The Magnificent Game of the King
One of the most interesting findings of precognition and presentiment
research is that people seem to be influenced by themselves in the
future, rather than by objective events. Precognitions are like memories
of the future. Presentiments seem to involve a physiological back-
flowing from future states of alarm or arousal, a flow of causation
moving in the opposite direction to energetic causation.
the science delusion, dr. rupert sheldrake
Dedicated to the most powerful woman on earth at the time—Catherine de Médici; the Florentine princess who became queen of France—a book appeared in Bologna in 1551. It was called One Hundred Liberal and Ingenious Games and contained rules and instructions for various dice and card games, both of which were extremely popular in northern Italy. One was listed as the Magnificent Game of the King, wherein the four suits of the traditional Italian playing cards represented the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Here was a game that was also more than a game. It was a pastime that told the players something about the wider universe.
In what is a mildly amusing circular metaphor, precisely dating when the tarot appeared in Europe is something of a Fool’s errand. Western esotericism’s current views of the tarot are shaped more by late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French mystics seeking to tie everything back to Egypt. (This was easier to do in a time before hieroglyphs had been translated.) Subsequent Victorian occultists then overlaid Christian kabbalistic concepts and the Hebrew alphabet over the astrological correlations developed by their French predecessors. Whilst this is a pleasingly coherent system—reaching its apogee with Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth—it lacks any historical veracity further back than its creators.
The broad consensus appears to be that card games had arrived in central and southern Europe by the 1300s from the Near East, if the admonitions of various holy men at the time are anything to go by. These games typical had four suits including mirrors, acorns, swords, and plants but had yet to coalesce into today’s recognisable set of playing cards. Different regions had different variants and it was only later that the trump cards were added. (Early trumps contained a female pope which is now the High Priestess, and much of the religious concern about the cards may have sprung from this blasphemy.) These trumps appear to be based on the popular medieval mystery and morality plays that travelled Europe promoting Catholic and biblical eschatology to a mostly illiterate populace. Paul Huson, in his excellent Mystical Origins of the Tarot, suggests that the presence of Death in the trumps, as well as the general movement of the trump story from the physical to the metaphysical may have served as a memento mori for the wealthy of Europe when it was being ravaged by the Plague. In any case, the imagery that would have been instantly understood by the medieval mind became obscure and “mystified” only a few centuries later as the Renaissance blew away what it saw as the cobwebs of the ignorant worldview of the Dark Ages.
Sortilege—from the Latin sortilegium—as opposed to cartomancy has been around since mankind developed toolmaking capabilities. Dating back to the rise of Christianity, cards were used to generate random numbers referring to phrases in the Bible, Virgil, or Homer, for instance. So we have two behavioural streams, gaming and divination, coming down to us from the distant past in a way that is now impossible to disentangle.
And why would we want to? As we saw in the probability chapter, a mathematical understanding of risk and probable outcomes is an extremely late development. The difference between a game and a forecast was far less defined for our ancestors than it is for us. Both dealt with a future event that, at the time, was entirely out of your hands and in the hands of Fortune. (“Oh, I am Fortune’s Fool!”) Would she favour you or no? Thus we find ourselves once again in the realm of the trickster, in that liminal space between what is real and what is a game. Divination in general and cartomancy in particular can only ever have emerged in an environment of illegal tavern games, marginal cultures and forgotten fears of Plague death. Those eighteenth-century French occultists were correct in saying that the tarot contains the highest secrets of magic, just not in the way they thought.
The Science of the Magnificent Game
Along with telepathy, precognition is the most studied and most common psi effect. Over a century’s worth of data has been generated in laboratory conditions on which we can draw. As Dr. Russell Targ says, from a statistical perspective the evidence for telepathy and precognition is ten times greater than the evidence that aspirin prevents heart attacks.
Getting your head around precognition and getting good at divination are probably the two steps you can take to magically improve your life over any other. Cartomancy has managed to accrete several centuries of mythology and folklore, much of which is unhelpful if you are in the business of, you know, getting an accurate view of likely outcomes. The fastest way to burn off these accretions is to hold them to the light of precognition’s scientific and psychological evidence as well as their subsequent implications.
