Invitations

Wild Speculation on Divination, Magik, Baby Makin' Chicken Soup and other acts of the Gods.

In the closing months of 1993, Susan and I had a newborn baby of our own and two children from my previous marriage. Although we were still in the honeymoon phase, life was difficult. There were struggles, both financial and emotional, which were interfering with our relationship and family dynamics. After a lot of soul searching, we decided that it would be best for our family if we had no more children. We decided that I would have a vasectomy.

The winter of 1993-94 was unusually snowy in Philadelphia. I had an appointment in November to have the procedure done which was cancelled due to inclement weather. Since the free clinic only offered the procedure once a month I rescheduled. December saw a rerun of this scenario and then January. While visiting with a friend a few days after the third canceled appointment, I remarked on this strange coincidence. She asked, as if it was the most obvious of questions, “Do you think the Gods are trying to tell you something?” As convinced as I was about the rightness of our decision to not have anymore children and as uncertain as I was about “the Gods”, I was already invested enough in omens through my study of the I Ching, that I had to admit that this old witch might have a point. When I got home and recounted the story to Susan, we decided that we would give these “Gods” the benefit of the doubt. Our youngest daughter was born 40 weeks later in October of 94.

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I remember reading in an English Translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that, when one reincarnates into the human realm, they perceive in infinity of copulating couples and, inexorably drawn to one of them, becomes the child they conceive. It is sometimes said that we “choose” this life – our parents, our bodies, the social and historical situation of our families, etc. – by the dictates of past karma.

Human life is based on a relatively compact genetic “alphabet” which “spells out” the entire human genome. Each of us receives 23 chromosomes from each parent. Every human who has ever lived has been some combination of a limited set of genetic “sentences”. This means that, as different as we might seem, at the molecular level, we are nearly identical.

As a diviner who has worked with I Ching and Tarot and is currently learning Astrology, I am fascinated at the way these bounded symbol sets can speak to every situation. I wonder how often two different acts of divination, in different times, places, and in response to different queries, must yield the same series of cards. The “meaning” of a series of cards rests as much, if not more, in the question that they are drawn in response to. Would three cards drawn without a question mean anything at all? Probably better than half of the card readings I do for other people are what I call a “weather report”. The querent claims to have no question in mind but just wants to know what the cards will reveal. In almost every case, once the cards are drawn and I start talking about their meanings, the querent will start talking about some VERY particular situation in their lives. I have come to think that yes, any time cards are drawn, there is a question. We might not know what it is until we start to read the cards.

When our parents conceived us, the body that was born from this act is very much like the result of a draw of Tarot Cards. We are the answer to a question that the universe asks. Perhaps our parents didn’t have a question in mind when they “shuffled” the genetic deck. Still, if the idea that we have a purpose in life is anything more than an attempt to draw meaning from the meaningless, then each of us constitutes something like an answer.

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Recently, while attending a talk by one of my old classmates from university, I was chatting with one of the organizers of the event. When asked what kind of work I do, I said that I was a “semi-professional fortune teller” mostly by means of Tarot Cards. After telling me that he had met very few people who described themselves in this way he asked “So you don’t think the cards you pull are just random?”. I replied that while I didn’t have a problem with the word random, that the word “just” was problematic.

Imagine that you are in the market for a house. You have a price range and a general area that you’d prefer to live in. Your realtor will present several available properties. These properties will be “random” in the sense that their availability will be the result of factors that are beyond the control of you or your realtor. If you think of all the properties in a desirable zip code as a deck of cards and your requirements and budget as the “question” the list of acceptable options presented by your realtor will be the “draw”. If you end up buying one of these properties, your decision to do so will be predicated on how satisfactorily one of these properties meets your requirements and budget. If none of the properties meet your requirements, the “answer” is that you will find no home at this time unless you can change your budget or adjust your requirements. Whatever the outcome, the process just described hinges on a great many contingencies and is, in that sense, “random”. Yet the result, the purchase (or not) of an adequate home is in no way without “meaning”. We should decouple the idea of contingency from meaninglessness.

The above example is a metaphor for everything from how a meaningful answer can arise from the contingent drawing of cards to a meaningful life arising from the contingent meeting and mating of our parents. The material world has no “meaning” in the sense that it does not point to anything beyond itself. Things happen according to more or less well understood natural “laws”. When we pull a card from the deck, the “reason” for it being this “particular” card goes no deeper than the fact that, at any given time, each of a limited number of cards will occupy a definite position in the deck. When we draw the cards and arrange them in accordance with a layout pattern, the meaning does not so much “arise” from the arrangement of cards on the table as “descend into it”.

Some traditions speak of spirits “riding” bodies. Usually, this riding refers to some spirit OTHER than that of the person being “ridden”. It is my contention that every person’s body is “ridden” by the spirit of the person we recognize AS that person. This is the difference between your grandfather, for example, and your grandfather’s corpse. When our parents did the natural, they “invited” us, consciously or not, into the body they conceived. The experience of the infinity of copulating couples I read about in The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes, perhaps in a metaphorical sense, the process by which we evaluate and accept the many “invitations” being offered at any given moment we accepted.

When we perform an act of divination, we are doing something like what we do when we make a baby. We shuffle some set of, more or less fixed elements into a configuration that “attracts” an answer. Furthermore, we do this even when we are just “fooling around”. This is the reason for the warnings we sometimes hear about asking “frivolous” questions of oracles or having “non procreative sex” for that matter. While I think it is important to understand that the things we do, at the card table, the alter or in the bedroom always “invite” something, I am not a puritan. Sometimes things just want to get born and make their way into the world by whatever means they can – by kids fooling around with Ouija Boards or even with one another. But we should, if only for our own benefit, try to honor the results of even our “unplanned” outcomes, by giving them a name and trying to understand who they are, even if this means turning this result away.

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As I have said in other essays, everything we do with an eye toward bringing about something new rather than simply reacting to what already is, constitutes magik. This means that we are not only always doing magik, but that the only choice we have is to do it well or poorly. As Stewart Brand put it in the first Whole Earth Catalogue: “We are as Gods, we might as well get good at it”. This might seem grandiose to some, but I believe that it is true, and further, to deny it is the height of irresponsibility on our part. Chicken soup is Witch’s Brew.

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In this essay I have tried to address the way in which meaning finds its way into the world. It “finds its way in” it does not arise from the material world. Nihilism is essentially correct in its assertion of the meaninglessness of life if, AND ONLY IF, there is no spirit world. We will not succeed in proving the existence of anything beyond the material world by material means. If we seek meaning and purpose, in a pile of cards, an uncanny series of apparently unrelated events or in our own lives, individually or collectively, we will not find it in the quantum nuts and bolts of material existence. Nor is there any particular reason to believe that the “spirit world” is united in what it would like to play out in the material world. Venus likes love and harmony, Mars likes bloodshed and discord. Both have claims on each of us (check your birth chart for proof of this). But we can, to some extent, choose how we channel these forces. This channeling, even in the most mundane of circumstances like picking a fight or seeking an accord, is also magik.

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I completed this essay on December 19,2024, making it the last essay I will publish this solar year. I wish all of you a blessed Yule and happy and prosperous new year. Blessed Be.