The Diviner’s Medium: Intuitive Insight or Pure Projection?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve always been skeptical of the widely-held opinion that the subliminal insights we tap into while reading the cards are a form of spiritual illumination coming from a mystical source of higher wisdom. Those who aspire to the practice of “secular tarot” (now there’s an oxymoron for you) believe that it isn’t received knowledge but is in fact projected from within, the assumption being that we are fooling ourselves if we think otherwise. (How it “gets in there” in the first place is not often discussed in that corner of the tarot world beyond proposing that it’s only the result of bemused self-deception.) I’m not convinced of that either, but here is another broadside on the subject. I think it lands just outside the borders of “mean-spirited” and within striking distance of being perfectly reasonable, but you can decide for yourself.
I’ve been gnawing at this premise like a dog worrying a bone since 2011, and I’m still not confident that it is anything more than subconscious projection by the querent or the diviner. In other words, we will see what we expect to see unless we can distance ourselves from our preconceptions; there are ways to do this if we as readers aren’t too enamored of our own prescience. (To be fair, in many cases these impressions will be entirely on-point since reliable induction of a sitter’s subjective awareness is one definition of “how tarot works.” Much of the time, however, “confirmation bias” on the part of both participants looms large in the equation.)
While I agree that “something mysterious” seems to be going on, it’s all too likely that what we are accepting as intuitive enlightenment is just the product of an overactive imagination, a vestige of the “animal magnetism” experiments of Franz Mesmer that has been passed down to us through the New Thought movement, the auto-hypnosis disaster that was The Power of Positive Thinking and its trail of neurotic casualties, and now the Law of Attraction and the whole phantasmagorical notion of “manifesting reality” according to our desires, ostensibly abetted by angels, spirit guides or other putative agents of the Unseen. Can you say “woo?” (I’ll grant some leeway to Buddhists who abide by the Master’s self-fulfilling prescription “What you think, you become,” and to quantum physicists who are beginning to find empirical proof of “mind over matter.”)
In truth, if we “make our own future,” it is the cumulative result of our actions in the world (including our oversights and mistakes) and not our fondest hopes and wishes; that’s the stuff of romantic fantasies and biblical miracles. It’s an engaging fiction that has little hard evidence to back it up since most such testimony is anecdotal and not rigorously demonstrated even to ourselves. While “positivity” — much like the “power of prayer” — certainly can’t hurt, it’s unlikely to be the final solution.
There is no doubt that “shit happens” apparently without our active cooperation, but if we dig deeply enough we can usually see where, at some point in the past, we set circumstances in motion that led to the conditions we are currently experiencing. This acceptance of culpability exemplifies the “hindsight is 20/20” phenomenon that attends many rueful epiphanies regarding our unfortunate state of being. This is not to say that other people with nefarious motives don’t “have it in for us” and aren’t slyly pushing their own agenda at our expense, but as the saying goes “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
While it’s a somewhat “dehumanizing” way to live, taking a vigilant stance in matters involving the participation of other people in our private affairs may be the only way to avoid being compromised. If nothing else, we can keep our eyes wide open and take very little at face value; “show me the money” could be the best attitude to cultivate, and the benefit of the doubt may be capital we don’t want to spend too freely.
Which brings me back to the subject of professional tarot reading. If we are brought on-board early enough in the development of a situation, we can frequently see glimmers of future hardship in the cards that can be headed off before they get too strong a grip on the seeker’s existence. If these are handled objectively without descending into alarmist hyperventilation, they can facilitate adopting a “forewarned is forearmed” posture in the matter. But we should not assume that just because we believe they are likely to occur, they will automatically “come true” for the querent. It’s always best to treat any such observations as avoidable possibilities rather than outright certainties even when the client is begging for assurance of their legitimacy.
At its most defensible, tarot excels at pinpointing trends and tendencies but it doesn’t have an unimpeachable record for nailing the facts. The Universe is too capriciously (and often perversely) inscrutable for that, and we can never be sure that its heralds are being completely transparent with us when it comes to prognostication. I recommend taking these presentiments “under advisement” as provisional hints rather than offering them as unassailable confirmation of future events because they may only be surfacing the querent’s hopes and fears or the diviner’s self-referential presumptions, with no footing in objective reality.
Personally, I always err on the side of caution in my oracular observations. You didn’t hear it from me, but we might all take a lesson in cagey (or maybe just obscure) circumlocution from “Tricky Dick” Nixon: “I know you think you believe you understand what you thought I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is exactly what I meant.”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on August 16, 2024.
