Affirmation Bias and “Participation Mystique”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I recently came across an extremely useful concept in Sallie Nichols’ Tarot and the Archetypal Journey, that of “participation mystique.” The premise is that, until they can begin to fashion words into coherent ideas that define their individuality, infants have no sense of personal ego and instead reside in a limitless, amorphous ocean of primal urges that they share with other less-introspective forms of sentient life. They are entirely instinctual creatures that recognize no boundaries and observe no laws other than biological imperatives; in other words, they epitomize the perfectly unconscious — or more precisely, unself-conscious — organism. (One wag has described the process of individuation we all undergo as an “I-opening” adventure.)
I just reached the conclusion that this is the ideal rationale to describe my reservations about purely intuitive tarot reading in general, and the Waite-Smith deck in particular. Learning the symbolic language obviously encourages a knowledge-based approach to interpretation that intentionally narrows one’s point of view. Some people believe that definitive wording cramps the creative imagination, which should have free rein to go wherever it wants based solely on impressionistic hints from the images. In this paradigm, no fact is better than any other fact, so we can choose the one we feel most drawn to and never be wrong. While I may be overstating the case a bit, I’ve seen evidence of this in some psychic modes of divination that operate entirely on emotional endorsement.
It occurs to me that avowed sensitives would like nothing better than to crawl back inside the unitary womb of primordial “we-are-all-one” wholeness that “participation mystique” suggests. They don’t fuss much with any kind of formal structure that might challenge their assumptions about the organic elasticity of spiritual reality, whether it be keyword memorization or positional spreads. The conviction seems to be that if we believe strongly enough in something we “intuit,” it will inevitably happen regardless of whether our visionary impressions conform to any benchmark of traditional wisdom, a recognized approach to delineation, or even plain old common sense.
“In the beginning,” Nichols observes, “everything was fluid and confused.” I’m not sure that kaleidoscopic stew of mingled impressions is something I need to stay in touch with, much less present as oracular wisdom, since I don’t feel privileged to be able to discern one faceless ambiguity from another based solely on my own intuitive judgment. If you think you can do so with confidence, more power to you, but as a thoughtful student of the esoteric path I will opt out. Tarot author Tony Willis once described this psychic burrowing to me as a “free-for-all” with no rules of engagement and no standards of excellence other than anecdotal experience and opinion, along with an unshakeable faith in one’s sacred mandate (aka “Divine right-to-know”). Forget “confirmation bias;” let’s call this curious attitude “affirmation bias.”
When I read the cards I like to stand “on the shoulders of giants,” although I might take a leap off that eminence into intuitive conjecture from time-to-time when it expands upon and doesn’t detract from or devalue my original thinking. Inspiration, imagination and ingenuity all have a place in my reading style; where I draw the line is at unsubstantiated guesswork that can only be validated over time and through disciplined practice. Once they demonstrate some repeatability I might include such suppositions in my interpretive toolbox, but not until. The “one-off” insight based on a random epiphany doesn’t do much for me unless I can link it to conditions I’m already seeing in the spread. I usually build my opening statements around fundamental knowledge and then infer my way into a more relaxed narrative posture that cues off the querent’s spontaneous reaction to my observations. But for the most part I’m a conscientious analyst rather than an ardent mystic (unless I’m doing dream-work).
In that sense, visual free-association from the images is something I use sparingly with the RWS tarot; it’s nowhere near as problematic when working with the Thoth and TdM decks that don’t try to “hijack” the narrative at every turn with their prosaic scenes and anecdotal vignettes, which in Pamela Colman Smith’s artwork often have little or nothing to do with the details of our clients’ affairs, although we task ourselves with making a case that will convince them otherwise. Personally, I prefer not to work that hard to undo something that never should have been carved into tarot’s cultural memory in the first place, so I use the RWS deck with a deft touch and a very light helping of insinuation from the pictures. I typically import the much less confining Thoth meanings whenever I approach the RWS Minor Arcana and court cards since their flexible, Golden-Dawn-based tenets are easy to mold to the narrative flow without getting caught up in storytelling minutiae, while still being suitably germane to the matter at hand.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 24, 2023.
