Symbolic Interaction Between the Lenormand and Tarot
As explained earlier, the tarot is a mystical communication with the Anima Mundi, encoding the symbols used by occultists to communicate with her since ancient times. Or, more likely, those symbols were deliberately introduced when the tarot was repurposed from a card game to a magical tool of divination.
But when we look at the images on the Petit Lenormand, we find very little reflection of Fludd’s Mirror of Nature. At least at first. We can impose some obvious associations with astrological symbols on the cards. For example, 34–Fish can be associated with Pisces. And the astrological associations of 31–Sun and 32–Moon are self-explanatory. But the two symbol systems do not fit together as nicely as the tarot fits with astrology; there is a lot more blending of symbols and clearly little in the way of conscious, deliberate alignment with the Mirror of Nature.
There are obvious and not-so-obvious reasons for this. The most obvious reason is that the thirty-six cards of the Lenormand were not invented by an occultist. Neither were the twenty-two cards of the major arcana, but occultists took it upon themselves to stick their fingers in that particular pot and stir. And those occultists were well-educated men and women, some of them with rather a lot of money. Those who repurposed the Petit Lenormand for its current divinatory uses (the original use of the card game for divination is much less elaborate than current practices) were not well educated in the same sense. They probably hadn’t read Homer in the original Greek or spent a year traveling the continent with their father’s money. I’m not saying they were illiterate, or even impoverished, but they were educated by a different standard: a practical, daily standard. On the other hand, even though the founders of the occult tarot weren’t all wealthy, they were educated. Antoine Court de Gébelin, for example, went to seminary and was trained as a pastor.
The symbols of the Lenormand, unlike those of the tarot, refer not to archetypal themes like “Justice” but to everyday occurrences in the life of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gentry of Europe. Consider card 27–Letter for a moment. Letters were the lifeblood of the eighteenth-century gentry. It was not uncommon for a woman to send several letters throughout the day and receive quite a few in response. So important and central was this system of messaging that until recently England delivered the post several times a day. One of the reasons for this central importance of letters was the cloistered life of women. I’m not suggesting that all women were locked up (some were, actually, but not all). But women did set certain times at which they were “at home” and available to receive visitors. Such visitors might come from afar for the specific purpose of seeing a woman—such as 1–Rider. A woman had to be home at those times, but at the same time, she needed to arrange other visits with other women. The social network had to be maintained, so communication had to be continually maintained as well. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women wrote letters the way that many young men and women now send text messages, and in nearly the same volume (if with better spelling and never while driving).
Notice, too, that card 25–Ring is different from card 24–Heart. Love and marriage were not always the same thing. In some senses 25–Ring is a card of finance, which survives in its contemporary meaning of “contract.” Marriage is a contract, and for many women of this era, the only contract with which they could hope to make a living. Let the men worry about airy philosophical concepts like “Justice” and “Temperance.” Women needed to concern themselves with their financial as well as domestic future. It’s telling that 25–Ring traditionally could mean “a proposal,” but VII–The Lovers traditionally meant “a choice.” It is the man with his tarot deck who chooses, the woman with the Lenormand who receives the proposal.
So it stands to reason that the Lenormand would not concern itself with the ceremonial magic and complex astrology to which some men and women bent their time. Obviously, a lot of astrological symbolism and a lot of Fludd’s Mirror of Nature show up here; it’s because it’s actually reflected unconsciously rather than deliberately designed by occultists. There were female occultists, many of them quite educated and some of them contributed to the development of the tarot. But the Lenormand was used for ordinary questions and ordinary concerns.
In practice, however, so is the tarot. Pick up any book on the tarot and you’ll see a list of everyday meanings even for the major arcana. After all, how many archetypal life-changing events occur on a daily basis? Not many. Even the wealthy, Latin-reading, brandy-sipping, velvet-coat-wearing men of the Golden Dawn were probably excited to get some mail.
Yet there are patterns of symbols in the Lenormand. I haven’t seen much discussion of them in the few texts available on the Lenormand in English or Spanish. (I am, sadly, unable to read German—which is a pity, because the Lenormand is popular in Germany.) For example, each of the cards, as explained above, is associated traditionally with a particular playing card. It seems these traditional associations might have some significance, and in fact we can trace back some systems of meaning to early systems of reading the cards.