Firstly and most importantly, what is the most common form of precognition? For this, we must return to Cambridge biologist and personal hero Dr. Rupert Sheldrake in his Science Delusion.
On my database there are 842 cases of human premonitions, precognitions, or presentiments. Of these, 70 per cent are about dangers, disasters, or deaths; 25 per cent are about neutral events; and only five per cent are of happy events, like meeting a future spouse, or winning a raffle. Dangers, deaths and catastrophes predominate. This agrees with a survey of well-authenticated cases of precognition collected by the Society for Psychical Research in which 60 per cent concerned deaths or accidents. Very few were of happy events. Most of the others were trivial or neutral, although some were very unusual. In one such case, the wife of the Bishop of Hereford dreamed that she was reading the morning prayers in the hall of the Bishop’s Palace. After doing so, on entering the dining room, she saw an enormous pig standing beside the table. This dream amused her, and she told it to her children and their governess. She then went into the dining room and an escaped pig was standing in the exact spot where she had seen it in her dream.56
Right away you can see that these data are highly instructive. The first thing that leaps to mind is that the evidence for successful precognition comes from the complete opposite end of the question spectrum to what diviners commonly ask. Divination tends toward positive questions: “Where is my soul mate?” “How can I make more money?” Indeed, it is a common topic of discussion among professional tarot readers whether to sugarcoat negative readings and by how much.
It appears that precognitive accuracy increases when it comes to avoiding negative outcomes to possible actions. We may speculate a mechanism for understanding this: a future state of discomfort may be easier for our consciousness to detect in the present than a future state of comfort as they are not only more rare, but as Duke University’s Dan Ariely’s research demonstrates, humans are more concerned with avoiding negative outcomes than seeking positive ones regardless of the probabilities involved. There is potentially a very real opportunity to use our own cognitive biases to genuine advantage here in ways that have so far been under-explored.
Positive or negative, it seems that having a fixed outcome at the time of divination works better than having an indeterminate one. Here is Peter J. Carroll again, from his classic essay “Magical Theory”:
When the magician divines he interacts primarily with future versions of himself. In divination he basically taps into what he may know in the future. A curious circularity seems to exist in divination; it only seems to work if at some point in the future you will end up knowing the result by ordinary means. This explains why the best results in divination seem to occur for either very short term divinations about unlikely things that will happen in the next few seconds, or for events which are heavily deterministic, but not yet obvious, in the further future.57
Carroll’s observations align with the findings of the notorious Stargate program; a NASA- and CIA-funded series of experiments into remote viewing that lasted for more than twenty years. Beginning during the height of the Cold War, the project successfully located down Soviet aircraft in the jungles of Africa, kidnapping victims, the rings of Jupiter (before Voyager had been verified them), and dozens more. Over the course of its existence, the findings from thousands of experiments led to the development of some fairly robust protocols designed to maximise the accuracy of a remote viewing session. Most pertinent to classic divination are the following two:
Firstly, what is known as “feedback”: the remote viewer is told whether the information he or she gave—–and specifically which parts of it—were accurate or ultimately useful in achieving the objective, i.e., was the plane eventually found or not? This is functionally equivalent to divining for a fixed event in the future whose outcome you will eventually know. Not only does providing feedback improve the accuracy of the individual session, it improves the overall accuracy of the viewer over time. If you want to get better at divination—and who doesn’t?—keep this in mind. Providing feedback is lifting barbells.
Secondly, contemporary magicians should consider what is known as “analytical overlay.” A term coined by the Stargate Program’s most successful remote viewier, Ingo Swann, it refers to the mind’s natural tendency to interpret the imagery it is receiving as it is receiving it. Interpretation appears to require using a different part of the mind to precognition. Attempting interpretation during the precognitive part of a session leads to the imposition—the overlay—of the reader’s personal opinions of what are going on rather than the clearest possible view of a future event. This rather defeats the purpose of divination, of course. If you want your own opinion of what is going to happen in the future, just put down the cards and ask yourself. From personal experience cartomancy has an inbuilt capacity to short-
circuit analytical overlay. As long as you merely look at the images on the cards as you turn them over and resist leaping to an interpretation until you have overturned them all, you largely avoid getting in your own way.
