CHAPTER 2

DIVINATION:

EXPANDING THE WAYS OF KNOWING

We are not likely to know the right
questions until we are close to
knowing the answers . . .
Steven Weinberg

When people ask me how I became interested in the Tarot, I think they
are sometimes surprised to hear that I was lured into a close association
with the cards through my discovery of divination. I had first
acquainted myself with the Tarot from an academic perspective--and
rather as a last resort. I was studying Jungian psychology at the time,
and I wanted to understand more about Jungs fascination with image
systems and synchronicity. I thought I needed to grasp this not only in
the abstract but also in the concrete, so I tried to study the I Ching.
Tried is the operative word here, because the I Ching was entirely
opaque to me. I never experienced whatever it is that other people,
including Jung, find in the I Ching.1
The meaning of the I Ching is, for us Westerners, largely carried by
language, and I decided that might be my problem. Perhaps my highly
developed relationship to language prevented me from moving beyond the
logical, linear, language-based interpretation of I Ching. The Tarot, on
the other hand, is carried mainly by visual images, so I thought I might
be more able to relate directly and intuitively to the pictures. What
actually happened, however, was that I followed my habitual inclination
and learned about the cards rather than learning with or through them.
Accordingly, after a while, I knew quite a bit about the history and
symbolism of the Tarot, but nothing about how to use it. I hadnt any
interest in prediction with the cards, but I thought that in order to
understand the phenomenology of Tarot better, it would be interesting to
take a typical fortunetelling sort of Tarot class, and this I did. Luckily, I
had a good teacher, who was traditional in her approach to the Tarot
but very sensible, and I emerged after several weeks with the general
notion that the Tarot cards could usefully be read as a pictorial
language. My idea at the time (scarcely original) was that one might
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employ a spread of cards to catalyze the creative imagination and thus

open up to awareness insights which would otherwise remain unconscious.
In the case of reading for another person, I reasoned, the process could
be carried out through some form of covert communication or even
telepathic connection.
Okay so far. Now at the time, I was a graduate assistant at a large-ish
university, and I had participated for several semesters in teaching a
class called Creativity and Consciousness. This wildly popular course
was part of the Visual Arts curriculum, but due to the unusual
philosophical foundations of that program, the class included such onthe-fringe consciousness-related topics as sacred geometry, astral travel,
reincarnation, and ESP. When a local community college decided they
would like to offer a version of the course in its continuing education
program, they asked me if I would come and teach it.
Since doctoral students are generically and perennially hard up for cash,
I was only too happy to oblige, but it wasnt economical for me to go to
the distant campus for just one course. So I suggested teaching another
class on the same evening, and when they asked what I would like to
teach, I heard myself saying Tarot. Preparing and presenting such a
course, I reasoned, would create an opportunity to organize my research
on the subject.
Well . . . I taught the six-week course more than two dozen times, on five
campuses, to several hundred people over the next three years, and I
never did get organized. In fact, my ideas about Tarot were radically
changed within the first few months of this exposure. I soon found that I
couldnt give the class without doing some reading of the cards myself,
and as I read for more and more people--total strangers--I found myself
against my own will extending my interpretations not only beyond the
evident scope of the cards, but more and more into the future. No
matter how much I tried to remain in the designated space of present
events, I wandered out of it and into a realm of future impressions.
I also discovered that the Tarot process was a phenomenal short cut to
psychological insight. People will tell their Tarot readers in a moment
things they will work for years to avoid telling their shrinks! This is so, I
decided, because contemporary people dont really believe in divination
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the way they believe in psychotherapy; they regard having their cards
read as an entertainment--perhaps a serious, even enlightening
entertainment, but not an ego-threatening experience. Since they dont
fear that they will be forced to confront themselves through a Tarot
reading as they fear self-recognition in therapy, so they dont set up the
intricate and nearly impenetrable layers of resistance that slow down or
even defeat the conventional therapy process.
Once I knew this, it seemed frustrating to pursue a therapeutic modality
that requires spending months (at best) working through transference and
counter-transference, defense mechanisms, denial, and other forms of
resistance. Of course I still think that conventional psychoanalysis has an
important place, particularly for dealing with disorders serious enough to
impair functioning; but there are plenty of people with the patience to
practice that discipline, and Im not one of them. I found that through
the Tarot, I could work quickly and effectively with people whose
problems stemmed in a fairly ordinary way from unconscious blocks and
distorted thinking patterns.
But even having established a therapeutic rationale for working with Tarot,
I was by no means content to stay in the present. For one thing,
extending the clients considerations of self and life into the future
through the mechanism of prediction has a solid therapeutic application.
But for another, there is a heady appeal to hanging out on the edge of
time, flirting with the future. To explore this particular form of
excitement, I disguised myself as a gypsy and read Tarot at Renaissance
fairs and even parties. These experiences--which often involved reading
for twenty or more perfect strangers within a two- or three-hour period-did the most to transform my understanding of Tarot.
I discovered that the faster I read and the less time I had to think about
the cards or the querent, the more likely I was to have a confident sense
of the persons present and future. And by being forced to recognize
and interpret the cards quickly, I began to read them almost exactly as I
would read a written-language text.2 As I became aware of these factors,
I began to see similarities between the process of Tarot-reading and
theories of flow and trance, which describe how consciousness may
become altered in ways that increase our access to ambient information.
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I also explored aspects of contemporary science (such as quantum

physics and chaos theory) which seem to be telling us something about
the nature of space-time and how we perceive it.
These reflections are discussed at some length in The Tarot: History,
Mystery, and Lore, and I believe they suggest a plausible line of inquiry
for understanding how Tarot can be a way of knowing. The next step,
then, is to consider in more depth the nature of that knowledge, as it
emerges through the transaction we call divination.

