not really true; 2) on the other hand fortune-telling: a crass or quaint superstition that is just a scam when it gets things wrong and just a coincidence when it gets them right. The little scientist can be free to frown on it. In other words, the distinction was born out of the guilty conscience of “spiritual” people, i.e., out of their subconscious scientism, as a way of telling themselves and society “I indulge in this silliness, but I am just quirky, not stupid.”

The occultists of yore were at least intelligent men and women who actually had something to say. They may have worked in an intellectually hostile environment, but they at least gave it their best shot, and for this they deserve leniency. What happened next is worse: that the already battered art of divination fell into the hands of stoned hippies and people with degrees in the most useless branches of socially acceptable knowledge. Then along came the Liz Greene’s and the Rachel Pollack’s (to make just two examples) who destroyed Astrology and Tarot even further. From then on it could only go in one direction: past life readings, divine feminine, empty motivationalism and strategizing, healing of generational traumas and all the attendant nonsense.³

Interestingly, the more contemporary divination’s fake husk rots, the more one needs to be intellectually dead to practice it, the more it becomes reintegrated in the higher spheres of society. I believe I already talked about a friend of mine who works for Google and has to endure meaningless meetings with tarot readers and astrologers because her boss is the manifestation-obsessed boss babe type. Nor are tarot readers a rarity in corporate America. This probably says something about how brain-damaged this kind of environments is. The nicest thing we can say about this part of society and this strand of divination is that they deserve each other.

MQS

1. This is not to say that Astrology or divination were unanimously accepted, but the debate was much more complex. ↩︎
2. This, by the way, is not a call to “go back” to some long lost good old times. I am no reactionary. Nor am I a progressive. I am a realist. ↩︎
3. By which, of course, I do not mean that there is not a feminine side of the divine, nor that trauma cannot be a real thing. I only mean that these words correspond to nothing but the most vapid pseudointellectual nonsense when coming out of most people’s mouths nowadays. ↩︎