Category Archives: Tarot

Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, I Ching / Yi Jing, Occultism and Esoterism, Philosophy, Playing Cards, Spirituality and Psychology, Tarot, Vera Sibilla

Why You Can’t Be a Fatalist

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This post is part of my Notes on Divination series. This gets somewhat philosophical and is rough and not organized, so bear with me.

I already talked about the limitations of free will in divination. Undoubtedly I will need to talk a lot more about it in the future. For now, though, I want to discuss the other side of the coin, namely predestination.

Predesination is the idea that the future is predetermined. This is already vague, because the way in which the future is supposed to be predetermined changes based on the particular view: the way in which a flower necessarily follows from a seed is not the same way as the ending of a movie necessarily follows its beginning. No matter how many times you rewind, Baby Jane always snaps. She cannot do otherwise, for her life has been scripted and it plays out from beginning to end according to the script.

In the case of the seed, although there are contingent factors at play (for instance, the quality of the soil or the amount of water it receives) we are talking about a form of internal necessity. Baby Jane’s life, though, is determined by external factors: she is nothing more than what the author of the book and those of the movie wanted her to be.

The question is: could Baby Jane understand that her life is so predetermined, if someone told her? Let us suppose that the writers had added a scene where she consults a diviner and has her fortunes told to her. The diviner is a good one, and correctly tells her what is going to happen to her, her sister, etc.

Does this change things? The answer, in this case, is no. It doesn’t change anything, because the fortune teller’s scene has also been scripted and plays out for the same reason every other scene in the movie plays out. From an external standpoint, the meeting with the diviner would be no different than any other part of the movie. It would be just another link in the chain.

The Fatalist

But this is not how divination works in real life. In real life, we don’t have the privilege of an external poit of view from which to witness our existence in the same way as when we watch a movie. We can watch a movie because we are not in any meaningful sense part of it.

But we are part of life. We are part of the flow of existence. More specifically, we are that section of existence that is capable of reflecting on existence itself, or, if we want to get trippy, we are the section of existence through which existence reflects on itself: we are existence’s self-consciousness.

This has enormous consequences on our freedom. Let us suppose someone tried to argue that our life is predetermined by a kind of external destiny that uses us like sockpuppets in the same way a character is written by a writer.

The first and most important consequence is that the very fact that they are saying that we are predetermined would itself be predetermined. That is to say, the person does not believe that we are predetermined because it is true that we are predetermined, but because he or she has been written as a fatalist.

Of course, the person in question would like to argue back that they are a fatalist because it is true that we are predetermined. But in defending this view, what they are truly saying is “everything is predetermined, except me when I argue that everything is predetermined.” This is obviously inconsistent: a theory–any theory–must be consistent with its own uttering. But fatalism cannot be truly uttered without incurring self-contradiction. The moment one says “Everything is predetermined,” they place themselves outside of the destiny they try to describe.

This happens for a subtle reason. Consciousness is inherently the place of freedom. It would take me a whole treatise to discuss this (and maybe I will write one at some point) but to be concise, we cannot be conscious of something without placing ourselves outside of it and beyond it. If I am conscious of this pen or this flower, this pen or this flower are the object of my attention, and I am the subject. No matter how strictly connected subject and object are, they are not the same, and when they are, there is no consciousness.*

If you read a few paragraphs back, I said that we are essentially existence’s self-consciousness. This means that through us existence perceives itself as its own object. Furthermore, in being conscious of itself, existence moves beyond necessity, exactly in the same way that any person (even a fatalist) places themselves outside of their own fatalism by being conscious of it.

In the next blog post I will discuss more closely how the ideas I just presented impact divination.

MQS

* I know that mystics like to argue that the subject-object distinction is artificial, but I’ll leave this for another post. My short answer is that without duality, unity is barren, while without unity, duality is inconsistent and inconceivable.

Card Reading, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Philosophy, Reading Example, Tarot

Free Will and Real Estate (Tarot Reading Example)

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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.