DIVINATION DECONSTRUCTED
Divination is probably as old as humankind, but it has been little
recorded and even less studied. We can only speculate about how it
was practiced by our ancestors, or how well it worked. But we can,
perhaps, better understand the process of divining--our attempt to
understand the shape and meaning of events--if we turn to other primal
phenomena: language, myth, and play.
When we contemplate our origins, writes Richard Leakey, we quickly
come to focus on language. World-famous for his fossil discoveries,
Leakey has given great consideration to how we became who we are, and
he concludes that although there are many objective standards (such as
bipedality and brain size) for our uniqueness as a species, nevertheless,
in many ways it is language that makes us feel human. . . . Our
thoughts, our world of imagination, our communication, our richly
fashioned culture--all are woven on the loom of language. Upon this
loom, Leakey contends, was fabricated a uniquely human mental model
of the world, by means of which multiple channels of sensory data are
processed to meet complex practical and social challenges.3
According to one influential view (built on the work of MIT linguist Noam
Chomsky), language has a deep structure which can be seen in the
overall similarity of structural and generative rules underlying all human
languages. This accounts for why children learn languages in much the
same way the world over, and why all languages seem to develop and
diverge in comparable patterns. The presence in language of a deep
structure seems to reflect a language-acquisition facility in the brain,
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which in turn explains how we can do anything so fabulously difficult as

learning language in the first place.
Physicist and writer Heinz Pagels describes how this deep structure can
be glimpsed in the work of translators, such as this remarkable Russian
who knows dozens of languages, Oriental as well as Western:
After he listens to someone speak, he translates the remarks into
whatever language is desired--any one of dozens. How does he do
it? According to him, he hears the remarks not in any language
at all, but rather as a matrix of meanings--a conceptual format of
some kind that he creates. When asked to translate into a specific
language, he consults the matrix and expresses that meaning into a
language.
Pagels points out that the spoken language heard by the translator is
subordinate to a deeper, nonverbal logical structure that is independent
of any specific language.4
The idea of an underlying structure of language--a matrix of meanings
from which can be drawn any one of a number of translations-illuminates the process of divination in general, and Tarot in particular.
The most basic category of divinatory methods focuses on the
interpretation of patterns found in objects and events: the entrails of
animals, smoke rising from a fire, or cloud designs in the sky. These
practices are based on the impression (fanciful or not) that natural
phenomena constitute a kind of language that expresses the deep
structure of reality.
Indeed, an archaic and unconscious link between
language and divination is apparent in the very way we talk about
divination: I read the cards, or the tea leaves said . . . .
If, indeed, there is a built-in facility of the brain that acquires/creates
spoken language, there may be a variant or companion faculty that
perceives natural phenomena in a similar way--a faculty that helps us
discover in our surroundings clues to the patterns of fortune. Tarot,
however, is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It belongs to a
second category of divinatory techniques, those which are purposefully
created in order to provide a language we can read more easily and
reliably. 5 (Or looked at another way, to provide the deeper structure of
reality with a means to communicate more clearly.) It is uncertain when
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humans first developed divinatory systems, but like other practices,

divination seems to have become more systematized as cultures became
more complex. We do know that China had the basic form of the I
Ching nearly four thousand years ago, and in the first millennium BC,
divinatory practices were a busy business around the Mediterranean,
where they continued to thrive for centuries under Christianity and Islam,
in spite of orthodox denouncements.
Of the many divinatory systems we know about, Tarot is one of the very
few that uses entirely artificial symbols--that is, symbols not derived from
or connected with naturally occurring phenomena, as astrology is based
on the movements of astronomical bodies, palmistry on lines in the hand,
and so forth. Numerology shares the artificiality of Tarot, but of course
predates the Tarot significantly. In fact, another quality which
distinguishes Tarot in the world of divination is its relative newness; its
the only widely used divinatory system more-or-less invented in modern
times (insofar as its esoteric and mantic properties were not defined at
all until the nineteenth century).
Perhaps its not surprising, then, that Tarot is more similar than most
divinatory systems to spoken language, in the sense that individual
elements (the cards) have specific meanings and can be arranged
according to grammar-like rules. Its obvious, of course, that Tarot is
more amorphous than a conventional language, because there are no
fixed references for its individual elements; the images can refer to
virtually anything and they can be related to each other however we
choose at a particular time. A Page is a child in one context, a message
in another; the Emperor may be a father, a boss, an Aries man, a
politician, a social structure, the force of convention, or any of several
other things, depending on the cards which surround it.
But spread patterns do control and direct possible meanings and
combinations of meanings by providing a kind of grammar, in the sense
that they enable the reader to tell by position roughly whats in the past
tense, whats in the future, what subject acts on what object, and so on.
A spread forms sentences and paragraphs in which individual
meanings can be understood by contextual reference. So if the rest of
the cards in a spread have nothing to do with children or romance, the
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Page is more likely to be a message than a child; if, on the other hand,
the Page appears with the Empress and the King of Cups, it is more
likely to be a child than a message. Although thats a very simplified
example, its a clear illustration of the same process which enables us to
recognize one meaning for spring in the sentence Tomorrow is the first
day of spring, and another in the sentence He has a spring in his step.
In many ways, Tarot language is actually most like the language of
dream imagery, from the standpoint that (a) information is conveyed
more by images than by words, and (b) the meaning of individual images
is largely a function of their relationship to other images in the set. If,
for example, I say I ate fish you know exactly what the fish means; no
matter whether it is a salmon or a trout, a big fish or a little one, its
meaning is that it was food for me. But if I say I dreamed of fish, you
have no idea (and I dont, necessarily) what the fish means. Now it
becomes very important whether the fish was a salmon or a trout, big or
little, swimming or sizzling on the grill. The characteristics of the
particular fish and the context in which it appeared are the only clues to
its significance.
Dream and language, says the strange and fascinating French philosopher
Gaston Bachelard, are brought together in reverie, the waking dream in
which the imagination travels into the heart of reflection.6 The experience
of poetic reverie is described by Bachelard in a manner that can be
applied as well to reading Tarot images as to reading the written
language:
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a
word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin
to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word
abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and
prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they
had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in
the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company . . . .
In just such a way may the diviner find that a kind of reverie overtakes
his or her imagination, and transforms a Tarot event from the prosaic
kind of reading to the poetic kind.

