Divination, as a method of envisioning our potential futures, is different from straight fortune-telling, even though some use the terms interchangeably. The difference is one of intention and our presumed ability to take action to affect outcomes. Divination, literally, is to be inspired by the gods (or some other omniscient power, like the natural world) to gain insight into the truth of a current situation (“soothsaying”), as well as the likely future(s) that might result. This is done to guide our decisions and actions. It is not about discovering an inevitable fate. In this sense, divination is an aesthetic act--a way to gain a degree of control over the seemingly random events of life by giving them meaning.
Some of the most famous stories about divination mislead us about its true uses. For Macbeth and Oedipus, for example, the divination performed by the witches and the Greek oracles offers what look like impossible statements of fortune that at first make the characters overconfident, and in the case of Macbeth, willing to commit murder. The drama in both cases is watching the stories unravel to show that even the impossible predictions were unavoidable truths after all. This sort of divine detective-story has fascinated audiences again and again, a clever narrative genre that has its own aesthetic rewards, but it is not at all what everyday divination is about.
Divination usually includes a process of uncovering the portentous signs latent in random events. Mechanisms for generating random signs can include laying out an array of tarot cards, throwing coins for an I Ching reading, reading smoke, wax drippings, or patterns in tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, counting flower petals, or, in older times, discovering the arrangement of the insides of an animal. The mechanisms are almost endless. Natural phenomena such as weather, flight paths of birds, and, especially, astronomical events are also particularly valued as sources of divine signals. It is through such random acts that it is presumed that the gods can speak to us. A more down-to-earth but still spiritually infused explanation is that we naturally impose our subconscious influence over the physical world. We (or the gods) influence which side of the coin turns up, which tarot card is drawn from the deck, which flower we pick, or the shape taken by wax poured from a candle into a bowl of water. Some Tibetan Buddhists believe that the world is created in the mind, but even non-buddhists harbor beliefs that the mind influences what happens in the material word. Sports fans’ magical thinking can make them believe that they must watch a game to help their favorite team win.
Many otherwise traditionally rational people appreciate divination, even if they do not accept it with blind faith. This is because it works in ways that have little to do with conversing with gods. Divination practices provide a structure that allows us to use our creativity and intuition to interpret the state of our world by considering how a sign or symbol might indicate truths about our current lives and potential futures. Divination, which begins with a question to stimulate the process, helps us to create the story that lets us make sense of our life. It encourages us to reflect about the turbulent present, with its many confluent forces, gives us a structure in which to tame it, and then a direction to consider the outcomes that might make narrative sense of this complexity and guidance toward a justified outcome.
Consider a typical Tarot card reading. The core of a deck of Tarot cards are the 22 cards known as the “major arcana,” the ones that depict an archetypal character, force, or situation (the Sun, Moon, King, Emperor, Empress, Death, Justice, Lovers, etc.). In response to a question, each of these symbolizes a category of task, goal, and potential risk, but also an attitude toward life, which together helps one envision an answer or set of potential answers to the question. The major arcana have been used for centuries, and have been interpreted in both mystical and psychological terms (most effectively, in Jungian terms), but also in simpler dramatic terms--as key elements of a basic narrative, typically one centered on a journey. But nearly any narrative can be seen in terms of a journey, including those of internal struggle or growth, which are journeys of knowledge growth. (See Learning is an Aesthetic Experience.) The remaining cards, the minor arcana, which resemble the common numbered cards of a modern poker deck, are sometimes ignored, but also have symbolic importance in providing tone or means to the narrative. Most consider these as an historically later addition to the core, Major Arcana.
The reader, either an individual doing a self-reading, or a person reading for a friend or client, lays out the “spread”--and arrangement of cards that gives each card a different influence in the reading. There are many popular spreads, and the choice is up to the reader, perhaps depending on their level of experience in using it. Each requires a slightly different brand of symbolic thinking, and practice helps. The Celtic Cross is one of the most popular layouts, but others have similar components. All are based on helping to answer a question, not providing a general statement of the future or current conditions. In the Celtic Cross, the first and central card is the Significator (literally, the one who creates significance or meaning), or the question asker who we will assume is you. The second card is the Crosser, laid across the first, and represents the person or thing that is opposing you. Note the narrative already forming with just two cards--we have a person with a question, you, and a conflicting force. The next two cards describe the present, Foundation, or the motivation for the question, and the Recent Past, the most immediately pertinent backstory. Only in the 5th and 6th cards does the future come into the picture--the Crown, or significant issues that may only now be emerging, and the Future, what lies ahead. Cards seven, eight, and nine come back to the present, current emotional states, external forces, and hopes or desires. Not until the 10th card do we come to the Outcome. But it is not a predetermined outcome, just one that is likely based on the current path and influences. It is an outcome ripe to change if that is what you want.
