The audio version, if you'd prefer to read along.
I don't love the deck I drew. It's not mine. I prefer Rider-Waite, but whatever. That's a discussion for another post. This was my first draw: Reversed The Magician, Death, and Reversed Four of Swords.
Looking at that picture, thinking about what I'm doing – this is stupid. You no doubt think this is stupid. But in a little head-break I took to let my mind wander before focusing intensely on writing this second part, I read some advice from John Steinbeck. Which is funny – because I don't like his work, but his The Grapes of Wrath definitely set the foundation for how my work with Rob is as much essays about the past and the present and where the future is headed as it is a narrative. Maybe (and this is very likely) I decided to take on this difficult and unrewarding style because I hated his attempt at it so much I had to prove to myself and anyone like me that it's possible to do well.
Still not sure I've done that.
Anyway, one of his tidbits of advice is to not think about your audience as you're writing. So maybe I'm wrong – maybe you find this as fascinating as I did. Only one way to find out. Sort of.
It shouldn't be to test just how fascinating you find it by meandering as far from it as I can without losing your interest.
There are probably an infinite number of ways to read Tarot. Any of you reading this who actually know what you're looking at are probably going to be frustrated with me. The rest of you are probably also going to be frustrated with me. Because we're doing this the hard way – the way I did it.
I learned to read a three-card setup something like this: from left to right you're reading the Past, Present, and Future of whatever question you're asking. Now— I don't ask questions. In fact, I actually drew because I was thinking about you, Listener, and I was thinking about how I would try to tell this story to you if I drew this morning instead of making coffee and listening to someone say something that would annoy me. And I was thinking about probabilities. And about how I wouldn't know whether it meant anything significant if I drew from the deck without shuffling.
And then I was thinking about what it means that my hands get tingly while I'm shuffling. That's how I know it's time to draw: my hands get half-numb like I'm holding something that's vibrating very rapidly. Right as I started to wonder how I would articulate that feeling and impress upon you that to me it is very real, whether there is any reason for it, any mechanistic reason like that my hands are more full of blood because of the unusual activity of shuffling or that my carpel tunnels are pinching because of same—
It ultimately didn't matter. Because my hands were full-on numb when I pulled the cards out of their little box.
If I were trying to be dramatic, I would say that I felt as compelled to drop them like they were hot as I did to draw them at all. That isn't true. But I did put them down immediately and draw the first three cards. Which you have seen: Reversed The Magician, Death, and Reversed Four of Swords.
You don't have to read reversals. Not every Reader does. They double the complexity of any read, which— If you remember me talking about how any word has an infinitude of possible meanings, then you will understand Tarot a little better when I say that I treat the cards like Words. An image is 1000 words, we can agree on that. And each Tarot image is coded with particular words. Rather than trying to decode the infinitely infinitely complex imagery, I focus on the words and their synonyms and those meanings.
Because that's what you're doing when you're Divining.
Let's talk about that. I've avoided it because a definition wasn't going to help either of us before now.
Divination is literally the act of trying to understand the mind of the Divine. From dictionary.com: the practice of attempting to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge by occult or supernatural means; augury; prophecy; perception by intuition, instinctive foresight.
We'll probably dive into my actual reading by Part 5. These are things I've needed to talk about in a meaningfully systematic way for a while.
I've mentioned many times that I have adopted for myself a hybrid worldview that tries to replicate the way ancients saw their reality. Maybe I haven't. I know I've talked about the Esoteric worldview. And then again, maybe I haven't. Maybe I haven't written about what that means adequately enough that either of us really knows what I mean.
I can't speak to Eastern magick. The religious and philosophical traditions east of the Indus River are known by me; some of them even pretty well. But the magickal traditions I am almost entirely ignorant of. I am aware of Japanese folk magick in the way that anyone who has ever caught a passing glimpse at anime like InuYasha is, and in that way I may as well be entirely ignorant.
I'm aware that this sounds and even to me feels antithetical with my sense that I at least partially grasp Buddhism and Taoism. But I have to push on or I'll get caught up in the minutia of defending a potentially erroneous throwaway statement.
The ancient magick tradition which has survived in the West comes to us from Egypt – from the deepest, darkest, secretest and maybe most salacious parts of Egypt's occulted past. I don't know why we call the collection of works attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth – and then later to Hermes by the Greeks, when they translated the god's name to one they were more familiar with – Esoterica. I haven't even read all of it.
It's weird. When I read so much ancient philosophy, I find myself nodding along like I already know it. Which is maybe a me problem? Or maybe I really was involved in recording it in another life like my imagination wants to insist is the case. Are past lives possible? I don't know – they feel possible. They also feel improbable. What does it mean that there are seven billion people in the world? Are any of them first-time lives? You'd think it would have to be the case. Not sure, but I know this isn't the place I want to talk about it.
Really what I think it means is that I've already had too many of these thoughts independently to have waited this long to try to codify them.
The Esoteric tradition is not religion as we know it today. I think that's why I struggle with this and I just kind of talk about it like because I know what I mean talking about it at all is good enough. There's so much groundwork that needs to be laid. Anyway— Religion, the history of thought alone, is a long and complex story. By the time the Esoterica was written down, the traditions of thought encoded in it were probably already thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. (You know, like the Bible – the authors of which were educated and trained in Egypt's Esoteric tradition or by people who were)
It's very possible. Anything is possible.