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But as marvelous as reading may be, with its capability not only to
propagate information but to inspire reverie, it is an epiphenomenon of
language itself. Language is essentially oral-aural in character: we make
and hear sounds that convey meaning. Writing greatly extends the power
of language, because it fixes sounds so that the same words can be
heard in the same order over and over, by many people. But a good
deal of the complexity of communication is sacrificed in the process,
because there are no visual cues (gestures, expressions, physical
references, and so on) to embellish meaning, and there is no feedback;
what is written down does not change in response to our opinions or
expand in answer to our questions.
In ordinary life, reading and speaking are rather distantly related; we read
to ourselves mostly, and if we read to others, we usually read word-forword what is written. Tarot is unusual in the way it brings together a
kind of written language and our spoken language. A Tarot reading
involves the process of real-time translation from visual symbols to vocal
narrative, so images and speech are drawn closely together; its as if we
read a poem or story aloud but instead of following the words on the
page, produced free associations inspired by the words. In this process,
we can open and share consciousness in an extraordinary way.
Terrence McKenna, an important interpreter of shamanic technology, tells
of Amazonian shamans who, with the help of plants that contain a type
of pseudo-neurotransmitter (DMT), actually perceive sounds visually.
McKenna speculates that as consciousness evolves, we may all be moving
from a language that is heard to a language that is seen, through a
shift in interior processing.7 The visible language he predicts is not
written language, fixed in time and immune to feedback, but a speech
which is apprehended not merely by our ears but by our eyes.
McKennas idea is intriguing. How much more profoundly, how creatively
could we communicate if our experience of language were taken in
through more of our senses; our senses, after all, offer multiple channels
of input and processing in the brain, which suggests we might reach far
more meaningful levels of understanding. But whether or not such a
remarkable leap of consciousness is around the corner for our species,

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some of us may at least catch a glimpse of the complex human potential

through the visible language of Tarot.

FORTUNE/TELLING
I began this chapter with a story--my own, since its the one I know best-because stories have a special way of conveying information. Stories, by
virtue of their appeal to the imagination, are more intriguing, more
memorable, and often more enlightening than explanations, facts, or other
instruments of reason.
The particular story I told is a story about destiny. It tells how the
eddies and currents of my own fortune brought me under the spell of
Tarot, and if I were to continue the tale, you would learn how those
currents carried me away again, and then back, at a different place. In
one sense, its a story about me, but in another, its a story about Tarot
and how the Tarot pulls certain people into its orbit, absorbs and
transforms their energies, and projects its mysteries through their voices.
Think for a moment about all the stories that have been told over the
Tarot cards--from ravishing romances to tales of deep sadness to
parables on the meaning of life. Through these stories, both reader and
querent have explored the many-sidedness of the past and the subtle
energies of the future, in a process which ultimately illuminates the
present by making it more dimensional, more meaningful, and in some
important way, more real.
This communal, creative way of using Tarot is what Id like to call
fortune/telling: fortune in the sense of destiny, telling in the sense of
narrative. Although fortunetelling has long been used as a popular, and
somewhat pejorative, term for the tall-dark-stranger school of superficial
Tarot reading, I hope to rescue the concept and reclaim its grander
meaning. Ones fortune, after all, is the unfolding of ones core being; as
an individual destiny takes shape, we watch the meaning of a particular
life gradually become apparent. It doesnt matter, really, whether you
believe life is pre-ordained, or whether you believe we make it up as we
go, for in either case, fortune sweeps us along on the tides of our own
nature.
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Telling, also, is a much more grand concept than we commonly realize.

