Mirror of the Gods
What (I think) happens in divination
In my ongoing effort to be both thorough and concise in what I present here I have decided to try using end notes to clarify points without derailing the overall idea of the essay. I hope this proves useful to my readers.
A few days ago, I had lunch with an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a while. Catching up on each other’s lives I mentioned that I had been doing some Tarot readings at a little shop in town. My friend asked what I thought was happening when I was reading Tarot cards. I told him that what I was telling stories through the medium of the cards but how the stories find their way into the cards I couldn’t rightly say. He asked me if I thought that, as is often supposed, that any sufficiently “open” set of images could easily lend themselves to nearly any situation given a creative enough interpreter. I said that although I couldn’t say categorically that this was NOT so, I felt that there was something more to it than that. What I didn’t want to say, at least in that moment, was that I thought – that I think – that there is something like genuine spiritual communication occurring through the medium of the cards. The main reason for my reluctance was that I couldn’t make the claim without unpacking a truck load of metaphysical speculation that didn’t seem appropriate over poke bowls and ramen. I can do that here and can write about something I have been wanting to address directly for a while.
So yes, I believe that in Tarot reading, or any other form of divination, we are accessing information from the spirit world. The oracular “technology” (cards, runes, buttons from a jar, clouds, etc.) are the “media” in which this information presents itself.[i] I do not believe that spirit entities “draw” the cards in the sense of an invisible hand that reaches into the deck or bag of tiles. Instead, what I think is happening is that when we enter the space of divination, we invite spirits to draw near and, in their presence, we shuffle the cards or draw the lots. Anyone who has performed an act of divination will recall the strange moment when we are shuffling cards or counting through our yarrow stalks. It doesn’t feel completely in our control. Not that it feels like something else is moving our hands but, to the contrary, the hands move without clear purpose. How do you “decide” where, and at what moment to cut the deck and draw the card. To me, it feels like a moment of musical improvisation or free form dance where we, the person for whom we are reading (if we are reading for someone else) and the spirit who is to be revealed move together, being prompted to move this way or that by one another’s movement. This spirit, who is the ANSWER, will take form – will be BORN, in the spread of the cards.[ii]
As I said in the last entry, anything with a name has a soul. An answer is such a “name”. The Tarot has a bounded number of unchanging symbols. We might think of this symbol set as something like an alphabet (or genetic code). The human genome, or that of any creature, can generate a certain range of possible phenotypes. All of these are more or less similar (humans usually have 10 fingers and toes, two eyes, blue or green or brown etc.). But within this range we can recognize almost infinite subtle variation. This is what it means to “know” someone. What we mean when we speak of the individual that one IS, is their NAME. Similarly, while there are a limited number of possible outcomes for any Tarot reading, only one will be the outcome of this PARTICULAR reading. Now sometimes I will use the Tarot as a medium for speaking with a particular deity or ancestor. I will invoke their presence and, when I am satisfied that they have drawn near, ask my question and take whatever comes out as the word of whomever I have invoked. But what is happening here is the same process, the oracle acts as a medium or incarnation[iii]
For me, spirit entities are akin to Platonic Forms.[iv] They are NOT energy, they are INFORMATION.[v] Information requires a medium in which it can be expressed if it is to be communicated. In astrology, the planets are not thought of as the Gods who’s names they bare but rather as the expressions of these Gods. As such, they disclose by their positions within the zodiac and relative to one another, the way in which archetypes blend to form the personality of people and events. When we ask a question of the Tarot, the cards that we draw embody the combination and interconnection of archetypes which form the “personality” of the situation we are enquiring about.[vi] Another way of saying this is that everything that occurs in the material world reflects the meeting of Gods.[vii] The Tarot, or any other divination technology is a tiny mirror that we hold up to them.
[i] I mean media in the same sense that film or a stream of digital code are media – a substrate into which information is encoded but which remains distinct FROM this information. In this sense, music and all human languages are also media. The word “water” carries all the meaning of water without being water, a string of notes inexplicably transforms our mood.
[ii] In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, we are taught that we choose our parents. This “choice” corresponds with the moment of our conception. This moment is described as being surrounded in all directions by couples in sexual embrace. We will find ourselves drawn to one of these couples by karmic forces of which we are largely unaware. The answer that comes of an act of divination is “drawn” in a similar way to the random outcome of the card shuffle in the same way WE are born of the random meeting and mating of our parents. They could have met someone else, but they did not and because of this, each of us are the person we are and not someone else. This is, I think, the way all magikal results come about.
[iii]As an animist, I strive to recognize the spirit resident in all material things. For me, the sacredness of the material world is in her capacity to EMBODY spiritual entities.
[iv] Plato taught that behind all material objects there are hierarchies of nested archetypes. The roundness of the moon or a pumpkin is the expression in material objects of the “form” of a circle. A pumpkin is round, fruit, autumnal and a whole network of other qualities which combine to form the specific objects in the world. Another way we might think of this is to consider how fractals work to organize complex material objects like the circulatory system. It has been pointed out that if every parting and change in size of every blood vessel needed a specific gene, we would need more genes than are present in the whole genome. Instead, a small number of genes can encode instructions like “grow to X length then bifurcate, after bifurcation, grow 2/3 as long and 3/8 as wide as before the last bifurcation”. In this way, a vastly complex object can be formed from a small amount of information. That we can think of such information apart from its implementation speaks to the separability of “spirit” from “matter”.
[v] The science that studies both energy and matter is called PHYSICS, from the Greek “physis”, meaning nature. The “spirit world” is “super natural” or “metaphysical”. Spirit world entities are not “made of” anything. They are literally insubstantial. This is why they need bodies to make them visible and allow them to act in the world. To understand the difference, we might imagine a radio broadcast. The transmitter radiates electromagnetic energy. We can measure this energy with appropriate instruments to determine the wattage of the transmitter. We cannot, however, measure the CONTENT of the broadcast. A 50,000 watt transmitter is 50,000 watts regardless of whether it is broadcasting music, a ball game, Morse Code of just random noise.
[vi] No matter how much one birth chart differs from another, all will contain The Sun, Moon, Venus, etc. A person or event represented by such a chart is an amalgam of these archetypes. The Tarot spread that constitutes the answer to a question is similarly an arrangement of archetypes that define the
[vii] There is an assumption on the part of many diviners all events, no matter how small or (seemingly) random, are merely reflections of the doings of “higher powers”. This is why some highly sensitive people can draw meaning from things like the curling of smoke or the smear of coffee grounds. The Gods no more have to reach into the deck and pull cards to communicate themselves than I have to reach into a mirror to move the reflection of my hand, the reflection simply follows my movements. This is what is meant by the Hermetic Law of Correspondence “As Above So Below”.