The past is Schrodinger's Box: anything could have happened until we observe what did. Can we observe what did? Rob says there's a way and that he's doing it when he talks to me – observing his past first-hand again. But that's... not what I'm here to talk about today.
There are a lot of little aphorisms that sum up the Esoteric worldview. And I'm not really here to talk about that. It's necessary that we understand a few things, and that you understand that I think about what reality is in a different way than you do because of the Esoteric worldview. Without quoting chunks of scripture, let's try to get out of this quickly with just two ideas: the first is that every level of reality, from the smallest proto-particle to the largest heavenly body, is exactly the same in every way as every other. As above, so below. Not only is everything connected, but everything is on parallel planes of sameness.
What does this mean, as an example? It means that every grain of sand is the same as every desert. It means that every federal government is the same as every state government, every local government, every student government – in fundamental ways. It means that the same thoughts and feelings that dictate your actions dictate the actions of every human and every other living being in the potential universe. It means that if there is a god, it thinks and feels and acts just the same as we do – only at a plane of existence very different from ours in that it is exactly the same.
It means that if you strip anything down to its basest elements, it is the same as everything else. Lowest Common Denominator Thinking, you might say.
This is the foundation of alchemy, as well: reduce anything to its basest elements and you should be able to manipulate its development and complexification – because everything tends toward complexity.
But I'm way ahead of myself again. Let's back up a few steps.
Reality is a series of mirrors reflecting one another.
Sometimes the result is an incomprehensible jumble of partial and apparently unique images – but if you look at it from just the right angle, you can see the corridors of sameness.
The other important thing to know about the Esoteric worldview is that at its core is the belief, the interpretation of reality, that the material universe is the Mind of God. It also requires an assumption that the question of Is There a God is not worth asking – of course there is; how could there not? How could the universe still be interesting and worth observing and understanding and questioning at all if there is no God from which it sprung for us to ask these questions of and to?
This isn't – these aren't, I suppose – questions of opinion or artistic license. They are sincere questions asked by sincere people. And I would ask you if you doubt the existence of something which we can only call GOD because ineffability by any name is as good as any other: how is there beauty in your world if you cannot look at Creation and see in it the the careful and deliberate touch of a Mind, a Presence, and Intellect greater than yours?
This thing that we call material reality is, from this perspective, the dream of that Mniversal Mind, and we are all of us individual expressions of It as it experiences itself in its slumber.
Quantum physics agrees with the Esoteric tradition, by the way – before you want to scoff. And I don't mean woo-woo Quantum Physics, either, the kind you'll find in the mouth of people like Deepak Chopra – that is, people who don't understand Quantum Physics even a little bit. That's largely because Physics as a field came into being because Occult-trained mathematicians wanted to prove their forbidden and heretical beliefs were more than interesting superstitions but the very factual mechanics with which the world and the universe in which it floats are made.
I'm on another tangent – I can't seem to get to what I want to get to, and that's okay; I need to get to all of this – but we have such a high opinion of Science, when the men who laid its foundations were all fucking wizards. And I mean stars and moons on their pointy hats and robes. All of them. The best of the best minds of the world are and have been wizards since men were first allowed to glimpse the mysteries of Religion. (Those mysteries, by the way, were hidden in the women's caves, originally.) But that's Rob's story to tell, not mine.
So if we are a god dreaming about itself, it stands to reason that we should be able to affect the world with our thoughts – our immaterial Wills. You know, like how you can change a dream when you learn how to lucid dream.
Which— Lucid dreaming, as it turns out, is what life is most like. And we can – affect it, that is, with our Wills.
I don't need to be Aleister Crowley (who shamelessly ripped off Thoth/Hermes-Trismegistus with all his talk of the Will like it was his unique IP) (also, we really have to talk about how you can't own an intellectual property because thoughts aren't real estate and you can't gatekeep where people go with their thoughts. But that's another post for a much different time.) (Why do I do this? I'm going to lose all of you with all these insane ramblings. It's the drugs – it's gotta be. Tell yourself that and push on. I promise, it's worth it.) Um...
I don't need to be Aleister Crowley for you to believe that your thoughts can change reality.
We've already discussed ad nauseam how the Millennial and later generations are increasingly Spiritual but not Religious – and looking for something to fill that Religion Hole Post-Modern Materialism carved out of their lives. And I've railed at length against pseudo-psychological demagogues who would sell to you ideas such as self-love and the power of positivity and visualization and manifestation. All of these things are what I'm talking about – but they're corporatized versions, falsifications.
These versions of what I'm about to tell you, they rely on your personal ignorance of the truth of how they work to keep you coming back for more. Right? So, like how a gas station works – you don't enjoy the whole process of fueling your vehicle, but you still fuel your vehicle – because you can't get there yourself: you need the vehicle, and you need the gas. In that way, if you're going to keep your false positivity and you're going to continue manifesting affirmation, these writers and thinkers, these demagogues, need you to keep coming back to them to find what you think you don't generate for yourself.
I'm not making this argument, but it's the same argument people make for why we should trip DMT and consume THC rather than drink alcohol: they're chemicals our bodies are already making or which they already want to consume instead of a poison.
Basically what I'm saying is this: ride a bike or walk; and think for yourself. And let me show you how to do the latter.
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