For most of the life of humanity, the telling of stories was among the
most vital activities in society. Story-telling preserved and passed along
the wisdom and experience of the community, long before there were
alphabets or books. They served, too, the initiation of imagination;
children were awakened to the truths of the heart and alerted to the
traps of the trickster soul by hearing those deeply psychological stories
we today call myths, legends, fairy tales or folk tales. Stories
were told and retold, embellished and adapted, by specialists who
combined prodigious memory with a creative sensitivity to the
fundamental elements of story. 8
Homer, of course, is the singer of tales best known to us today, but he
(if indeed there was a single historical person named Homer) was only
one voice in a history-spanning chorus that organized and conserved the
essentials of human experience. In those days, stories were not works of
literature to be enjoyed or analyzed, but living precepts that revealed the
deep truth of the world and explained the process of living in it. Think
about the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epics of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, the
legends of Hercules and Paul Bunyan, the folk stories of Coyote and Brer
Rabbit, and fairy tales like Cinderella from that point of view, and you
realize that these narratives are all, indeed, ways of telling the fortunes
of character, community, and cosmos.
Though there were story-telling specialists in times past, almost everyone
told stories in some form or fashion, because stories were a principal
form of entertainment and education. Even today, when much of our
story-telling is done by television and tabloid, we all have the inherent
ability to weave a story web. We do it spontaneously to soothe a child
or amuse a friend, enrich a conversation or create an impression. But
we tend to overlook the power of the story to explain, explore, expand,
and even create our realities.
Contrary to the usual assumptions, stories are not untrue but rather (in a
way) super true; they capture a broader portion of the reality spectrum
than the relatively narrow band of mere fact. Because stories can touch
us on so many levels--conscious and unconscious, intellectual and
emotional, subjective and objective--they create not just a depiction or
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description, but a complete model of a particular reality. So when we let

ourselves go inside the world of a good story, we come away with the
impression and memory of objects, people, events, thing of all kinds that
exist there in some imaginatively real way. And since the story has a
beginning, a middle, and an end, we can see a point, a meaning that
emerges from the story.
In real life, experience unfolds so slowly and continuously that it is
difficult to see the stories we are part of. A Tarot reading can isolate a
segment of that unfolding and make it visible in the multi-dimensional
form of a story, which has a beginning (somewhere in the past), a middle
(whats happening now), and an end (projected into the future). As the
story is told, its meaning becomes visible, and that meaning, in turn, can
be pondered and elaborated, revised and applied to the
questions/dilemnas/demands constantly generated by real life.
Fortune/telling brings the art of the story into a personal and particular
context. In our own society today, fortune/telling serves much the same
purpose it has long served in traditional cultures, offering a chance for
dialogue, for sharing, for objectification, for hope and drama and
revelation. As a way of telling about fortune, Tarot-reading offers the
opportunity to cultivate our natural narrative abilities and endow them
with deeper resonances and broader meanings. Edgar-winning mystery
writer and Tarot enthusiast Bill Bayer describes the process perfectly
when he say the Tarot is, for him, a means of evoking stories latent in
my and my querents minds: stories that may well lack a conventional
form, rather stories that reveal the processes of the unconscious.
The means by which we look at a group of Tarot images and create a
meaning-full story seems to be that faculty called by the Romantic poet
and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge Secondary Imagination. The
Secondary Imagination (more commonly referred to as poetic imagination)
was believed by Coleridge to maintain a living unity with the Primary
Imagination, the living power and prime agent of all human perception.
So--as Coleridge described it--poetic creation involves a repetition in the
finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.9
Perhaps the purest enactment of poetic imagination we have reference to
is the process of mythmaking. Although we now use the word myth in
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a wide variety of ways, Im referring here very specifically to the creation

of stories that symbolically express both the inner workings of the psyche
and the outer phenomena of physical life. As Mircea Eliade, Joseph
Campbell and other recent interpreters have revealed to us, the mythic
stories of ancient civilizations and tribal or traditional societies are not
(as so many of us were told in school) pre-scientific anthropomorphic
mumbo-jumbo. Rather, they are ways of conveying--carrying along from
day to day and generation to generation--truths that are too deep and
too complex to be explained in the language of ordinary discourse.
Cultural critic William Irwin Thompson suggests that while history is the
story of the ego of a civilization, myth is the story of its soul. When we
look to the myths of past cultures, we see the ways that lifes indisputable
yet inexplicable forces--from thunder and fire to famine and blizzard to
love and aggression--called forth narrative expressions which spoke not to
the mind but to the heart, and recorded not events but experiences.10 But
mythmaking is by no means in the past. Although we now have (or think
we have!) scientifically satisfying explanations for things like thunder and
fire, we are still making up stories (for example, the Jungian contrasexual
archetype and the Freudian Oedipal complex) to account for such
mysteries as the strange raptures of love and the driving illusions that set
brother against brother, nation against nation.
Our mythmaking today--at least in urban, Western culture--is more subtle
and more abstract than it was among the Paleolithic cave-painters or the
early Greeks or the Yoruba or the Navajo. It is also much more
individualized, because for the most part, we see ourselves now as
individuals rather than as members of a community. So some of our
most important myths are the stories of our own lives. In fact, the
discovery and transformation of ones own mythic story is the
fundamental process taking place in many kinds of psychotherapy.
In those societies where mythmaking was or is a living, communal
process, mythic stories are very often expressed in rituals. The kachinas
of the Hopi, for example, are not merely characters in stories; they
appear to the people in colorful splendor so that the tribe can
experience the presence of the ancestral spirits. And the impressively
costumed dancers who enact the kachinas dont just impersonate them-Page 12 of 24

