Divination
Every time someone finds out I work with divination, one of two things happens. Either they laugh with that smile that says “how charming, the crazy guy,” or they go into test mode: “Oh, so you must know who I am. Tell me something.”
The second one fascinates me. It’s like meeting an architect at a dinner party and saying: “Oh, you’re an architect. Draw up the plans for my house right now, here, on this napkin.” The architect doesn’t carry blueprints around. They need the commission, the time, the tools, and the site. Divination works the same way. It’s not a faucet you turn on when someone challenges you in conversation. It’s work. With its conditions, its tools, and its limits.
Before you ask me if I know who you are, read this.
* * *
The Oldest Art in the World
Before there was writing, before there were cities, there was someone in the group people turned to. The shaman, the person of knowledge. When food ran scarce and the group didn’t know which way to go, they went to them. They laid out the problem with minimal details. The shaman opened their tools and pointed the way. A specific day. A specific place.
It worked. And that’s why it kept working. Not out of blind faith. Because it delivered results that couldn’t be obtained any other way.
The Chinese turned this into a complete philosophical system. The I Ching was not entertainment. It was the foundation for decisions of government, war, and harvest. As Marie-Louise von Franz recounts, around 1960 Mao weighed what to offer the population to ease tensions: more rice or returning the I Ching. The answer was unanimous. Spiritual nourishment, for the Chinese, outweighed the physical.
The Oracle of Delphi was not a tourist attraction. It was a governing tool. The Greeks didn’t make important decisions without consulting it. Neither did the Romans, the Egyptians, or virtually any civilization that has ever existed. Divination is not a marginal footnote in human history. It’s a constant. What’s unusual, in perspective, is the last couple of centuries in which the West decided all of that was superstition.
What hasn’t changed throughout all that time is the underlying question: how is it possible that it works?
* * *
How It Works
The question nobody answers well is this: why does it work?
Not “how do you use tarot.” Any little booklet that comes inside the box explains that. The real question is what’s happening when a card falls and it’s exactly what you needed to see.
The answer has to do with how we understand time. In the West, time is linear: past, present, future in a single file. One cause, one effect. That’s useful for getting around, but it’s not the only way to understand reality.
Classical Chinese thought, the same tradition behind the I Ching, doesn’t ask why something happened. It asks what is happening simultaneously at a given moment. Time not as a line but as a field. And in that field, all information, what was, what is, and what is coming, coexists simultaneously. The patterns are there. Divination reads them.
Symbolic systems, cards, bones, runes, are interfaces. Vocabularies designed to translate those patterns into something the human mind can work with. They’re not magical in themselves. They’re tools.
And here’s what almost nobody says.
The answer to a question doesn’t arrive through a single channel. The cards are one. The reader’s direct perception, what they see and feel without it being written on any card, is another. And in some cases, external intelligences act on the process: on how the reading falls, on what information comes through and how. This explains why two readers with the same deck can give completely different results to the same question.
The reader takes all of that, filters it, and unifies it. The difference between a reader who knows what they’re doing and one who doesn’t is exactly there: in distinguishing which channel is which, and not confusing their own internal noise with real information.
* * *
The Systems
Not all systems say the same things in the same way.
Tarot is the broadest. Its 78 cards are divided into two groups. The Major Arcana speak of major events, the forces that drive entire situations. The Minor Arcana speak of everyday detail. Together they give a complete picture, but they require more time working with the system to use well.
The systems derived from the traditional Romani deck are several. Two of the most common are the Zigeuner and the Lenormand. Fewer cards, more direct vocabulary. They speak of love, money, enemies, influences, health, the territory of everyday life. They’re more immediate in their responses. And even though their vocabulary is more concrete, in the hands of someone who knows them well, they can answer questions at any level.
They’re different tools for different questions. Like a road map and a subway map. Both tell you how to get there, but they’re not interchangeable.
* * *
Can You Know Everything at Any Given Moment?
No.
And any reader who tells you otherwise is lying, selling you something, or both at once.
Divination has conditions. The first is the question. A divination system works with symbolic vocabulary, and that vocabulary is limited. A vague question produces a vague answer. Not because the system fails, but because you’ve given the wrong coordinates to someone trying to find something in the dark. Without precise data, what comes up are imprecise answers that are useless to you.
The second is the reader’s state. Emotions contaminate readings. A reader with a personal stake in the outcome is no longer reading: they’re projecting. And if they keep doing repeat readings because they don’t like what they see, they’re opening the door to something worse. When someone keeps asking the same question over and over looking for whoever will tell them what they want to hear, something shifts. The answers become confused. Or worse: they tell you exactly what you wanted to hear. You make the mistake. And the consequences follow. I’ve seen it enough times not to consider it coincidence.