For example, consider the court cards of the spades. We have 13–Child, 9–Flowers, and 30–Lily. Each of these cards can represent a person: a child, a young woman, and an old man. The spades’ court cards share the meaning of “time.” This meaning doesn’t carry into the other cards in the suit, however, although spades do often deal with issues of intellect and communication and travel. Similarly, almost all the “negative” cards are clubs. Many of the hearts deal with friendship and love. And diamonds often deal with money and fortune. Finally, we see that two of the aces are signifiers. At some point in the development of the Lenormand, these images were the meaning attributed to a thirty-six-card deck of playing cards.27 Yet this association is loose; we would expect 8–Coffin to be a club, but it’s a diamond. And we would probably expect 25–Ring to be a diamond, but it’s the Ace of Clubs.
But why are these cards not in order? We would expect them to be numbered, perhaps, according to their playing card sequence, but instead they’re numbered seemingly randomly, as if they’ve been previously shuffled. There are, however, some patterns in this seemingly random numbering as well. The cards 28–Gentleman and 29–Lady follow each other, and 35–Ring follows 34–Heart: marriage follows love, ideally. And 31–Sun precedes 32–Moon. Of course, in the original game, this order was simply the order in which the cards were laid down, so that one could travel over them by throwing dice. There has been no effort to put esoteric significance into this order, as there has with the tarot.
What we also don’t find, overall, is a clear astrological association. The keys of two, three, four, seven, and twelve appear to be nearly absent. We do have thirty-six cards, which is three times the key of twelve. But laying the cards out in that pattern, three rows of twelve, does not reveal much insight, really. Similarly, we could try to arrange them according to the decans of the zodiac, ten-degree divisions of each of the signs. But doing so also seems to make little sense.
So where are the reflections of this Mirror of Nature in our humble little deck? Unlike the tarot, no one seems to have sat down and made the thing conform to the model of the universe depicted in Fludd. But if the Anima Mundi is using these cards to communicate with us, surely some of these symbols should appear.
It might help to analyze the cards by the surface feature of the symbols employed. Then we might see, at least, how the maker of the Petit Lenormand divided up her world.
|
External World |
Animals |
Objects / Tools |
|
6. Clouds |
7. Snake |
8. Coffin |
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16. Stars |
12. Birds |
10. Scythe |
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20. Garden |
14. Fox |
11. Whip |
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21. Mountain |
15. Bear |
24. Heart |
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22. Crossroads |
17. Stork |
25. Ring |
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31. The Sun |
18. Dog |
26. Book |
|
32. The Moon |
23. Mice |
27. Letter |
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34. Fish |
33. Key |
|
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35. Anchor |
||
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36. Cross |
||
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People |
Plants |
Edifices / Machines |
|
1. Rider |
2. Clover |
3. Ship |
|
13. Child |
5. Tree |
4. House |
|
28. Gentleman |
9. Flowers |
19. Tower |
|
29. Lady |
30. Lily |
Some of these attributions are, admittedly, a bit sketchy. A heart as an object is crowbarred in there, I’ll admit. But in general this chart reveals that the creator of the Lenormand relied on a limited number of symbolic domains. These domains are particularly heavy in familiar, daily objects. A woman in a drawing room probably had little experience with anchors, but she surely knew very well the nature of keys, books, letters, crosses, and rings. Notice the heavy weight of symbols from nature: clouds, mountains, plants, and animals. Yet even so, there’s a sense of randomness, of disorder, behind these symbols.
Romanticism
How do we account for this disarray of symbols? We have the tarot, which began as a catch-as-catch-can collection of cards for card games, and settled finally into a carefully constructed set of symbols based, as we have seen, on the ideas of late-Renaissance Neoplatonism. But what principle governs the seeming melange of the cards of the Lenormand?