they become the kachinas while the dance lasts, at least from the
standpoint of identifying in consciousness with the spirits.
The kachina dancers tell stories through movement and song, in a
process common to almost all human societies. This mythic enactment
became very elaborated in cultures like that of ancient Greece, where
ritual was one of the sources of the great classical drama we still study
and perform today, and the dramatization of mythic themes occurred in
the ritual initiations of mystery cults such as those of Dionysus and
Demeter.11 The power of such dramas to deeply affect and even
transform consciousness has been known for millennia, and in more
recent times, it has played a rich part in the activities of esoteric groups
and magical practice.
It is partly for this reason that rituals are felt by many Tarot-readers to
be an important part of the fortune/telling process. In addition to
creating atmosphere, establishing connections and correspondences, and
focusing concentration, rituals add a bit of drama or theater to the
reading, and that can be effective in bringing about a more intense kind
of attention. Rachel Pollack points out that the diviner, like the
magician, experiences the power of encountering the spirits through the
oracle. But unless she or he tells the client something dramatic and
startling, that spiritual encounter may not transfer to the other person.
Not that good readers consciously put on a show, or make up things to
startle people! But I think it is true that many people who find themselves
attracted to Tarot, who choose to make it a significant part of their lives,
do have a sense of theater that expresses itself in the process of working
with the cards. The dramatic quality of a Tarot event can emerge in a
number of ways--through the setting of the scene, for example, or the
pacing of the reading or the phrasing of the story, as tone and language
shift from that of ordinary discourse to that of sacred discourse.
Today, in our secular culture, we generally think of the sacred as
something that belongs to religion (in the narrow, sectarian sense of that
term), and so we see it as something set apart from everyday life. To
understand the nature of the sacred, however, we have to recognize
religion in its largest sense, as an awareness of the numinous (godbearing) dimension of everything around us. The presence of the sacred
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reveals itself to us in what historian of religion Mircea Eliade describes as

a hierophany--the manifestation of something of a wholly different order,
a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an
integral part of our natural profane world.12
For archaic people, hierophanies often took place in the simplest
circumstances, when a rock or a tree was suddenly perceived as a visible
expression of some higher order of reality. Becoming more sophisticated,
humans began to invite hierophanies instead of waiting for the chance
occurrence, and divination--as a means of discovering the will of the
gods--provided just such an invitation. But conventional Western religion
became more and more a matter of orthodoxy and bureaucracy, rather
than direct experience, and so it has been less and less the precinct of
hierophany; as a result, people looking for a glimpse of the sacred are
nowadays likely to look elsewhere: to Pentecostalism, Sufism, Tantra,
channeling, transpersonal psychology, and a host of other possibilities.
At the risk of overreaching (a risk I will be taking more than once in this
book!), I would suggest that one of the places that we may hope for a
hierophany is in Tarot-reading. The sacred is in fact the realm of myth,
and descended from myth is story, which weaves together the fates of
human beings with the truths of the natural world and the numinous
realm. So at its best, the fortune/telling process can present us with an
opening into the sacred. We, however, must invite the opening, sense it,
and be willing to step through.
Needless to say, Im not talking about enlightenment on the order of
Moses and the burning bush or Siddhartha under the bodhi tree. The
rituals of fortune/telling create an opening which is more subtle, more
homey and domesticated perhaps--but powerful nonetheless. This
opening appears when we are able to see our own lives, inner and outer,
our characters and our fortunes, as expressions of the numinous. Mary
Greer puts it beautifully, in her book Tarot Mirrors: Reflections of Personal
Meaning:
The mirror, an ancient symbol, represents our ability to look at
ourselves, to examine our lives, and to see ourselves from another
perspective. Paradoxically, the mirror is also a doorway, an
opening into another world in which reality offers other options.
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Sometimes when moving through such a mirror, the self is refracted

into a spectrum of selves in which we can see many other
possibilities . . . . Just by paying attention, especially with the help
of a magical looking glass, you can begin to see the entire
universe in your own experience.
In fortune/telling, stories describe the pictures in the mirror. Whether
reader or querent, you have only to step through the mirror, into the
story, and you inhabit for a while the sacred space of life imagined.

THE FUTURE FACTOR

Tracey Hoover, editor of Winged Chariot (a small and intermittent
publication that nevertheless had a very significant impact on the
formation of the contemporary Tarot community) provided me with a
wonderful word-picture to begin this section. My initial attraction to the
Tarot was its empowerment, she says. Those mysterious symbols were
seam rippers fraying the veil of the future.
How can we not be attracted to the idea of peering beyond our present
illusions, perhaps into a timeless reality that is unfolding before us? Yet
the general trend today seems to be toward a definition of divination
that doesnt focus on the future. Increasingly in the Tarot community,
the lines between reading for divination and reading for healing (a
topic of the next chapter) or growth (discussed in Chapter 4) are
indistinct at best. The prevailing sentiment is that a Tarot reading
reveals patterns in a persons life, and that these patterns can be
changed through recognition. Negative patterns can be healed, while
positive patterns can be discovered, reinforced, and utilized for growth.
The verb to divine does mean generally to produce information
otherwise hidden, and specifically, to learn the will of the gods. (Hence
the etymological bond of divination and divinity.) This information
may be about anything, past, present, or future. A divining rod, for
example, discovers water or other things presently buried, and divination
is frequently used in traditional cultures to discover who did something in
the past or what is currently afflicting a sick person. But just the same .

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. . the future factor is what really fascinates us, and sets divination
apart from the many other ways of human knowing.
After all, things that have already happened or are currently happening
produce information which is available in ordinary as well as extraordinary
ways. Mysteries of the past and present may be solved by gathering
clues and making deductions, because the information exists in some
literal way; what happened did happen, what is happening is happening.
(So we suppose, anyway.) But as far as can be told, what has yet to
happen doesnt exist. Therefore we cant find out about it in ordinary
ways. Though we may guess or bet or predict or project, we cannot
know, because there is nothing to know.
Or is there?
that?