“Will we be able to buy the apartment?”
Tarocchi di Layla, design by Elisa Scerrato

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

“Is the apartment really off the table?”
Tarocchi di Layla, design by Elisa Scerrato

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

Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, I Ching / Yi Jing, Occultism and Esoterism, Philosophy, Playing Cards, Tarot, Vera Sibilla

Free Will and Prediction (Notes on Divination)

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This post is part of my Notes on Divination series. This gets somewhat philosophical and is rough and not organized, so bear with me.

I have been playing with the idea of writing a book on the philosophy of divination. In fact, I have been playing with ideas for a lot of books on occultism, but I need to start somewhere. This is the first in a series of articles on such topics. Don’t take the following as an organized treatise–it is more like a random gathering of thoughts.

It’s impossible to be self-aware diviners without sooner or later stumbling upon the question of free will, the two most simplistic options being that we have complete free will and therefore divination is not about the future or that we have no free will at all and everything is predestined. I will argue in another article that both options actually prevent meaningful prediction.

Often people talk about “compatibilism” that is, the idea that prediction and free will can be seen as compatible. This is all very well, but it means nothing unless one explains how. Inevitably, explaining it requires one to clearly define the space alloted to both. Here I talk about all things that limit our choice, while in a future article I will talk about the limits of prediction.

Firstly, we need to acknowledge that when it comes to divination, it is not at all clear that we talk about prediction. After decades of New Age nonsense, divination has largely been relegated to the uttering of ‘inspired wisdom’, wisdom apparently being the consolation prize for those that can’t look at reality for what it is.

People who usually manage to compose their faces in a mask of sanity abandon all commonsense as soon as they pick up a tarot deck: you create your own destiny, you can do whatever you want. Well, you don’t. This is provably so. We cannot treat people as if they were bundles of free will floating in empty space. People come from specific backgrounds and have specific problems, idiosyncrasies and preferences that dictate their course.

You may be free, for instance, to choose between vanilla and chocolate, but if you hate chocolate you’ll probably pick vanilla. This is often seen as part of people’s free choice, but if we think about it for a second, it is actually a limit to personal freedom: an inner disgust toward something leads you toward something else without you being able to control it.

Free Will and Destiny

In other words, your choice, which is theoretically open to everything, is already limited by a number of psychological hangups that push you around like a sock puppet. That is a limit to free will in my book. Divination may very well be used to delve into these issues and to widen your options. In fact, it is a very good use of divination. But we cannot use divination to do so if we don’t first acknowledge that our options are limited, sometimes severely so.

But preferences are just one kind of limit. Another one comes in the form of ( the much reviled in spiritual circles) objective reality. If you are in a blind alley, know no martial arts, have no means of self-defense and an armed thug is walking toward you, that’s a pickle you can’t meditate or visualize your way out of.

This is not to say that you’ll inevitably lose. Maybe the dude is drunk and collapses to the ground as soon as he stumbles on that banana peel; maybe you are very good at talking and you persuade him to let you go by striking the right note; maybe a falling bit of debris from a ramshackle building takes care of him.

All this (and more) is possible. But the objective fact that you are in the blind alley in a less-than-desirable situation instead of sucking on a Capri Sun on your way to Hawaii imposes certain limits (just as this latter scenario imposes other limits)

The example above is situational, but our whole life is a series of determining factors that limit our trajectory. Look back on your personal history and you’ll probably be able to see traces of many, many past situations that still accompany you to this day, for better or worse. Even past choices become hard, unchangeable facts once enough time passes. You cannot, for instance, ungraduate from that useless gender studies degree in order to pursue a STEM subject. Although you can divorce, you cannot unmarry the person you married. Although you can abandon your child, you cannot unbirth it.

We could go on, but this point is clear enough: at any given moment in time we find ourselves shaped by a series of objective, subjective and intersubjective factors that limit us and our possible trajectory.

The delusional New Age view that we are the product of our current decisions does happen to stumble upon a little bit of truth, though it mischaracterizes it. It is true that, in so far as we abstract from ourselves and we move toward the universal, we peel backs layers of individual conditioning and we move toward the unconditional, however you may choose to call it (God, Being, One, Reality, Ensoph, etc.)