It’s important to understand that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe marked a paradigm shift in modes of thought. Old ways of understanding the world gave way, rather suddenly, to a new way of thinking. Often referred to as “the Enlightenment,” this new mode of thought privileged “rationality” and “reason” over emotion and authority. Obviously, in the history of human ideas, this new notion is just a dusted-off version of old ideas, but now scholars had the ability to distribute and share rational observations of the world with each other, and a foundation of philosophical skepticism that allowed them to test ideas empirically. The roots of this revolution in thinking fed institutions and movements as diverse as science, politics, and even—a bit later—literature and art in the form of realism and naturalism.
But as always happens in a revolution of ideas, there was a counter-revolution. Actually, there were two: the first is the return to the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance, as we’ve already seen, which fueled a small occult revival in the nineteenth century and influenced the symbols of the tarot. This looking backward to older philosophies is sometimes called Neoclassicism, although the original Neoplatonism occurred a bit later than the classical era. Nevertheless, one way of responding to the new “rationality” was to look to the past, for other ways of knowing. The other, larger and more influential counter to Enlightenment thinking is called Romanticism.
Romanticism began as a movement in Germany and England before spreading to the rest of Europe. It met head-on Napoleon’s efforts to rule France and conquer Europe, and in that crucible took on an interesting new form in France, feeding the streams of classical liberalism as well as a kind of conservative populism. I called it a movement, but Romanticism was never deliberately organized so much as organically sprouted from the fertile soil of an industrializing Europe. Therefore, Romantics often seem to espouse contradictory ideas.
For example, the highest form of humanity for the Romantic is the creative genius, transforming the torments of his or her tortured existence into art. At the same time, however, the simplicity of rural life, its orderly regularity (as perceived from the vantage of a city garrett, of course), was held up as an example of spiritual richness. What can you do, then, as a Romantic, if you idealize the wild Lord Byron flitting about the world being tortured, drunk, and—well—laid? You also idealize the farmer with his poor dirty hands at the plough. So, to reconcile these two heroes, you declare the farmer a kind of genius. Genius, then, can spring up anywhere, like a weed: this is the foundation of Romanticism’s liberalism.
What mattered to the Romantic, what was of value, was not reason per se. It was the passionate realization of awe in the face of nature and the power of imagination. The poet held a mirror up to nature; that was his or her job. This creation of art reflecting nature was an act of supreme courage, because nature was both nourishing and awful (in the original sense of the word—it caused awe) to the soul. It was also a lonely act: a single genius must do this, not a committee or council.
The Romantic attitude toward knowledge reflected this individuality. It was not through community testing and peer review that one knows something: one knows something by going and seeing. Emotional experience, intuition, and personal revelation were the sources of knowledge, not mathematical reasoning or logic. Imagination, above all, was the power that drove the Romantic genius.
Nature, for the Romantic, is the source of all knowledge and wisdom. If you see a painting with wild craggy mountains jutting over a stormy ocean, perhaps with a single indistinct figure atop it holding on to his hat, you likely are looking at a Romantic painting. Other technical characteristics also mark art as Romantic: the brush strokes are heavy and textured, there’s less effort to depict reality and more emotion and passion, and so forth. But ultimately all of these characteristics come back to the idea that nature is the source of the good: humans are by nature good, and if a human follows his or her natural passions, good will come of it. Those who follow their passions and end up doing evil are really following artificial passions, imposed on them by society, wittingly or not.
We see this idea as well in literature of the time. In England, William Blake writes, “If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.”28 This is both a criticism of the rationalism (the “ratio”) of the enlightenment and the mechanism of the Neoplatonic spheres; if we rely on philosophy and experimentation, our actions are mechanical, going “the same dull round over again” with no meaning. It is the individual’s prophetic or poetic genius that gives meaning to the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy.
Where a transcendent deity in Neoplatonism sends down a chain of increasingly more immanent manifestations to Earth, finally culminating in the Anima Mundi, in Romanticism the divine is seen in nature herself, and in the individual. The Anima Mundi is, herself, nature, and God is often seen as the universe itself. The Romantics begin to imagine God as immanent, as present in the world as we see it, not separate from it, and so needing no intermediaries. What we talk to when we divine from the Romantic perspective is the divine in ourselves, and we do so out of “enthusiasm,” in its original etymological sense: the God within.
The Lenormand oracle was defined, not in response to Neoclassical ideas or Neoplatonic ideas, but in response to Romantic ideas.