We believe the future doesnt exist, but why do we believe

In the first place, theres the evidence of our senses. We remember the
past, we perceive the present, but we dont _____ the future. (Theres a
blank there because we dont have a word for future-knowing, and we
dont have a word for it because we dont experience it.) The
Newtonian world view, which is based on our senses and our reasoning
capacity, accordingly tells us that causes must precede effects and
closed systems always tend toward disorder (that is, things get older but
never younger, things break but never get unbroken, and so on). These
are the principal explanations of why time unfolds from past to future.
But the post-Newtonian world view--which not only is not based on our
senses, but often is wildly opposed to sense data--tells us something very
different. In the quantum world, cause-and-effect doesnt necessarily
apply, and time isnt necessarily linear.
Because our systems, processes, and technologies are still based almost
entirely on the mechanical, Newtonian interpretation of the world, we
havent progressed much in our ability to relate to the future. So
although we now have (reasonably) reliable, (mostly) mechanical ways of
doing those past/present things for which divination was once employed-such as finding water, diagnosing illness, and solving crimes--we dont
have any more certain way to determine future events than the Maya did,
or the Homeric Greeks, or the ancient Chinese. This is one of the few

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areas in which we have no new technologies--or even any promising

developments.13
Some evidence suggests there may be a real barrier to our knowing the
future. Noted consciousness researcher Charles Tart reviewed the most
successful parapsychology studies to determine if there was a difference
in the degree of success possible in present-time ESP, and the degree of
success in precognition (future-time ESP). As he explains in Open Mind,
Discriminating Mind, a substantial number of present-time ESP studies
showed ten times as much information transfer as even the better
precognitive ESP studies. Tart believes this may suggest there is a
relationship between ESP and a physical condition--i.e., the condition of
being physically located in the present. But equally important, says Tart,
is the fact that although precognition doesnt work very well, it does work
on some level.
Nevertheless, common sense keeps us asking the question: Is it possible
to know the future? There are, of course, nearly endless anecdotal
reports of predictions coming true and divinatory insights producing
miraculous results. Attempts to validate these stories or analyze them
statistically have been meager at best, however, and one is left to take
them more or less on faith. An alternate--and theoretically more
efficient--strategy is to discover explanatory principles which would make
it theoretically possible for future-knowing to take place, thereby
validating all the anecdotes at a stroke.
Our attempts to develop explanations which fit our known terms, however,
may be inadequate, or even counter-productive. Lama Chime Radha,
Rinpoche, then head of the Tibetan Section of the British Library, offered
this observation in article on divination in traditional Tibet: 14
From the scientific point of view it would of course be possible
and even necessary to explain away the belief in divination and
other magical operations as mere superstitions having no
correspondence with objective reality, and of relevance only to the
social anthropologist. More sympathetic explanations might invoke
the concept of synchronicity, the interconnectedness of all objects
and events in space and time, whereby in states of heightened
awareness it becomes possible to see a world in a grain of sand
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and a heaven in a wild flower. Or one could hypothesize that the

external apparatus of divination, whether it is a crystal ball, the
pattern of cracks in a tortoise shell, or a complex system of
astrology, is essentially a means of focusing and concentrating the
conscious mind so that insights and revelations may arise (or
descend) from the profounder and perhaps supra-individual levels
of the unconscious.
These approaches to understanding divination were covered with some
depth in The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore. But now Id like to go a
bit further. The scientific vision of space-time and the related hypothesis
of synchronicity, the speculations of parapsychology and transpersonal
psychology are intriguing, but as Lama Radha points out, such attempts
at explanation may still fall very far short of correctly connecting mind
and reality:
The Tibetans themselves would certainly regard the visions and
predictions of seers and diviners as mind-created, but then in
accordance with Buddhist philosophy so they would regard
everything that is experienced either subjectively or objectively,
including entities of such seemingly varied degrees of solidity and
independent existence as mountains, trees, other beings, sub-atomic
particles and waves.
The in fact continuity between mind and world, consciousness and
created reality, is still by no means scientifically accepted or even widely
entertained--much less authentically experienced by most of us.
Speculation along these lines is confined to those few scientists with a
philosophical bent and/or an acquaintance with mystical experience.
Thus the science of space-time and the new model of consciousness that
might issue from it remain very abstract.
However, Eastern philosophy,
which has been investigating the space-time continuum for more than a
millennium, brings the concept much closer to our own experience and
our own embodiment. As Peter Barth explains in Piercing the Autumn
Sky: A Guide to Discovering the Natural Freedom of Mind, his delightful-and delightfully brief--guide to Tibetan Buddhist mind training:
exploring the nature of time and space more directly, as present in
our lives, we may begin to discover the vastness of time and space
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itself, the vastness of our human awareness. We may note the

