MQS
Is He Gay? (Example Reading)
Tag Archives: ethics of divination
Handling Bad News
No matter what kind of divination we practice: if it’s worth its salt and is not just some feelgood angel therapy oracle, it has the potential to deliver bad news. How we handle bad news is a mark of how helpful we are capable of being as diviners.
People can come to us for a variety of reason. They may need reassurance, hope, advice or just a quick look ahead. They may even come to us for fun or curiosity, and as long as they are not disrespectful, there is nothing wrong in indulging them.
The principle of respect for our querent stems from seeing them as a whole person rather than a sack of meat endowed with more than its fair share of doubts. We, as diviners and as handlers of odd devices (decks, charts, counters of various kinds) hold a degree of power over them. It is symbolic power, for sure, but reality itself is symbolic (that’s how magic works), therefore symbolic power is real power, and must not be misused.
Finding the right balance between informing the querent and respecting them can be difficult. It’s all well and good as long as the cards talk about pleasant trips and job interviews. But occasionally we recognize messages that we know are going to deeply upset our querent.
Causing unnecessary anguish is a no-no, and there are things that cannot be said without causing unnecessary anguish (“You’ll die soon”, “You’ll lose the baby). Even less serious topics (at least, less serious than death), such as marital infidelity must be treated with caution. We cannot just destroy whole families willy-nilly simply because our cards seem to hint at untoward dealings.
We must also distinguish whether a querent directly asks for something or something unpleasant simply shows up in the cards. Usually, if the querent asks for something, we can be more forthcoming, if we can speak with tact. If they ask “Will I get the job?”, they need to be able to accept “I’m not infallible, but it seems they appear more inclined to go with someone else.”
If they ask “Is my spouse faithful?” and the cards show clear signs of interference, an answer like “Remember that I could be wrong, but there does seem to be someone who’s trying whisk them away from you. Maybe it’s time to have an honest talk and try to solve the issue.”
Incredibly enough, even some taboo topics may occasionally be addressed in this guise. For instance, there are plenty of non-morbid reasons querents might want to know about death: “Do you think my elderly father going to survive long? I want to be able to visit him one last time but the situation at home is just crazy.”
While we must not delude the querent, we have no right to rob them of all hope. Aside from the mantra “Remember I’m a fallible human being”, and even aside from potential advice we might sometime give the querent to soften the blows of bad luck, there are occasionally ways of preparing the querent for a difficult situation without hurting them.
“Is the pregnancy going to go alright?” This is a question I am become more and more skeptical of answering as time goes by, because there is no way of saying anything other than “yes” and still be able to look at myself in the mirror. If we do find ourselves somehow coerced into answering it and the cards are less than positive, the only thing we may say is something to the effect of “Yes, but remember to take it easy, and the cards are saying you should pay extra attention to the doctor’s orders.”
Where all else fails, human empathy is our last line of defense. Helping the querent even for just some minutes by sharing their burden is part of what we may have to sign up for when we choose the path of divination.
MQS
“Will I Ever Be Happy?” Or, How to Torture Yourself With the Cards
I’ve already written a couple of articles on unanswerable questions. Some of them are unanswerable for logical reasons, others because they ask about something on which no objective standard of measurement exists. Some are also unanswerable for ethical reasons (“Tell me when is the best time to rob the bank.”)
But occasionally someone comes along who asks a question that we instinctively feel is unanswerable, yet we can’t put our finger on why. It’s happened a couple of times to me that someone would ask me something to the effect of “Will I ever be happy?“
Obviously no one whose life is coming up roses would seek out a diviner of all people to ask such a question. These queries are put to the cards or the skies in a moment of weakness. My experience in these situations is that the cards behave in one of three ways. They:
- Show the cause of the person’s unhappiness rather objectively, and whether the problem is likely to be overcome over the next few months (usually not)
- Are generically very negative, without a specific sense to them
- Are generically very positive, without a specific sense to them
In the first instance, the cards usually show the problem not getting resolved, not necessarily because it never will be, but because the person is still knee-deep in it. The fact that they chose to frame their question in such tragic terms tells us that, whatever the nature of their problem, it goes beyond its specific objective nature and it has wounded the person in their soul.
Extreme care is advised in dealing with people in such a state of difficulty. They come to us broken and they should, at the very least, not leave even more broken. Furthermore, it is not unlikely that they have started consulting many diviners, obsessively asking the same question in hopes of getting a magical solution to their issue dropped in their lap. It would be good to advise them to stay away from divination for a while, unless we are capable of pointing out a solution they haven’t thought about, which unfortunately is rare.
When the cards are generically positive or generically negative, they are merely reflecting the person’s state of confusion: the bleakness of their outlook or the irrational hope for unexpected redemption. I don’t think there is much that we can do in such situations, except telling them that their upset shows in the cards and that, life being a succession of phases, even this one will pass. Sometimes, in such situations, talking to them in our quality of human beings is better than talking to them in our quality of diviners. In extreme cases, having a hotline number handy may be helpful.
