Tag Archives: philosophy of divination

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

Divination and Intellectual Honesty

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When I was a teen, I remember stumbling upon Aristotle’s definition of the “educated mind” as being able to hold a thought without accepting it, and I remember thinking how silly and basic the definition was. The older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with him, as I see fewer and fewer people capable of doing it (the fact that Aristotle never actually wrote the sentence is a whole ‘nother can of worms)

A lot of people don’t have an educated mind per the definition above. One would like to think that tarot readers, astrologers and the like would not be like a lot of people, seeing how much the word “wisdom” gets thrown around in their circles. But one would be wrong. Leave it to the “spiritual community” to be among the most ideological and stiff. And, consequently, not among the brightest. If there is a group of people I don’t trust to be capable of holding any thought except the ones they agree with, that’s these people.

I believe I already talked a little about this, but one of the most memorable examples I can think of is the 2016 US election, when every tarot reader on youtube and their mom were busy predicting Trump would lose the election disgracefully, poop his pants, writhe on the floor, throw a tantrum and retreat into the hell that spawned him while Hillary Clinton swung her throbbing, veiny, 25 inch hard-on at the glass ceiling. While I am slightly exaggerating, this was pretty much the tone. (interestingly, those same readers routinely claim that the tarot is not for fortune-telling)

One such reader went as far as channeling Trump’s character. I do not remember the exact spread, nor most of the cards, but two things stuck with me: first, no egregiously bad card showed up, and second, the King of Cups featured prominently in the spread. She interpreted the card as Trump being a violent man prey to his base emotions and instincts. I took a quick look at some of that reader’s other videos, only to discover that she never, ever interpreted the King of Cups this way. In fact, she always interpreted it as the significator of a good man who takes care of the querent.

This is a good time to point out that I am fiercely apolitical, so this is not about politics. All ideologies are, as far as I am concerned, clouds over the mind’s clarity. I’m not saying everyone needs to think like me. Everyone has their delusion of choice, and everyone (including me) has their way of slanting reality in one direction or the other, whether politically, spiritually or philosophically (or even scientifically, for that matter). In fact, slanting reality is probably needed in order to filter information that might be useful to us.

Yet divination should be something else. What that reader did was merely using the cards as a mirror of her own (perfectly legitimate) bias. This is fine, and can even be useful at times–if you are aware that you are doing it. Even that would not be actual divination, but at least it wouldn’t be a waste of time.

I already discussed that divination is really a process of deification, that is, the process of allowing the dispassionate, bird-eye view clarity of the divine into one’s limited, subjective world by letting new information in. In other words, true divination is the opposite of retreating into one’s bubble: it’s the bursting of the bubble.

This, in turn, requires a certain readiness to accept the information we get (which is why it is always best to get someone you don’t know to read your cards.) Divination without intellectual honesty is just a crutch for one’s ego, and that’s how it is currently being used by the vast majority of diviners.

Unfortunately, intellectual honesty won’t make you many friends. Back in 2016 I had arguments with more tarot readers than I care to remember and was routinely labeled a dangerous extremist just because I called into question the usefulness of this type of reading (back then I still tried to entertain fruitful conversations with people). But occultism, in all its branches, is a narrow path.

Two lessons from all this: 1) if you are reading for yourself and the cards (or chart, or dice, or whatever) seem to confirm what you already think or wish, apply a bucketful of salt to the reading; 2) invest some money into a simple handbook of logic, or at least expand your knowledge of logical fallacies. This will repay you many times over, regardless of what branch of sorcery you practice.

MQS

Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Geomancy, I Ching / Yi Jing, Playing Cards, Tarot, Vera Sibilla

Predictions that Change Behaviors

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I don’t remember if I already talked about a reading I did for myself some time ago. I was expecting a parcel but needed to go somewhere else, so I asked the cards if the package would come on that day. The cards clearly answered in the negative, and I was right: I went out, and the parcel arrived the day after.

Thinking back on this, I was reminded of an experience reported by famous British astrologer John Frawley. I cannot remember if he discusses it in The Real Astrology or in his Horary Textbook, but it goes somewhat like this: he was waiting for some repairman to come to his house, but he also wanted to take a relaxing bath, so he cast a horary chart to know when the guy would come, only to discover that he wouldn’t. So he slipped into the bathtube, and his prediction proved correct

I believe this kind of readings is the most fun and instructive on the nature of divination. Ultimately, divination is intelligence-gathering. Sentient beings organize their behavior based on the information available to them. Therefore, new information is bound to change the being’s behavior.

The more complex the organism, of course, the more factors come into play, but the basic principle remains true. This is not to say that anything is possible, because only someone with infinite knowledge would know how to overcome all kinds of situations he or she finds unpleasant. We humble mortals are always restricted by difficult circumstances. Still, the information we gather through divination is not, in principle, different from the one we gather through other means which are all just as imperfect.

A fatalist might try to defend the idea of an all-encompassing destiny by arguing that the prediction is itself part of the person’s fate. I was destined to pull those cards and go out. But this stance, interestingly enough, invalidates the idea of prediction itself. If everything is destiny, then even knowledge that everything is destiny is destiny, rather than the truth.

I believe that divination is not simply communication with the divine, but also a form of deification: if we take God on one hand, that is, someone who is capable to be the pure consequence of its own choice, and a rock on the other, that is, something that simply passively receives whatever action external forces exert on it, then divination moves us closer to the divine condition of being the consequence of our own choice.

This is also why I am skeptical of airy-fairy forms of divination that try to take the focus away from concrete life in the name of some vapid divine idea. Ultimately, there is far more divine depth to Frawley’s ability to take a bath thanks to a horary chart than there is to questions like “How can I embody the divine feminine and honor my ancestral heritage more fully?”