sameness of each moment, or each millionth of a moment, in the
sense that each piece of time or space contains the complete
nature of all of time and space. We are endowed with space and
time itself in the fabric of our being.15
In other words, all that is (or was/will be) is in us. We perceive
differences between time and space, then and now, thought and matter,
me and it not because such things are in fact separate, but because
we are conditioned (physically and mentally) to construct the world in a
certain way.
At our present level of evolution, it is very difficult for most people to
transcend these limitations of perception for any length of time. Various
drugs and certain techniques for achieving ecstatic trance can produce
temporary suspensions of our habitual perception, but the effortful pursuit
of spiritual discipline or mind training is needed to bring about more
lasting alterations. As Barth explains, with careful practice,
rather [than seeing time as] a linear road that we are on, we may
discover what may be called vast time, a time which is inherent in
everything, as eternal, unimpeded dynamism; a source of unlimited
energy. By getting to know this aspect of our minds, by attending
to the dynamic nature of our experience directly, we can actually
begin to enter the dance of vast time itself, with no space between
us and time. The fabrications of past, present, and future
places and selves begin to loosen their grip on us. Experientially,
we realize that the past and future are only projections of our
thoughts, while the present remains an indeterminate state that
cannot be pinned down.
The mind-training disciplines taught by Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, yoga, and
other traditions can eventually produce this expanded relationship with
time. But we dont all have the leisure or the temperament to pursue
these practices intensively (at least in this lifetime). Work with Tarot,
however, can be a surprisingly effective way for almost anyone to bring
something of this experience into her or his life.
My own experience suggests that the ability to sense something of the
future is frequently an aspect of being entirely in the present. A
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complete, serene, and unselfconscious engagement with the given moment

(such as may be experienced during a Tarot reading) actually frees the
mind from habitual projections into the future and allows the future to
reveal itself. The more we cultivate a deep and fluent command of the
cards, as well as an ability to focus concentration, the more likely we are
to find our awareness growing beyond the present.
The practice of meditation is helpful to many people in improving
concentration. By this I dont mean meditation on images, such as one
might do for magical pathworking. I mean regular practice toward
developing greater control of consciousness. This practice can take a
variety of forms, and contrary to widespread assumptions, doesnt have
to involve sitting still for long periods of time! There are active forms of
meditation, including formal practices such as walking meditation in Zen,
as well as participation in centering activities such as craft and sport.
Lawrence LeShans classic book How to Meditate describes four different
kinds of approaches to meditation, and interestingly enough, they
correlate very well with the four suits of Tarot: the path of the intellect
(Swords) involves meditating on the nature of reality and other
philosophical questions; the path of the emotions (Cups) focuses on
feelings of love, praise and worship; the path of the body (Pentacles)
leads through yoga and the martial arts; the path of action (Wands) is
practiced through art and craft.
Meditation can be as simple as practicing mindfulness (continuous
awareness of what the mind is doing) during your normal daily activities.
Mindfulness meditation is very useful in coming to know better the
workings of consciousness, and it will also help in identifying key personal
issues (in the form of obsessive or distorted thought patterns). Both of
these factors can prove very valuable to the Tarot practitioner.
Obviously, the more you understand how consciousness produces for us
constructions of reality, the more you can see through those
constructions to a deeper level of meaning. Also, knowing more clearly
what you own stuff is will help you limit the intrusion of personal issues
when reading the cards for others.
Approached in a more structured way, mindfulness may involve directed
reflections on aspects of emotional and spiritual life. Jack Kornfield, a
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psychotherapist and long-time spiritual seeker, offers a very satisfying

blend of traditional meditation techniques and contemporary issues in his
popular book A Path With Heart. It is filled with stories (the best kind of
teaching!) which beckon toward wholeness, and methods that can take us
some measure along the way. Through mindfulness, Kornfield explains,
we can come to know and reduce the patterns of unhelpful worry and
obsession, we can clarify our confusion and release destructive views and
opinions. We can use conscious thought to reflect more deeply on what
we value.16
Mindfulness can prepare for, include, and/or complement another form of
meditation, which works more directly on the powers of concentration.
This approach to meditation seeks to focus the mind on one point and
develop the ability to maintain that focus over a period of time. A
simple way to begin this practice is to follow your own breathing. Just
place your attention on the rhythmic pattern of inhaling and exhaling,
following the breath in your mind. If other thoughts break in, just let
them drift past and gently return your mind to your breathing. If your
mind wanders, dont get upset with yourself or frustrated; again, just
return to your breath.
Zen Buddhism offers a particular approach to meditation which
emphasizes the discipline of zazen, or sitting. This intensive practice,
says American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, is about breaking our
exclusive identification with ourselves.
The tool we use for this job, she
explains, is attention, and her description of this tool has an interesting
resonance with Tarot:
Attention is the cutting, burning sword, and our practice is to use
that sword as much as we can. None of us is very willing to use
it; but when we do--even for a few minutes--some cutting and
burning takes place. All practice aims to increase our ability to be
attentive, not just in zazen but in every moment of our life. As we
sit we grasp that our conceptual thought process is a fantasy; and
the more we grasp this the more our ability to pay attention to
reality increases.
Swords--the mental suit--summarizes the power of attention and also the
difficulty and discomfort that can go with using it. When we turn the full
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power of attention on ourselves and our own thinking, we often come

face to face with things we had not wanted to recognize.
As Jack Kornfield observes, meditation is an art of opening and letting
go, rather than accumulation or struggle.
But in practice, learning to
let go can turn out to be more difficult than learning new ways to
struggle. Thats why meditation requires patience and commitment, and
why many people are helped by having a teacher to guide their efforts
and offer encouragement. There is an old saying, though, that when the
student is ready, a teacher will be found. Teachers appear in unlikely
places, even within ourselves, so the lack of a teacher need never be a
barrier. Just begin, and the rest will take care of itself, for sooner or
later, meditation rewards practice by transforming the evanescence of the
passing moment into the immensity of the eternal present.