But there is a catch: moving toward the unconditional means not just letting go of our limits, but also of the aims that would lead us to want to overcome those limits as, however we may understand the unconditional, it is not conditioned by this or that choice. The fact of the matter is that free will may very well be the substance of reality, but in so far as it is the substance of reality it is not the substance of my limited whims.

In practice, therefore, the idea of unconditional free will is untenable from the standpoint of a diviner, as abiding by it renders the divination process futile, however we may understand it. This is not to say that complete determinism fares much better, as I shall show in the next article.

MQS

Creativity, Tarot, Visuals

AI-generated Magician Tarot Card Illustrations

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Magician tarot card illustration, generated through AI
Magician tarot card illustration, generated through Artificial intelligence
Magician tarot card illustration, generated through AI
Magician Tarot Card illustration, generated through Artificial Intelligence
Magician tarot card illustration, generated through AI
Creativity, Tarot, Visuals

AI-Generated Judgement Tarot Card Illustrations

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Rebirth has never been creepier. Probably because you have to pay taxes again.

Judgement tarot card, generated through AI
Judgement tarot card, illustrated through Artificial Intelligence
Judgement tarot card, illustrated through AI
Judgement tarot card, illustrated through Artificial Intelligence
Justement tarot card, illustrated through AI
Judgement tarot card, illustrated through Artificial intelligence
Creativity, Tarot, Visuals

AI-generated High Priestess / Popess Tarot Card Illustrations

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Bit mysterious, bit creepy

Illustration for the High Priestess / Popess tarot card, generated through AI
Illustration for the High Priestess / Popess tarot card, generated through Artificial Intelligence
Illustration for the High Priestess / Popess tarot card, generated through AI
Illustration for the High Priestess / Popess Tarot Card, generated through AI
Illustration for the High Priestess / Popess tarot card, generated through Artificial Intelligence

MQS

Creativity, Tarot, Visuals

AI-Generated Hermit Tarot Card Illustrations

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I love how each illustration conveys a completely different mood.

Illustration for the Hermit, generated through AI
Illustration for the Hermit 2, generated through Artificial Intelligence
Illustration for the Hermit Tarot Card 3, generated through AI
Illustration for the Hermit Tarot Card 4, generated through AI
Illustration for the Hermit Tarot Card 5, generated through AI
Illustration for the Hermit Tarot Card 6, generated through Artificial Intelligence

MQS

Card Reading, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Reading Example, Tarot

When Questions Are Deceptive Even if Querents Are Honest (Example Reading)

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Sometimes people ask me, “What happens if I ask you a deceptive question?” to which the honest answer is, “I’ll be more likely to get the answer wrong” The underlying assumption is that I either pull answers out of my ass or I get them through some infallible magical process, so that either my getting the answer wrong is proof that divination is bogus or a querent’s deceptive behavior should have no bearing on my ability to answer.

Neither of these assumptions is true. Divination is a process of symbol-reading that equates the combinations of a given comprehensive set of symbols with certain states of being in the past, present or future.

A symbol is not some arbitrary squiggle. Keep in mind that symbolic means “that throws together”. It’s the opposite of diabolic, which means “that throws apart”. Our whole perception is symbolic, as we equate X with Y at every turn, linking various states of being together (“we throw them together”) in our perception. Car approaching means danger of becoming crayon smears on the asphalt. If our mind didn’t work symbolically it wouldn’t be able to link facts together, and we’d already be dead.

As I said somewhere else, if you show up at the doctor’s insisting your leg hurts even if it doesn’t, sooner or later you are going to get a diagnosis and a prescription. If the doctor touches you where it hurts but you say it doesn’t hurt, that also changes the diagnosis. The doctor is reading you and your behavior as symbols that he “throws together”, i.e., connects with certain predictions about the past, present or future. An honest and cooperative querent is as valuable as an honest and cooperative patient, except that patients understand this, querents sometimes don’t.

