Divination or Fortune-Telling: A Matter of Degree, Not Pedigree
These days I fancy myself an ordinary “fortune-teller” rather than a starry-eyed purveyor of the psychological and spiritual insights that I’ve concluded are not particularly worthwhile pursuits for the tarot when compared to the robust capabilities of natal astrology. But I also agree with Alejandro Jodorowsky that a tarot reading — although it may be rich in portent — doesn’t unveil the one-and-only future for an individual seeker, but instead identifies one hypothetical track among many that beg to be exploited by the querent to maximize their benefit or, conversely, to minimize their detriment. Such a wide-ranging forecast doesn’t become a “prediction” until one chain of theoretical circumstances and events is singled out during the reader-client dialogue and awarded the mantle of assumed veracity (yet to be proven at that point). I’m not concerned so much with whether I speak the gospel truth (Jodorowsky calls it being “a prisoner of finding the right answer”) as with the incentive (and ammunition) my observations can offer my clients for dealing effectively with their problems. Although I draw the line at unfounded intuitive pronouncements, I don’t mind being a little impressionistic in my narrative if it gets my point across successfully; it’s all part of being a compelling storyteller.
Some diviners go to great lengths to distance themselves from the taint of fortune-telling, assuring us that they are in touch with a much more exalted wellspring of wisdom and that they are its corporeal mouthpiece (er, “minister”). They prefer the word “divination” (as in divinely-inspired) to “prediction,” and by no means mistake them for crass soothsayers! I don’t dispute that such a fount of illuminated knowledge is available to the sensitive inquirer, but my own experience has been that the scope of face-to-face prognostication traditionally draws on the querent’s latent or heretofore untapped awareness of their future condition, however they might have come by it. (See Joseph Maxwell’s The Tarot for more on this premise.) The focus is on the verifiable dimensions of a situation and doesn’t need to concern itself with more rarefied input. With that in mind, I’m not a mystic or psychic intent on opening an unimpeachable “hotline to Deity” or otherwise sagely reading the mind of a client. I position myself as an analyst dedicated to extracting relevant information from my sitters’ subconscious via the agency of their hands-on interaction with the cards, thus forming a credible bridge between psychological theory and pure psychism.
As I see it, divination is a broad class of esoteric practice aimed at “getting under the skin” of objective reality to see what makes the Universe tick (invariably called “pseudoscience” by the scientific community but nonetheless embracing a parallel agenda). On the other hand, mundane prediction is only one piece of that enormity, one that derives its inspiration from the same source (albeit filtered through the client interface) but has the pragmatic goal of substantiating the “real-world” implications of any transcendental flights-of-fancy ginned up by the theoreticians. I’ve spent too many years as an armchair philosopher of the occult arts to want to continue down that path. Now I endeavor to sniff out “where the action is,” and as Aleister Crowley said, “The practical, every-day commonplace way is divination” (by which he meant the tarot cards). But in my own case “now” is relative since I’ve been practicing tarot and astrology since the early 1970s; what I’m after at the moment is not plowing a deeper furrow in that direction but rather expanding my horizons into other modes of divination and other predictive techniques. My recent experiment with the pendulum is emblematic.
I’ve become a willing ex-communicant (and apostate) of the ad-hoc Jungian cult of mystical aspirants to the pulpit of psychological “seer-ship.” Instead, I prefer to treat divination as an effective metaphysical tool for piecing together the puzzle of future circumstances without succumbing to high-flown introspection about its consequences for the human psyche. Such ponderous deliberation has more to do with the mental/emotional/spiritual impact of emerging circumstances on the person (the legitimate role of the psychoanalyst or theologian, not the prognosticator) than with the utilitarian forces that underlie the situation and lead to its development. Although it’s often a byproduct of my work, I don’t seek to unearth the philosophical “why” of a prediction as much as the “what, who and how,” all actionable considerations. I mined that paradigm for all it’s worth back in the ’70s and ’80s; I don’t need to go back there on my own behalf at this point in my life, and I certainly don’t want to mislead my clients into believing that I’m some kind of therapeutic “mind-healer” dealing in arcane symptoms and their equally abstruse causes. I can point them at the signs, but it’s their job to make what sense they can of the augury and act accordingly to promote their own well-being (or they can just cut to the chase and see a psychiatrist).
A question was asked recently on the divination sub-reddit about whether anyone uses tarot for “healing.” My answer, as always, was “not as such.” I’m not a trained and licensed therapist and I’m certainly not a shamanistic “faith-healer” posing as the “one-eyed man in the land of the blind.” For reasons of liability and ethics, I’m not comfortable making any kind of diagnostic health assessment, and the same goes for most legal and financial matters. There is a place for all three in divination, but not at any established professional level of authority. My credentials are informal and anecdotal, and I consider what I (and most practitioners) do to be “learned consultation” based on experience and intelligence that stops short of advising and counseling on the subjects of biological wellness or economic wholeness. I may predict but I never prescribe.
As an aside, I’m also not too interested in hazarding the emotional minefield of romantic entanglement, but that’s another “wish-fulfillment” rant that I’ve previously exhausted.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on March 22, 2023.