Finally, and proving that my own lack of fashionability extends far beyond my wardrobe (don’t judge, I’m not the one reading a chaos magic book!), is the classic notion of oblique strategies. It is perhaps a bit
disingenuous to include it under a subheading that contains the word “science,” smelling faintly as it does of smile therapy, fondue parties, and other long-since-dismissed concepts from the seventies, oblique strategies are nevertheless highly instructive for the improved performance of cartomancy, particularly for beginners. The general idea, so deliciously and repeatedly skewered in the 1991 film Slacker, is that randomised and typically counterintuitive suggestions can lead to breakthroughs in creative thinking’.
Whether that is applicable to your own life or no, there is much to be gained even from what would otherwise be considered failed divinations—i.e., predictions that subsequently prove to be in error. Consider an individual tarot reading to be a brainstorming session for one. Typically the magician does not resort to divination except in situations where he or she is stuck or unaware of the best course of action. Often the layout or interpretation of the cards will suggest an approach that can unstick the magician regardless of whether the reading was accurate or not.
In these situations, note the prediction nonetheless (for feedback, yeah?) but lend more credence to the unsticking suggestion that has just appeared in your mind. A big part of this approach is “giving yourself permission” (for want of a less annoying term) to experiment with the form of cartomancy. You otherwise run the risk of frontloading your mind with outcome-anxiety and missing the session’s most valuable component. Unless your life goal is to become the world’s most gifted psychic, what you actually want from a divination is not to envision your preferred outcome, but to actually get to it.
Forecasting
So it would seem that the human capacity for precognition is better used in avoiding negative outcomes, and it appears that the probabilistic nature of reality makes the likelihood of predictive accuracy diminish the further into the future the querent looks, especially in cases where feedback is unlikely. How are we to cohere these consciousness effects into a workable predictive system for generating preferred life outcomes, especially where it comes to wealth? Enter monthly forecasting.
Astrology
Astrology is a bit like hairdressing. Not only is it likely you will have to admit defeat and visit an expert rather than attempt it yourself, it can take a while to find one who doesn’t make you look like a just-escaped mental patient. When you do find one, cleave to him or her for as long as you can.
Even if you consider astrology to be little more than a randomised correlation between seven common topics and the perspective error that gives humans the impression that our nearest stellar bodies appear to move regularly through the earth’s night sky—which is perfectly reasonable, by the way—as a sort of checklist for regular divinatory subjects, it works better than most other systems.
As to astrology’s predictive efficacy, I will just highlight in passing that the one time CSICOP—the so-called Committee for the Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal—actually did some scientific investigation, it was into the predictive power of natal charts correlated with sporting prowess. They found a (small) correlation that led to resignations and claims of falsifying data in an attempt to prove no correlation.58 They stopped investigating and have spent the past forty years shouting from the sidelines instead. The group actually completely dropped “scientific investigation” from its name in 2006. The more you know, eh?
Even something as vanilla as a monthly sun sign horoscope can provide the catalyst for an improved monthly forecast. For example, in addition to a broad divination such as “What are the top challenges facing me in the month of May?” one can add:
You will note that these questions, while not specifically negative in and of themselves, give the diviner a wider context for looming challenges. They also very much leave the door open for full feedback. Whether it “works” in any objective sense, astrology can indicate those Rumsfeldian “known unknowns” that may otherwise slip by.
Monthly Reporting
Much of this procedure can be performed on a smartphone. I actually do most of it on the bus on the way to work the morning my monthly horoscope is published online. I read Susan Miller’s astrologyzone.com, but you may be after a different hair style.
Firstly, start a Google doc or similar that will be used for your monthly forecast. Over time you will end up with a reverse chronology of the year. Then make some notes under the following headings.
Only once this is done should you read over the previous month. Consider it your feedback.
Nothing in the monthly forecast precludes doing situation-specific divination. If anything, it helps to correlate which parts of your life may require either a little divinatory or sorcerous assistance, but it is a supremely helpful baseline. Some entirely new perspectives emerge when you begin with your opinion of what will happen that month and then layer over several different divinatory system. A few friends include a monthly geomantic reading as well, apparently to great effect. Whichever layers you choose, the aim is to frontrun the universe as much as possible.