Really there isn’t much sense in asking this question except to torture ourselves. We as diviners should know this when asking our own questions, but many people don’t, so it’s best to be prepared.
MQS
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies And How to Avoid Them
A couple of weeks ago I received a message about the question of whether we, as readers, risk causing self-fulfilling prophecies with our predictions. For instance, if I tell a querent that the relationship she is in is going to end, I may end up causing the break-up. What follows is a slight elaboration on my response.
First off, we need to recognize that some things we can change or at least improve, others we can’t and they will happen regardless of what we do and what a reader tells us. Most people who go about their life with their brain switched on can recognize this. It is only when we get into delulu territory and body-mind-spirit-section pseudomysticism that we encounter people who deny the existence of unavoidable happenings.
On the other hand, sheer fatalism is also a gross misunderstanding. Consider simply this fact: if two people X and Y are exactly the same and go exactly through the same life experience, except that X also uses divination or consults a diviner, this is enough to tell them apart.
The fact that X knows about what is going to happen in advance is enough to make him a different individual, which in turn is enough to change the nature of his fate, because our ability to change a situation is contingent on our knowledge of what the situation truly is. Even if X cannot change a certain fact in any meaningful way, but knows about it enough in advance that he can make his peace with it, the same event Z won’t be the same if X’s attitude toward it changes, because X is part of the event that takes place in his life, and so if X change, the event changes. Even if X cannot bring himself to accept Z, his knowledge of Z is enough to change Z, because X with knowledge of Z is not equal to X without knowledge of Z.
Fate patterns are a difficult topic to tackle without a previous sound philosophical and occult discussion, and I plan on starting that discussion at some point, once I’ve organized my notes. For now, it suffices to say that we, as readers, can play a rather important role in the querent’s life if we are consulted at the right moment.
Yet, this doesn’t mean that we are capable of empowering querents to always turn their life around, and I don’t even think empowering is our mission: our mission is to provide information. On a number of occasions, especially when I was less experienced, I gave querents the wrong prediction on purpose because I didn’t want to disappoint them, even though the cards were clearly negative: Yes, you’ll get the job, yes the relationship is going to last and be wonderful. But it didn’t happen.
On some of those occasions you may even think that because I didn’t bring up the negative aspects, the querent wasn’t prepared to tackle them, so my not bringing them up may have been just as bad as another diviner handing out negative predictions willy-nilly. That’s because I wasn’t able to give accurate information.
It is nice that some things can be changed even if some things can’t, but unfortunately we don’t always know which is which. Therefore, we must also recognize that we have a degree of power over our querent just by virtue of using odd, mysterious counters to give our predictions, and we must not abuse this power.
Whenever possible, we should either frame our predictions as potentials and/or accompany them with positive suggestions. These suggestions, though, must ALWAYS be based on what the oracle describes, never on vague self-help platitudes. Sometimes (many times) it is best to highlight critical points so that the querent can become conscious of them (e.g., “you know, this relationship is headed down a pumpy road. You should address x, y and z if you want to try to make it work”) while avoiding drastic predictions unless necessary.
Furthermore, we must never frame our predictions in such way as to take away all hope. It is not our right to do so. Deluding and disillusioning are the two capital sins that we must avoid, even though striking the right balance is sometimes hard. There is plenty of space between being a pushover to our querent’s wishes and being an insufferable sassy tough-love prick.
If there are positive aspects to a situation, we should emphasize those and try to put them at the center of the querent’s life so that they can address the negative points more positively.
Finally, we ought to always remind our querent that diviners are people and are therefore fallible. In a world where doctors, lawyers, judges, scientists and bakers can get things wrong it would be absurd to expect diviners to always be right. Always encourage the querent to take your predictions as an additional input.
MQS
The Ethical Limits of Prediction, Between Girly-Pops and Caring For Others
I had a quick but interesting exchange of emails with a reader of this blog, and they asked me my perspective on the ethical side of prediction. One of the questions was if I share the belief that we shouldn’t answer questions that don’t directly relate to the querent and their actions, especially if they involve reading other people’s mind (e.g., “Is he thinking about his ex?”)
The Three Types of Diviners
First off we must recognize that, nowadays, there are many diviners who do not even think that prediction is possible. Then there’s those who think it’s possible but not desirable. And then there’s those who think it’s both possible and perfectly legitimate. If you know me, you can guess which camp I belong to.
The one thing almost all diviners of almost all strands can agree on is that divination should leave the querent with more information than before the reading took place. It is the nature of the information that is controversial. Many (most, perhaps) contemporary diviners believe the information should be of a mystical/ethical nature and should guide the querent’s action rather than foretelling future events or things the querent has no control over, such as other people’s thoughts beliefs, which is seen as prying. The idea is that to do otherwise is to disempower the querent by putting the center of power outside of them.
To which I say: We are not discrete atoms living each in its own self-made, self-referential reality, no matter what the manifesting girly-pops on Tiktok say. The center of power is not within us, at least not in the sense that most people think.1 We exist enmeshed in an infinitely complex chain of actions and reactions, and our degree of control over them is objectively limited.