Endnotes:

Divination

I believe that the I Ching is an expression of the Eastern way of imagining, and
as such, is difficult for most Westerners to relate to without a good deal of effort;
the Tarot, on the other hand, resonates strongly with the Western imagination.
Jung himself said of what use to us is the wisdom of the Upanishads or the
insight of Chinese yoga, if we desert the foundations of our own culture as
though they were errors outlived and, like the homeless pirates, settle with
thievish intent on foreign shores? (From The Secret of the Golden Flower.)
2

Perhaps the most surprising revelation was that after a day of reading Tarot at a
fair, I always actually lost around ten pounds of body weight--just as some
mediums are said to do after seances. Although I would regain the weight
overnight, I would lose it again the next day.
3

Leakeys consideration of language and the development of consciouness is

found in Origins Reconsidered, which is co-authored by Roger Lewin. This book,
which revises many of the observations and conclusions contained in his earlier
best-seller Origins, is wonderfully clear and open, and although I believe that
Leakey, like most evolutionary theorists, is caught up in a rather poor paradigm,
his new book provides a fine, humane introduction to contemporary evolutionary
thought.
4

Pagelss speculations can be found in The Dreams of Reason, a fascinating

exploration of complexity and informatino science.

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A third category is concerned with inspiration or personal experience as a

means of divination, such as practiced by oracles and shamans.
6

Bachelard was a philosopher of science as well as a phenomenologist of poetic

consciousness, who undertook an imaginal exploration of the elemental world in
The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Water and Dreams, Air and Songs, and Earth and
the Reveries of Repose. The quote below is taken from The Poetics of Reverie.
If you like French literature, you will love Bachelard; if you dont, you will find his
work uphill going, but generally worth the climb.
7

McKenna makes this remark in an interview contained in Mavericks of the Mind.

An interesting and complementary observation concerning brain structure,
gender, and language forms is offered by Sam Keen in an interview in Timeless
Visions, Healing Voices: For example, when English-speaking men have a
stroke in the area of the brain that controls language, they become aphasic, they
can no longer speak. Whereas women with the same kind of stroke dont
become aphasic. Interestingly, Navaho and Hopi men, like women, also do not
become aphasic. Their language is much more pictorial than ours; it comes out
of a different part of the brain and a different view of reality.
8

Jungian analyst and well-known interpreter of fairy tales Marie-Louise von Franz
suggests (in On Divination and Synchronicity) that to tell is to go through time
in a rhythm--to go on, and on, and on, in the rhythm of the archetypes [which
have] a secret order. . . . They cannot be chained together arbitrarily but in an
infinite sequence of such rhythms.
9

The quotations from Coleridge are from Biographia Literaria. Its very
interesting to note how closely Coleridges nineteenth-century vision of the
imagination coincides with that of todays archetypal psychology and the mystical
school of modern physics. Philips Wheelwrights fine book The Burning
Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism gives a very interesting
overview of Coleridges thought. First published in 1954, and revised and
expanded in 1968, Wheelwrights book is even more interesting now than it was
then, and should engage those concerned with myth, ritual, poetry, symbolism,
and other Tarot-related activities of the imagination. In his analysis of the
operations of the Secondary Imagination, Wheelwright discusses four different
styles or emphases, which (of course!) can be linked to the four Tarot suits:
confrontative imagining (Pentacles) which particularizes and intensifies its
object; stylistic imagining (Swords) which distances and reveals its object;
compositive imagining (Cups) which creates unity from diversity; and
archetypal imagining (Wands) which sees through the particular to the
universal.
10

In the study of myth and literature, the seasonal cycle is widely viewed as an
important structure underlying all kinds of narratives. Seasons, in their varied
shapes and colorations, seem to provide the inspiration for the most basic mythic
themes: birth and rebirth, death and change, loss and triumph. Our oldest and
most familiar literary genres--tragedy, comedy, epic, and lyric--derive from this
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mythic background, transforming the archetypes of the seasons into

characteristic narrative forms. Its interesting to look at the Tarot from this point
of view, considering which suits and trumps correspond with spring or winter, and
so on. (For example, I think the trump sequence begins in summer and ends in
spring; see what youthink.)
11

This is a very compressed and informal treatment of the relationship between

myth, ritual, and drama--a relationship which has long been the topic of spirited
debate among scholars. For a more substantive overview, see ??
12

In The Sacred and the Profane (??). Eliades works are all of potential interest
to the student of myth and Tarot, but see especially this book, Myth and Reality,
Cosmos and History, and Patterns of Primitive Religion.
13

David Loye--Sphinx and the Rainbow

14

In Oracles and Divination, edited by Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacker

(Shamghala, 1981).
15

Barths description of spacetime sounds very much like the scientific

description of a hologram--an image created by patterns of light interference in
such a way that the whole is contained in every piece, no matter how small the
piece. The interesting thing about holographic images is that they appear threedimensional when viewed from certain angles, and they can change as the
viewing angle changes. These unusual characteristics have made the hologram
a widely used paradigm for understanding everything from the structure of the
brain to the nature of the universe. See Michael Talbots The Holographic
Universe for a terrific overview.
16

Kornfield also talks about a second, deeper layer of mindfulness practice: In

meditation we can reconnect with our heart and discover an inner sense of
spaciousness, unity, and compassion underneath all the convlicts of thought.
The approach which Kornfield presents is a Westernized version of vipassana
called Insight Meditation.

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