The Tarot cards in each position of the layout, whether divinely chosen or a random occurrence, can trigger surprising revelations through their potent archetypal symbolism. Aided either by any of the many published guidebooks or by the developed connoisseurship of a seasoned Tarot reader, almost anyone can recognize elements of truth about their present situation, and twinges of excitement or concern about the future. This is a human reaction, and an aesthetic experience--the process of reaching a satisfying culmination through a concerted analysis of an indeterminate situation (the triggering question). (See What Makes and Experience Aesthetic.)
The I Ching, another very old (perhaps older) but still very popular system of divination, offers another approach, but contains many of the same core elements. An I Ching reader, in this case most often an individual performing his or her own reading, first asks a question or considers an upcoming event or just the day or week ahead. The reader then throws three coins six times to determine the whether each of the six lines of a vertically stacked hexagram is either solid or broken. The result is a potential of 64 hexagrams, made up of an upper and lower trigram symbolically named for the archetypal forms of Lake, Fire, Wind, Earth, Mountain, Water, Thunder, Heaven. The I Ching is itself a book of interpretations of these 64 hexagrams, filled with wisdom about the changing nature of life and the virtue of qualities like modesty, restraint, perseverance, patience, tolerance, balance and independence. In fact, the title “I Ching” can be translated as the Book of Changes, viewing life as transient and composed of a series of decisions leading to either successful or dangerous outcomes. A reading helps the reader to take a coherent outlook toward a question about the present or future by consider how things have changed and will change.
Myriad other forms of divination with much less structure and bodies of literature exist in every culture. Any random event, particularly dramatic ones like natural disasters or powerful forces of nature, are felt as omens an open to interpretation. A list of other random, but purposefully generated, outcomes was provided above. Some require a visual imagination to find symbols in abstract shapes like clouds, smoke, and tea leaves. Others require discernment into how passages of words, found perhaps by flipping through a text or overheard from passing strangers, can be interpreted to provide answers to a current situation.
Science was invented to replace practices like divination for foretelling events. It is based on rigorous and systematic observations of cause and effect, and determinedly works to avoid creative interpretation. Yet tremendous amounts of data are generated by scientific or pseudo-scientific studies for which solid theoretical foundations are lacking, or which contain suspect causal assumptions that can mislead interpretation. In the end, much of what is offered as scientifically sound, particularly in these days of big data, may be considered a modern form of divination.
To summarize, divination is a set of methods to:
Some of the most famous stories about divination mislead us about its true uses. For Macbeth and Oedipus, for example, the divination performed by the witches and the Greek oracles offers what look like impossible statements of fortune that at first make the characters overconfident, and in the case of Macbeth, willing to commit murder. The drama in both cases is watching the stories unravel to show that even the impossible predictions were unavoidable truths after all. This sort of divine detective-story has fascinated audiences again and again, a clever narrative genre that has its own aesthetic rewards, but it is not at all what everyday divination is about.
Divination usually includes a process of uncovering the portentous signs latent in random events. Mechanisms for generating random signs can include laying out an array of tarot cards, throwing coins for an I Ching reading, reading smoke, wax drippings, or patterns in tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, counting flower petals, or, in older times, discovering the arrangement of the insides of an animal. The mechanisms are almost endless. Natural phenomena such as weather, flight paths of birds, and, especially, astronomical events are also particularly valued as sources of divine signals. It is through such random acts that it is presumed that the gods can speak to us. A more down-to-earth but still spiritually infused explanation is that we naturally impose our subconscious influence over the physical world. We (or the gods) influence which side of the coin turns up, which tarot card is drawn from the deck, which flower we pick, or the shape taken by wax poured from a candle into a bowl of water. Some Tibetan Buddhists believe that the world is created in the mind, but even non-buddhists harbor beliefs that the mind influences what happens in the material word. Sports fans’ magical thinking can make them believe that they must watch a game to help their favorite team win.
Many otherwise traditionally rational people appreciate divination, even if they do not accept it with blind faith. This is because it works in ways that have little to do with conversing with gods. Divination practices provide a structure that allows us to use our creativity and intuition to interpret the state of our world by considering how a sign or symbol might indicate truths about our current lives and potential futures. Divination, which begins with a question to stimulate the process, helps us to create the story that lets us make sense of our life. It encourages us to reflect about the turbulent present, with its many confluent forces, gives us a structure in which to tame it, and then a direction to consider the outcomes that might make narrative sense of this complexity and guidance toward a justified outcome.