Detecting a querent’s lies is not impossible, just as it’s not impossible for a perceptive doctor to call a patient’s bluff, but it’s damn hard. It is especially hard with divination, because unlike a doctor visit, a divination will always give an outcome, that is, its symbols will always come up in a certain order. If a married querent asks you “will I get married?”, you are still going to have a spread of cards or a chart or some other set of symbols in front of you saying something.

In my (fortunately limited) experience with deceptive querents, the divination always contains the truth of the matter. In the example of the married querent, there should be indications of an existing marriage. Unfortunately, it is extremely easy to misread the symbols as meaning something else on the backdrop of what the querent said.

But a question is not deceptive just when the querent is maliciously trying to call you out as a fraud. Well-meaning querents can inadvertently frame their questions deceptively. Here’s an example.

Case Study

I’m currently gathering recommendations as a reader, in case I decide to offer paid readings from the blog in the future. I was reading for a young woman in her late thirties in exchange for her recommendation a couple of days ago. She asked me about her love life, but asked nothing specific.

We’ve talked about querents’ assumptions, but readers have assumptions, too. One of the typical assumptions of many readers is that if someone is getting a reading, the person must be a mess in need of major help, so readers tend to give a less favorable reading of any outcome. In this case, this assumption would have led me to make a mistake.

Here’s the spread that came out in response to the question (I know I haven’t talked about tarot on this blog yet, but I’ll explain my approach another time. Note that the querent has given me permission to talk about the reading)

A tarot reading about the querent’s love life
Tarocchi di Layla, design by Elisa Scerrato

The cards of the cut were the Empress (the querent) and the Moon. The Moon can have a huge variety of meanings, from deception to silence to maternity to influence on people to many, many more. Mostly it is a bit of a red flag when it falls next to a significator. But the rest of the cards were wonderful.


Mqs: “You’re in a relationship, right?”
Querent: “yes”
Mqs: “it’s a longstanding one, though. Marriage?” (Hermit at the beginning showing slowness/long time, plus Sun and Justice showing a union of love)
Querent: “yes!”
Mqs: “It’s a good marriage. It has settled into its rhythms (Justice and Wheel) but there is still a great deal of love (Sun)”
Querent: “yes, we love each other.”
Mqs: “there is a clean, pure (Stars) energy (Devil) around this union (Justice above). You have different characters (Justice and Devil) but it doesn’t seem to matter, and any obstacle (Devil) is overcome (Chariot).”
Querent: “it’s true”
Mqs: “Is he older than you? (He’s represented by the Pope)
Querent: ” Quite a bit”
Mqs: “But he’s very dynamic (Juggler next to Pope)”
Querent: “Definitely. He does a lot of sport.”

At this point I was a bit startled. The cards were wonderful. There didn’t seem to be any issue. This is relatively common when the querent doesn’t ask a very specific question (she only told me the topic). Still that Moon next to her bothered me. Why was it there? The cards didn’t point to any cheating or issue.

Mqs: “Are you somewhat taciturn?”
Querent: “Yes, I tend to keep to myself.”

That was an explanation, but it still wasn’t satisfying. It was an odd thing for the cards to point out in the cut.

Mqs: “Are you dissatified?” (The Moon can mean sadness)
Querent: “A bit”
Mqs: “But not with your marriage”
Querent: “No, I’m happy with my husband”
Mqs: (looking at the Juggler next to the husband, which is the significator card for work) “Does he work?”
Querent: “yes”
Mqs: “do you work?”
Querent: “I don’t”
Mqs: “Are you dissatisfied that your husband works but you don’t?”
Querent: “yes! I think that’s how I feel”
Mqs: (laughing) “So the question is about work, not love”

Her face lit up with understanding, as if she hadn’t thought about it. “That’s right!” she said enthusiastically, “I wanna know about work!”

I think this interaction shows very well how, even if not meaning to, querents can veil one issue by wrapping a different topic around it. The querent in this case wasn’t trying to deceive me. Her subconscious mind simply used the topic of her love life to lead me to her real issue. This, by the way, is why it’s important to be able to have a frank conversation with querents.

MQS