I recently received some questions from a visitor to this website. One of them was in which sense the Sibilla is considered “chiacchierina”, i.e., chatty.

This is an interesting question, because it gets to the heart of how divination works (and not just divination with cards). I don’t want to foster the belief that the Sibilla is more capable of conveying information than other divination systems. This would be false advertising. Every deck and every system is capable of informing us.

But the way in which the Sibilla informs us is rather unique. Here we get into the specific character that each deck and system has. The Sibilla is like an off-beat aunt with a poor sense of boundaries.

A girl once asked me how her crush for a guy would develop. The girl had moved in with her grandma and the grandma disapproved of the guy. The Sibilla started off not with an answer to the question, but by telling me that the girl’s grandma disapproved of the situation. If I had asked another one of the decks I work with, I probably would have gotten a more straightforward answer.

It takes working with each deck in order to understand their language and personality, but these always emerge sooner or later. This is also probably why old folk diviners believed that each deck has a spirit attached to it that lives inside its cards and infuses them with its peculiar traits, a belief that I tend to share, since it explains this phenomenon much better than the impersonal Jungian theory of synchronicity.

The reality is that each (valid) divination system is chatty in its own way. I’ve heard the Bolognese tarot being referred to as chatty, and as I work with it I understand that its chattiness really is a factor, even though it is less chaotic than the Sibilla.

MQS