Consider a typical Tarot card reading. The core of a deck of Tarot cards are the 22 cards known as the “major arcana,” the ones that depict an archetypal character, force, or situation (the Sun, Moon, King, Emperor, Empress, Death, Justice, Lovers, etc.). In response to a question, each of these symbolizes a category of task, goal, and potential risk, but also an attitude toward life, which together helps one envision an answer or set of potential answers to the question. The major arcana have been used for centuries, and have been interpreted in both mystical and psychological terms (most effectively, in Jungian terms), but also in simpler dramatic terms--as key elements of a basic narrative, typically one centered on a journey. But nearly any narrative can be seen in terms of a journey, including those of internal struggle or growth, which are journeys of knowledge growth. (See Learning is an Aesthetic Experience.) The remaining cards, the minor arcana, which resemble the common numbered cards of a modern poker deck, are sometimes ignored, but also have symbolic importance in providing tone or means to the narrative. Most consider these as an historically later addition to the core, Major Arcana.
The reader, either an individual doing a self-reading, or a person reading for a friend or client, lays out the “spread”--and arrangement of cards that gives each card a different influence in the reading. There are many popular spreads, and the choice is up to the reader, perhaps depending on their level of experience in using it. Each requires a slightly different brand of symbolic thinking, and practice helps. The Celtic Cross is one of the most popular layouts, but others have similar components. All are based on helping to answer a question, not providing a general statement of the future or current conditions. In the Celtic Cross, the first and central card is the Significator (literally, the one who creates significance or meaning), or the question asker who we will assume is you. The second card is the Crosser, laid across the first, and represents the person or thing that is opposing you. Note the narrative already forming with just two cards--we have a person with a question, you, and a conflicting force. The next two cards describe the present, Foundation, or the motivation for the question, and the Recent Past, the most immediately pertinent backstory. Only in the 5th and 6th cards does the future come into the picture--the Crown, or significant issues that may only now be emerging, and the Future, what lies ahead. Cards seven, eight, and nine come back to the present, current emotional states, external forces, and hopes or desires. Not until the 10th card do we come to the Outcome. But it is not a predetermined outcome, just one that is likely based on the current path and influences. It is an outcome ripe to change if that is what you want.
The Tarot cards in each position of the layout, whether divinely chosen or a random occurrence, can trigger surprising revelations through their potent archetypal symbolism. Aided either by any of the many published guidebooks or by the developed connoisseurship of a seasoned Tarot reader, almost anyone can recognize elements of truth about their present situation, and twinges of excitement or concern about the future. This is a human reaction, and an aesthetic experience--the process of reaching a satisfying culmination through a concerted analysis of an indeterminate situation (the triggering question). (See What Makes and Experience Aesthetic.)
The I Ching, another very old (perhaps older) but still very popular system of divination, offers another approach, but contains many of the same core elements. An I Ching reader, in this case most often an individual performing his or her own reading, first asks a question or considers an upcoming event or just the day or week ahead. The reader then throws three coins six times to determine the whether each of the six lines of a vertically stacked hexagram is either solid or broken. The result is a potential of 64 hexagrams, made up of an upper and lower trigram symbolically named for the archetypal forms of Lake, Fire, Wind, Earth, Mountain, Water, Thunder, Heaven. The I Ching is itself a book of interpretations of these 64 hexagrams, filled with wisdom about the changing nature of life and the virtue of qualities like modesty, restraint, perseverance, patience, tolerance, balance and independence. In fact, the title “I Ching” can be translated as the Book of Changes, viewing life as transient and composed of a series of decisions leading to either successful or dangerous outcomes. A reading helps the reader to take a coherent outlook toward a question about the present or future by consider how things have changed and will change.
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| Photo by Ross Griff, Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 |
Myriad other forms of divination with much less structure and bodies of literature exist in every culture. Any random event, particularly dramatic ones like natural disasters or powerful forces of nature, are felt as omens an open to interpretation. A list of other random, but purposefully generated, outcomes was provided above. Some require a visual imagination to find symbols in abstract shapes like clouds, smoke, and tea leaves. Others require discernment into how passages of words, found perhaps by flipping through a text or overheard from passing strangers, can be interpreted to provide answers to a current situation.
Science was invented to replace practices like divination for foretelling events. It is based on rigorous and systematic observations of cause and effect, and determinedly works to avoid creative interpretation. Yet tremendous amounts of data are generated by scientific or pseudo-scientific studies for which solid theoretical foundations are lacking, or which contain suspect causal assumptions that can mislead interpretation. In the end, much of what is offered as scientifically sound, particularly in these days of big data, may be considered a modern form of divination.
To summarize, divination is a set of methods to:
- Understand the present through interpretations of random outcomes.
- Consider our lives as a coherent, well conceived narrative, following established paths of wisdom, some of which were established centuries ago.
- Help us make decisions that will lead to positive outcomes, based on analysis of the forces at work in our current situations, including our own motivations.
- Enhance our agency by providing the confidence to make good choices.
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