The Romantic imagination resists systematization. By this I mean the Romantic is likely to walk by church on Sunday whistling, just to show that he can worship God wherever he likes, without formula or ritual. The Romantic does not want tables or charts; who needs such things when nature herself gives abundantly of her knowledge? The ordering, structure, and symbols of the Lenormand reflect, at every turn, the Romantic spirit of the deck.
If we look at the distribution of the symbols in the deck, we can see this Romantic influence clearly. We see, for example, that the vast majority of the cards represent plants, the external world or nature, or animals. Only three cards represent human structures, and only four cards represent people. The category of tools or objects is dominated by objects of an agrarian nature, or symbolic of Romantic import, such as the key and anchor. We have a deck that represents not the astrological cycles of the Anima Mundi, but the genius of daily life and imagination idealized by the Romantic movement.
The Tarot and the Lenormand in Synergy
But how does this set of symbols interact with the tarot and how can the symbols of the tarot help us learn to read the Lenormand and vice versa? In two ways: through those astrological associations listed above, as well as by means of deliberate invocation of these daily objects in the cards themselves. In other words, from the perspective of the Neoplatonic top-down structure of the universe, or the Romantic immanent spiritual view. Can we reconcile the two, or must we choose?
If you look at the major arcana of a tarot deck based on Waite’s design, you’ll see a number of ordinary objects. These objects appear as emblems, decorations, but rarely as the central figures of the cards themselves. But it is clear that the makers of the tarot lived with these daily objects and regarded them as symbolically significant. Not all of the symbols of the Lenormand appear in the major arcana of the tarot (the anchor is hard to find), but most of them do. And those that don’t often have clear astrological associations connected to the astrological significance of the tarot cards. For example, the Hanged Man is sometimes associated with water, because it is assigned to the Hebrew letter mem, which means “water.” Similarly, one of its meanings—standstill, waiting—fits well with 35–Anchor.
Every card of the major arcana echoes the everyday concerns of the Lenormand, which means most cards in the Lenormand have a major arcana card (sometimes several) that rules them. One can think of the major arcana of the tarot as representing archetypal ideas and the Lenormand cards as representing their manifestation in ordinary, day-to-day life. The correspondence isn’t (and cannot be) a one-for-one correspondence, but even the concentration of symbols on certain cards can reveal some interesting things about the way these archetypes manifest. After all, some archetypes are more fertile than others.
Major arcana card 0–the Fool, for example, contains 18–Dog, 31–Sun, and 18–Mountain. We also see a flower, perhaps indicative of 9–Flowers, although that’s perhaps a stretch. The dog here seems to goad the fool on, and also acts as his enthusiastic companion. The sun is a promise of success to come, and the mountains in the distance represent the obstacles he will face as he continues on his journey. We’ll see those mountains in the backgrounds of a lot of cards.
In the Magician, we see 30–Lily and 7–Snake. The magician is girded with the slyness of the serpent—this recalls some early forms of the cards, in which the magician was a juggler or mountebank. But below him grow the lilies of contemplation. The magician is also, in some systems, the male querent, and therefore card 28–Gentleman.
The High Priestess, like the Magician, is the female querent in some old methods of reading, and thus contains 29–Lady. But she also holds 26–Book, although perhaps it is 27–Letter. In some decks, she holds a bound book. But in the Waite, she holds a scroll, which could be either. There is some ambiguity and secrecy in the priestess. Does she hold universal wisdom or a personal message? We also see with her 36–Cross and 32–Moon. She represents the burden of faith, as well as the imaginative powers of the moon. Here’s a place where astrological significance meets the iconography of the card: II–The High Priestess is associated with the moon, as is the Lenormand 32–Moon card.
The most obvious Lenormand symbol in the Empress is 24–Heart, which makes sense as she represents the emotional faculty. But she’s also sitting before a 5–Tree. As mother of all, she guards the health of the world. We also see a multitude of flowers, which recall 9–Flowers, although that symbol will reappear throughout the major arcana.
The Emperor gives us little to work with other than the 21–Mountain in his background. But the Hierophant who follows him offers us 33–Key and 36–Cross. We see here the burden of dogma, but also the keys to the kingdom.