Cartomancy
Technically, you can use any sufficiently complex system of divination that takes your fancy. These can include runes, geomancy, or the I Ching.
But let me tell you something about me. If you couldn’t tell from the introduction to this chapter, I love the tarot. Love it. Not just tarot either, but pretty much any form of cartomancy. I have dozens of decks. Some are worn and filthy from more than two decades of magical campaigns, and others are unbelievably expensive and too precious to use regularly. (For instance, a hand-printed Sibilla Oracle I got from one of the few remaining original printers in Florence … a city that was famous for magic, cartomancy, and printing for centuries.)
Never let anyone tell you that you cannot buy your own cards, that you cannot read for yourself, that only amateurs use the accompanying interpretations, that only some tarot systems are valid, that you should never read for people you know, or that you should never read when you are unwell. Humans have been divining for at least thirty thousand years and we are still working out the rules. These objects need to interface with your consciousness, after all, and you will always be the supreme expert in that particular field.
Why and Which Tarot?
Why tarot, specifically, rather than any other system of cartomancy? Well, this is a bit glib, but a game based on medieval courtly life filled with pitfalls and deception, zero opportunity for upward mobility that isn’t assigned via destiny where you begin with absolutely nothing and hopefully end with nothing more than a good death more closely matches today’s economic situation than I think most of us would care to admit.
As for which decks, let me immediately contradict myself regarding listening to other people’s tarot advice and suggest, humbly, that beginners select tarot decks that have images and clear meaning descriptions on each card rather than just the trumps and the court cards. At the very least, this leads to quicker and possibly more efficient meaning recall.
The second consideration is to ensure that if you are selecting a themed deck it has sufficient emotional range. I have several tarot decks on the theme of Arthurian mythology and the Grail cycle, for instance. These stories have a sufficient amount of sex, death, misfortune, and triumph to be able to speak the nonlinguistic language of the unconscious. “The Flowers of West Wales Tarot” probably does not. You are effectively teaching your mind to speak to itself in images like a zoologist would with a depressed gorilla or precocious dolphin.
Calibration
There is an element of that Christmas morning feeling when one receives a new tarot deck. Typically the cards are pulled out, looked through, briefly shuffled, and then taken for their first road test. This is fine; it is your money and they are your cards after all. The next step, however, really should be working out which combination of image and meaning matches your own interpretation and unconscious. This process is called calibration.
Begin with the deck and accompanying book sitting beside you. Lift the first card and see if you can discern its traditional meaning. Check the book to see if you are correct. If you are correct, place this card to the left of the main pile and to the right if you are not. Move on to the next card.
Continue the process until you have exhausted the main deck leaving you with two piles, one of cards whose meanings you recall and one whose meanings you do not. Shuffling the pile of cards whose meanings escaped you on the first round and repeat, checking each meaning against the book as you go.
Eventually—in less time than it appears when written out like this—you will have a full deck of cards whose meanings you know. At this point, shuffle and run through them one more time, then put them away for the rest of the day. Interleaving or interleaved practice is a method of studying used as a memory recall booster. Rather than cramming, recall is higher in instances where there are gaps in study or memorisation.
By no means does calibration imply that book interpretations are the only valid ones. Instead, consider it like learning your ABCs before you can begin to read and write. Similarly, it does not imply that you cannot begin using your cards until you have memorised their meanings … this is akin to memorising music rather than learning how to read it—you are trying to squish the wrong thing into your mind. It is impossible. Each sitting and each querent will be different. Personally, I can barely remember all my email passwords; I would have no chance of memorising each and every meaning of each and every card of each and every deck. Consult the book regularly and unashamedly. Many of my favourite companion volumes are of such a high standard of research that they function as independent sources of insight anyway.
Nested Divination
When you have multiple card sets and use them regularly, certain characteristics, shortcomings, and areas of expertise become apparent. Just as there are different golf clubs for different shots, you will discover that certain oracles are better suited to specific situations. For example, my Sibilla oracles are deeply paranoid, concerned with surprise visitors, double-dealing business associates, family members with their own agendas, illicit love affairs, that sort of thing. As such, they make excellent “classic fortune telling” decks because they deal with mundane issues that would lead you to the proverbial gypsy wagon parked at the edge of the town fair one evening (assuming you lived in a racist cartoon/Cher music video).