The third is timing. Not everything is readable at every moment. Some questions have no answer yet because what you’re asking about hasn’t taken shape. The pattern doesn’t exist yet. Pushing harder doesn’t make it appear.
* * *
Can You Predict the Future?
It depends on what you mean by predict.
If predict means knowing with absolute certainty what’s going to happen, with a date, name, and full details, the answer is no. Always. Anyone selling you that is lying.
If predict means reading the tendency, the flow, where a situation is heading based on where it stands now, then yes. That’s exactly what these systems were designed for. Not to freeze the future but to read it while it’s still forming.
That’s what the system does. But there’s another layer. A reader with direct perception can go beyond what the cards show, not as tendency but as concrete vision. I’ve seen complete scenarios, situations with precise details, that later unfolded exactly as they appeared. As fact. That doesn’t come from the symbolic system alone. It comes from the combination of tool, perception, and what operates through the reader when the conditions are right.
* * *
Self-Knowledge, Sure. Divination, Something Else.
In recent years it’s become fashionable to explain divination in purely psychological terms. Tarot as a mirror of the unconscious. Cards as a tool for self-knowledge. Reading as a therapeutic process. All wrapped up in the concept of “evolutionary tarot,” which sounds great and sells great.
The problem is that it reduces a tool for reading reality to an exercise in introspection. Yes, the cards can prompt reflection. Yes, sometimes what appears in a reading connects with something internal you needed to see. But that’s a side effect, not the function. It’s like using a handsaw to cut a dress pattern. Technically it cuts. But that’s not what it’s for.
Divination wasn’t born to help you know yourself better. It was born to obtain information you couldn’t obtain any other way. And that’s still its function, regardless of how convenient it is to dress it up in psychological language to make it seem more acceptable.
* * *
How to Tell if the Person in Front of You Knows What They’re Doing
First sign: cold reading. This happens when someone sits across from you, observes you, listens to what you tell them, and builds an interpretation from what they see and deduce. Without opening anything. Without a tool. Just opinion dressed up as a reading. Any reasonably attentive person can spot it, unless they arrive desperate and ready to believe anything. And there’s the problem: desperation is a bad reader’s best ally.
Second sign: the instant curse. The moment they sit down, before opening a single card, they already know someone has put a hex on you, that there’s dark magic at work, that they see someone who hates you. Without you having asked anything. That’s not a reading. It’s the hook for the next service, which always costs more.
Third sign: emotional tone. The bad reader does one of two things: either they dramatize until you leave terrified, or they sweeten a situation you already know is completely messed up, so you leave feeling good and come back. The good reader is more neutral. They open, look, explain what they see. They give you a clear perspective and something to work with. Not fear, not euphoria. Information. The decision is always yours.
There are many more signs, but those three are enough to get your bearings. The rest would fill another article.
* * *
Why It Isn’t Taken Seriously
There are two reasons, and both have concrete culprits.
The first is the market. Anyone can buy a deck on Amazon, read the little booklet inside, and the next day they “read tarot.” There’s no other profession where this would be acceptable. A doctor needs years of training. So does an electrician. But a deck with an instruction manual and you’re a reader. The result is a market saturated with charlatans playing amateur psychologist while reading body language. That’s not divination. It’s cheap mentalism with a deck of cards.
The second is the textbook skeptic, the one who dismisses it without having studied or practiced it. The same person who later, in private, checks Monday’s horoscope “out of curiosity.” Von Franz noted it decades ago: even the most hardcore rationalist has their private methods for consulting what they can’t control. They deny it in public and practice it in private. What’s unusual isn’t divination. What’s unusual is pretending it doesn’t exist while you keep using it.
* * *
What Is It Actually Good For?
Divination is as valid a tool as any other for making decisions in moments of uncertainty. Until two hundred years ago it was the method on which decisions of government, war, and harvest were based. We made it this far. It can’t be that bad.
Once it was the diviners. Now it’s the psychologists, the consultants, the coaches. At the core it’s the same thing: we look for information to know where we’re headed. The difference is that divination obtains information that has always been there, at the level where rational analysis doesn’t reach. Information about what moves beneath the surface, which no other system can read because no other system knows where to look.
It’s not the only system. It’s not the best for everything. But combined with others, it’s the complement that gives you the broadest possible perspective.
With those premises, the question is no longer whether it works. The question is finding the system that fits what you need and someone who knows how to use it.