We seek to steer our life through the chaos of existence by levereging the information we have, including our knowledge of what (we think) other people’s beliefs and motivations are. In so far as divination gives us information and knowledge, it helps us increase the degree of control we have on our life (though this control can never be absolute). As such, it is perfectly legitimate to want to know what other people think.
The idea that we can only tell the querent what to do as a discrete, atomized individual is faulty for a variety of reasons. As said, the first reason is that we are not atoms. Only first world people with first world problems can seriously believe such postmodern crap (try to go to a starving child in a war zone and tell him he just needs to manifest harder). In reality, how other people think and act has very much to do with how the querent will or can behave, and so the querent’s expectation of being told such information is understandable.
The Two Should’s
The second important reason is that the idea itself that there is an objective cosmic measure of how we should act which the diviner must relay to the querent is silly. How people should act is between them and their god, and diviners are well advised to stay out of it instead of trying to play the role of ruler-wielding metaphysical pep-talkers (whenever you find someone who acts like this, run! Those who can live their life, do. Those who can’t, become life coaches.)
The word “should” has two different meanings: technical (“you should take the bus now if you want to get there on time”) and moral (“you should think about those less fortunate than you”). In the first sense, divination has some use, but only in the sense that the diviner, after assessing the situation as it emerges from the cards or chart, and taking what the querent hopes to achieve into consideration, gives them advice (I’ve talked about this here). In this sense, knowing what someone else thinks can be valuable (“he is not thinking about you and he won’t for the foreseeable future. Maybe you should start thinking about putting yourself back on the market”).
From a moral standpoint, divination’s use is very limited and it can become a dangerous tool of delusion or deceit. Example: “Should I have an abortion?” there is absolutely no way of answering that question. Some quick research online will show that there are all kinds of stances on abortion, ranging from believing it should never be had even if it means the woman will lose her life to believing it’s a moral duty of every woman to have one to stick it to the system, with a variety of more moderate solutions in between.
Since there is no consensus, such question essentially translates to “what is your stance on abortion?” Why you should regulate your life based on the personal moral beliefs of someone shuffling pretty cards on the internet is a question the answer to which is probably found somewhere in California.
“But isn’t divination a form of communion with the divine? Shouldn’t the divine know what’s right?”
Divination is most definitely a form of communion with the divine, but the idea that God has any kind of moral preference is, as far as I am concerned, questionable. People tend to patch their idea of God together from their moral and political prejudices. Somehow the God of the reactionary is always a hillbilly and the God of the revolutionary is always a hippy.
Divination lets us partake of a small share knowledge that one would usually get only if he were God, but this knowledge is very practical and is a tight condensation of that which happens, has happened or will happen in real life: Dante, in describing God, imagines it almost as a compressed version of all that happens in the created world, apprehended in the single blink of an eye.
The above doesn’t mean that it is always wise to answer any question the querent puts to us. “Is he thinking about someone else?” can be two very different questions depending on whether it is being asked by a person looking for closure or by a crazed monomaniac bombarding the diviner with the same query over and over. That divination tends to attract a less conservative clientele is not an earth-shattering revelation, so we do need to exert caution in choosing the questions we are comfortable answering.
Caring For Others
My one guiding principle is that divination implies care for another human being. But what does ‘care’ mean here? Does it mean caring for their ‘evolution’?
Well, no. First off, I think it is very questionable that the concept of evolution should be applied to spirituality. It is generally brought up to make pseudospiritual gibberish sound scientific–it’s a trend that dates back to the XIX century–yet those who use it end up employing a concept of evolution that is more Lamarckian (the giraffe stretches its neck to reach the leaf, thus evolving) than Darwinian (the giraffe born with the shorter neck simply starves, thus ridding the gene pool of its inadequacy, and can do nothing about it), and therefore completely unscientific.
Secondly, again, who am I to tell the querent what the next step in their evolution is supposed to be, especially since there is no consensus on objective standards? Divination can point out shortcomings in the querent’s behavior, but not in a moralistic sense. The cards, for instance, can say, “he left you because you tend to spread your legs more than a ballet dancer” but that’s a mere explanation of the causality behind an objective situation: Y derives from X. The cards are no bead-clutching confessor and I don’t aspire to be one either.
For me caring for another human being means seeing them in their struggle to reach their goals and offering them a bit of additional information that they are at liberty of using or leaving. The main question I ask myself when asked to do a spread is: am I offering information? In the example above of “Is he thinking about someone else?” the person looking for closure is asking for information, while the monomaniac isn’t. It is that simple.
I will certainly talk more about the issue in the future, but I think so far the main point is that divination is a tool for intelligence-gathering. As long as it offers intelligence it is a form of communion with the divine. If it doesn’t, it reinforces destructive trends and is best avoided, but this depends less on the question and more on the querent’s attitude.
MQS
- From a philosophical standpoint I can accept the idea that the ultimate reality resides wholly within me, but if we accept this, then it is present just as much inside everything else, including in the people and situations that make my life miserable. ↩︎