The Lovers is an interesting card from the perspective of the Lenormand because of its cluster of negative symbols. We have some good symbols: 31–Sun, for example. But we also have 21–Mountain between the two lovers, 7–Snake behind the woman (an obvious reference to Eden, but so is the Lenormand card), and 6–Clouds. These symbols are practically a catalogue of what can go wrong. There are obstacles and confusion and deception in love, but over all shines the sun, and the blessing of the angel. Here’s a case where the Lenormand symbols enrich the reading of the card: we can see the nature of the choice offered by the angel: overcome the obstacle between you, through clouds of confusion and temptation, and perhaps you’ll achieve success. But perhaps not: you cannot know. You must choose blindly.
The Chariot is a bit more straightforward. We see 19–Tower and 16–Star. You might also think of him as 1–Rider. He moves forward with his internal authority of mind.
Justice is the first card in which the Lenormand really seems to have taken a vacation. We could argue, perhaps, that 10–Scythe partakes of the quality of the sword: it represents decisions. It’s interesting, by the way, that “decision” comes from a root meaning “to cut.” But ultimately, there’s not much in this card that appears in the Lenormand.
The Hermit, also, is sparsely colonized by the Lenormand: he has a single 16–Star in his lantern. The Wheel of Fortune, however, is a bit more productive. We have again 7–Snake, as well as 6–Clouds. Fortune is deceptive and uncertain. We also have 26–Book, four of them to be precise, to represent the secret nature of our fate.
Strength also has the ubiquitous 21–Mountain in the background. Here, it reveals the nature of the enterprise: to overcome obstacles by strength. What kind of strength is revealed by the presence of 9–Flowers? The power of beauty and grace.
I’ve already addressed the possible association of 36–Anchor with the Hanged Man, but I’ll also point out that he rests on a 5–Tree, a symbol of spiritual and physical growth.
The next card, Death, is symbolically chockablock with Lenormand symbols. First, we have 1–Rider, the visitor who cannot be denied. In older decks, he wields a 10–Scythe. This the grim cutting off of life. But behind the 19–Towers in the distance rises, or sets, the 31–Sun. And before the grim rider stands a 13–Child. Even in this ending there is hope for tomorrow, and this cutting off itself may be a blessing.
Temperance offers us 22–Crossroad (or, at least, a road) as well as 31–Sun again—although that sun might be more accurately described as a 25–Ring. The multiple choices of the crossroads become unified into a single whole in the form of the ring; this sense of completion occurs also in the water 30–Lily that grow behind the angel.
The Devil does not contain any Lenormand images, but the Tower practically is a Lenormand symbol: 19–Tower. But we also see 6–Clouds in the back: here is authority toppled, and confusion. This combination of Lenormand symbols spells anarchy.
The next three cards are also Lenormand images, but they contain some other Lenormand symbols as well. For example, the Star also contains 5–Tree, as well as perhaps 17–Stork, if you’re willing to squint. Here is the hope of spiritual change. The Moon, aside from 32–Moon, also has 18–Dog, 14–Fox, and if you’re willing to stretch definitions, 34–Fish: these animals symbolize companions, deception, and adventure, all available interpretations of the tarot Moon. Moreover, we also get 19–Tower and 22–Crossroad. These two towers appear again and again in the tarot: they represent a distant gate into a destination, but in the Lenormand they’re symbols of authority and institutional power. Finally, in the Sun, we get not just 31–Sun, but also 1–Rider, 13–Child, and our common 9–Flowers. This is the coming of innocence and beauty, under the blessings of the Sun.
Judgement is another card filled with Lenormand symbols. Some 8–Coffins float on a sea before a 21–Mountain range, while an angel blows a trumpet decorated with a 36–Cross through some 6–Clouds. Here we have repeated Lenormand symbols of ending and beginning again: the future is uncertain, and we must face it with faith, but we can be sure there are obstacles. However, we arise, transformed, to meet it.
The final card, the World, again seems sparsely populated with the Lenormand. We have 6–Clouds, but they are light, not dark. And the four cherubic figures which we have seen again and again, I am loath to attribute to Lenormand symbols (an eagle is a bird, but it doesn’t seem to me to be a 12–Bird). One symbol that does occur, however, is 25–Ring, a sign of completion in which the hermaphrodite dances.