MQS

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

To Understand Divination You Need to Understand Its Place in the World

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While in Italy for the holidays, I retrieved my first notes from when I had started learning cartomancy from the person who taught me to read playing cards and the Sibilla. It’s just a couple of loose sheets on the basic meanings of the playing cards, the main combinations and two spreads (the row of cards, hardly a spread at all, and the cross).

This brought back so many memories of that period, but most of all it reminded me of how eminently practical divination used to be before its current glamorization. Of course, over time I learned a lot more from that lady than what is on that couple of now yellowed sheets, but the core of the system is there, and I believe she must have passed it on to me in no more than two sittings, if not just in one.

People who spend their time musing on the arcane meaning of the splotch of color on this or that card in the latest glossy and overly ornate oracle deck may laugh at how bare-bones that system is, but they would forget what significance divination had for the regular folks that used it to solve everyday matters.

Folk systems of fortune-telling, especially by cards, were designed to be quickly memorizable in their main lines, because they formed part of every housewife/househusband’s toolkit of remedies to the difficulties and uncertainties of life.

When an elderly person passed their meanings on to you, they did so not to introduce you to a different world detached from the real one, where you could dilly-dally with pleasant platitudes, but to send you into this life with another string to your bow. In principle, they revealed their system to you for the same reason that they taught you how to make preserves and liquors and how to best cultivate your garden.

Folk fortune-telling, in a word, was just another traditional remedy to the complexities of life. It did not involve stepping into a different plane of existence, because the everyday one was already enough, and it was looked on with the same pragmatic, solution-oriented gaze that was cast on all other problems people faced back in the day. “Don’t forget to add a small pinch of sugar to your tomato sauce. The Ace of Spades is a thorn in the heart.”

This is an attitude toward life that is hard to recapture nowadays. The idea of divination being useful has been so utterly eradicated from our mind that, when we approach it again, we do it as if it were an exotic, quaint, arcane world separate from our own. Our immediate reaction is therefore to keep it separate from our life, divorcing it from veriafiable prediction.

This stance is fatal, because it implies that our world is not inherently meaningful as it is; that meaning is found elsewhere and cannot be reconciled with our real life; that in order to find it, one must learn to look at one’s everyday struggles as illusions or as silly preoccupations not worthy of the attention of those in the know about the cosmic mechanism. All this ends up debasing both life and divination, because once life is debased, divination, which is the language of life’s drama, becomes a meaningless mirror only reflecting vague vapors.

MQS

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

Fatalism and the Moment of Divination (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.

In the previous post in this series, I started discussing some general ideas on why fatalism is an inherently flawed view, while in the one before I had shown why pure free will makes just as little sense. To summarize, pure free will simply doesn’t take into account the fact that we don’t live and move within a blank space that we can change at whim.

On the other hand, pure fatalism cannot even be articulated as a view without contradicting itself: if fatalism is real, then my fatalism is not due to me assessing reality and forming a fatalistic worldview that corresponds to how reality factually is, but it’s due to destiny forcing me to be a fatalist. This implies that when I say I am a fatalist, I don’t really mean it. I *cannot* really mean it – It is conceptually impossible. In order to be a fatalist, I must have the freedom to develop a fatalistic worldview. This is a contradiction.

My view of the universe is consequently inherently libertarian, though it is a reasonable and limited libertarianism.* No matter how small our personal freedom is, it exists and is the place we our soul inhabits. Freedom is the consequence of consciousness. When I become aware of something, I posit it as the object of my awareness, outside of myself, and therefore incapable of completely determining my whole being.

Now let us ask: what happens during a (serious) divination session? What does divination do, at heart? At the very least, divination must either make us aware of unknown facts about the past, present or future, or it must shed new light on known facts, thus revealing them from a different, previously unknown point of view. A divination session that does not do this is not a divination session. It may or may not be helpful in other regards, but it is not divination.

The Moment of Divination

It is clear, therefore, that divination is inherently connected to consciousness and to increasing our conscious awareness of (our) reality. This is another reason why a (mildly) libertarian view of divination makes more sense. Suppose you cross the fortune-teller’s palm with silver and then you get told you will win over your crush: is the fortune-teller right because she actually sees this in the crystal ball or is she doomed to say this to you? If she is doomed to say it, then the fact that she is saying it has nothing to do with the statement being true and everything to do with destiny forcing her to say it.

Furthermore, in revealing your future to you, the fortune-teller cannot help but modify it. This has nothing to do with some odd theories I’ve read on the internet, about the fact that if you predict something you make it happen. If that were true, I could predict myself into a billionaire. Besides, even if the fortune-teller saw your future and didn’t tell you, she would still be modifying your future.

Reality is much more subtle. Suppose that X is going to happen to you. If the fortune-teller tells you, then you are aware of X happening. X happening with your awareness is different from X happening without your awareness. The fabric of the fact itself changes with your awareness of it, for the simple fact that something that happens with your knowledge is not something that happens without your knowledge.

The moment of divination, therefore, has a very important place in our life, because it is part of our life, but it is also a part of our life wherein our awareness of reality increases, thereby changing our reality. This does not automatically mean that divination can make us realize every whim that crosses our mind, nor that it can always save our butt. Sometimes the only choice possible is between accepting a fact and not accepting it.

I like to liken an oracle to a friend on top of a high building, who has a wider view of our surroundings than us as we move in a busy intersection of streets, and who texts us hints that increase our understanding of our reality and can help us make better choices, though sometimes the choices we can make are so severely limited as to border on predestination.

MQS

* I mean ‘libertarian’ from a metaphysical standpoint.