We get to the end of the major arcana and see that some are heavy with Lenormand symbols, others less so. The most interesting thing for me is that these symbols in the tarot often mean the same thing as they do in the Lenormand. In other words, it’s as if Pamela Colman Smith spoke the language of its symbols well enough to incorporate them into her tarot. Or perhaps the tarot, like the planets in Fludd’s diagram, sent rays into the physical world that manifested as these ordinary objects, reflected more directly in the Lenormand. Or, as another possibility, the Romantic associations of these symbols so permeated the culture that Pamela Colman Smith used them instinctively, thus joining the Neoclassical and Neoplatonic tarot to the Romantic Lenormand.
For all practical purposes, the question of whether the Anima Mundi is an emanation of a higher, transcendent deity or an immanent deity in her own regard is a moot one. These philosophical roots help us understand these two different plants, but we don’t need to cleave to one or the other to use either deck. I am inclined to think that both are true, from different perspectives, and neither contains the whole truth of reality.
Fortune-Telling and Divination
Another supposed difference between the tarot and the Lenormand is the purpose of the decks. The tarot is seen by some as a source for contemplation and meditation, the Lenormand for divination and fortune-telling. However, this distinction, too, deconstructs itself when closely examined. Some magicians make a distinction between divination and fortune-telling. Divination, for them, is a divine act of gaining knowledge. Fortune-telling is, at its best, a means of gaining information about everyday events. At its worst, fortune-telling is mere entertainment or fraud. The prototypical example is astrology. Divination by astrology is a complex process involving the calculation of the positions of numerous planetary bodies. To do it properly requires knowing both the exact place and time of birth. Fortune telling by astrology looks more like newspaper horoscopes, which simply assume—ridiculously—that everyone with the same sun sign will experience the same events. Most newspaper horoscopes are written by people with no actual interest in or knowledge of astrology at all, but even those who are meticulous enough to calculate transits must realize the broad brush with which they are painting. In some sense, then, this distinction is justified because it permits us to point to things that are useful and things that are not.
Yet the questions asked of diviners and fortune-tellers throughout history have often been exactly the same. It appears that people want to know relatively few things: about love, about money, and about their children. The only difference in questions between those offered at the Oracle of Delphi and those asked a modern fortune-teller is the scope. Someone may want to know whether to expand his business; someone may ask the Oracle at Delphi how to conquer a neighboring city. In both cases, the questions are similar: how can I increase my domain?
The distinction between divination and fortune-telling cannot rest squarely on method, either. After all, the Order of the Golden Dawn holds the tarot in high esteem, but for most of the cards’ history the cards were entertainment: first a game, and then a parlor trick. Perhaps we can rest the distinction between the two on the intent of the querent. If the querent intends only to be entertained, then he or she gets fortune-telling. If he or she intends to be informed, then we call the act divination. However, many people perform fortune-telling at home for entertainment and nevertheless take the advice of the cards or the tea leaves seriously.
We could also rest the distinction on the explanation for the act. The word “divination” implies some interaction with divine beings: gods or spirits at the very least. Fortune-telling does not, necessarily. But this distinction isn’t fully satisfactory because many fortune-tellers make at least some gesture toward piety. And some diviners do not.
What we end up with, ultimately, is a bag of unsatisfactory explanations clinking around. What we really need to is to cut through the issue and ask if the distinction is really useful, and if so, for what?
Unfortunately, the distinction may have much more to do with social class than any inherent nature of the act. Essentially, a divination costs more. Perhaps the distinction is only useful if we want to distinguish between what the upper classes do, and what the lower classes do. The issue is complicated by the fact that magic, too, has its social classes. The distinctions between high and low magic, for example, parallel a historical distinction between ceremonial magic and folk magic. Folk magic includes such practices as drawing hex signs on barns, or “laying tricks” in the Hoodoo tradition. The misconception is that high magic focuses, like divination, on loftier goals: union with God, for example, and low magic, like fortune-telling, focuses on matters of daily practical import: getting a good crop, making sure your man isn’t stepping out, and getting the hen to lay. If you read the account of any of the magical Lodge Wars, long and tedious affairs involving various supposedly lofty magicians throwing curses at each other, you can see that they wouldn’t be allowed in the kitchen of any respectable farm wife. Similarly, it is possible with a little looking to find loftier spiritual goals among the daily work of folk magic.
Therefore, I’m suspicious of the distinction. When I mention “fortune-telling,” therefore, I am not pointing out a distinction I believe in, but one that others use. And when I use the word, I mean to use it from their perspective. If this were a more scholarly work, I might carefully put quotation marks around every occurrence of the word, to make that sense of it plain, but I find that practice annoying and precious even in scholarly works. So I won’t do it here. If it would help you to keep in mind that the distinction is a troubled one, feel free to pencil in quotation marks around the word.
There is a difference between foretelling and commenting, however, that we could map onto fortune-telling and divination. Foretelling is attempting to predict the future, while commenting is simply offering insight on the present or past. It’s easier, philosophically, to justify the possibility of commenting. We don’t even need to propose some supernatural being like the Anima Mundi. There are even purely mechanical explanations of how divination can work to offer useful comments on the present; a number of creativity gurus recommend, for example, seeding new ideas with random input. On the other side, foretelling isn’t limited to people who believe in magic. Weather forecasting isn’t the only place people try to predict the future by extrapolating from present patterns: economics, politics, and advertising all attempt to make predictions.
The question of free will often arises in company with the question of foretelling, perhaps because fortune-telling can imply a fixed future. Many books on divination, especially astrology, go out of their way to assure the reader that the future is not fixed and that forecasting is, in fact, inaccurate, in the sense that, once warned, the querent can change his or her behavior. Many astrologers believe, for example, that when Neptune and Uranus come into conjunction, there are upheavals in the nature of community and belonging. The way those upheavals manifest, however, is shaped by the current situation. In the 1820s, for instance, a large number of countries broke away from their imperial governments, becoming independent. In 1990s, the next time these two planets came into conjunction, we saw the rise of the Internet uniting the world into a large information community. The details of these events were not fixed, but the conditions were suitable for their arising.
Many diviners believe that foretelling is more like forecasting—extrapolating the future from current patterns. This view of divination helps to explain why it’s relatively tricky to predict the winner of a horse race. After all, no consciousness on earth really knows how the race will turn out, unless cheating is involved. The Anima Mundi is not omniscient: like us, she is situated in time, and she knows only what she knows, which is much more than any given human consciousness, but much less than everything. She might be able to take this horse’s sore tendon, that jockey’s new diet, and the thoughts of the surface of the track itself all into account and predict a winner—but it’d be a guess, albeit one with more information than you might have at the track.
Being a consciousness herself, the Anima Mundi is not a slave. When Croesus was debating whether or not to go to war with Cyrus, the king of the Persians, he consulted the Delphic oracle of Apollo. Now, whether the utterance came from Apollo or from the Anima Mundi is an academic question, but the nature of the response illustrates that answers are not devoid of personality. The oracle informed him, in clear and unambiguous terms, “If Croesus goes to war with Cyrus, he will destroy a mighty kingdom.” Croesus rejoiced, went to war with Cyrus—and lost so spectacularly, and put such a strain on his financial and other resources, that he lost his kingdom. The oracle’s forecasting was correct, just not what Croesus wanted to hear. A cynic could point out that this forecasting could be correct no matter what happened, but that’s not true. If Croesus intended, not to destroy Cyrus’ kingdom, but some nobler cause for going to war, he might hesitate at the prediction of this oracle. After all, he might say (as unlikely as it would be at this time), “I don’t want to destroy the Persian kingdom; I just want to assure the freedom of its people from Cyrus’s tyranny.” But the oracle was telling him, “Because destruction is your goal, you will face destruction yourself.”
Some people, among them A. E. Waite, regarded fortune-telling as frivolous, a parlor game for entertainment. Surely the Anima Mundi will not dance for our pleasure. But the story of Croesus also shows that divination faces some of the same issues: the Anima Mundi might say no. It is not wise to treat the underlying consciousness of the universe as a servant, whether at a party or in the temple of Delphi.