Other decks deal with loftier or at least larger issues to do with personal destiny, life goals, and the wider movements of fate that are more likely to mark cornerstones in your incarnation. Then there are either the “darker” decks whose “good” cards aren’t actually all that good and their interminable opposite, the lighter oracles where even a cancer diagnosis is presented with an abundance of kittens.
You will only find out the limits of your oracles’ emotional ranges by pushing past them and throwing a really bad or inappropriate spread. The good news is this tends to only happen once. After that, you begin to develop an appreciation for which oracles work best in each situation. And that allows you to do something really quite neat. Comme ςa:
In situations where a card spread—typically one thrown using your most-used set—surfaces a card that you know has a very specific meaning such as malicious office gossip or family health problems you can “jump” up or down into another oracle system that is better matched to the challenge. The classic advice is to pull a few additional cards for clarity from the deck you are currently using, but this strikes me as asking the universe to type you up a new letter after you have removed at least ten keys from the keyboard. (The keys being the cards that are already laid out in the spread. What if they are needed for the clarifying message?) Granted, this is a bit unwieldy for a professional card reader (although I have certainly seen it done), but the focus of this book is you. Take your time, get the best reading.
As for which specific spreads to use, concerns regarding space and also a general pointlessness in doing so leave little time for their discussion. Each deck worth its salt will come with variations of classic spreads such as the Celtic Cross or three-card spread, and the Internet abounds with thousands of more suggestions. If the images on the cards are the letters forming the words your unconscious uses to speak, the spread is the grammar that builds the sentences. The process of spread discovery is as unique as meaning discovery.
Cartomantic Ritual
By now it should be fairly obvious that with such a long and enigmatic history, the notion that there is one right way to perform cartomancy is balderdash. However the notion that one should demarcate the cards and the space in which they are used as separate from everyday life is pretty close to universal. This can be as simple as visualising them bathed in a blinding white light that removes all previous energetic imprints.
Another option, one with a little more drama, is inspired by the western Iberian folk tradition of calling on Saint Zachariah for acts of divination and fortune telling, by way of the Book of St Cyprian: The Sorcerer’s Treasure. In the Biblical legend, Zachariah was the temple priest who, in his old age, received a message from Gabriel that he and his barren wife would give birth to John the Baptist. He is struck dumb as a result of his disbelief of the angel’s message until the day the child is born and named. As such, he is related to notions of spirit communication, prophecy, and its fulfilment on earth. The eagle-eyed mythographers among you will also spy that this particular saint and invocation folds back into the Headless Rite earlier in the book by virtue of the connection between Zachariah and John the Baptist. (Stick with me, baby. Oh, the places you’ll go!)
Consecration
Step 1
Gather some incense, even a joss stick will do, and have the cards to hand.
Step 2
Recite the following as you light the incense:
May the merciful God enter the Holy Place and
accept with favour the offering of his people.
For context, in the vanishingly unlikely scenario in which Zachariah was a historical person, this is the best guess as to the prayer he would have recited in the temple just prior to Gabriel’s appearance. But events do not need to have happened in the physical for them to drip with power and utility.
Step 3
Wave the cards through the smoke and say:
Most holy Saint Zachariah
Thou wert deaf and mute,
Thou had a son
And thou called him John,
Declare to me the true prophecies of heaven
through the medium of these cards.
With the permission of IAO SABAOTH,
Amen.
That’s it for consecration. Any time afterward when you wish to use your cards you can either recite the Zachariah prayer or simply call on him to reveal the prophecies/will of heaven.
Conclusion
Divination, in conjunction with enchantment, form practical sorcery’s one-two punch. From a strictly chaos magic perspective, the available data suggest that one should always enchant long and divine short. Our consciousness seems better built to spy future negative events whilst simultaneously preferring to assume positive outcomes are more likely to occur. It also appears to be significantly better at predicting future events than changing them.
Thus we arrive at an inevitable extension to chaos magic’s classic axiom, especially when it comes to wealth and success magic. Enchant long for positive outcomes and divine short to avoid negative ones.
The data also suggest, paraphrasing Russell Targ, that if you do not commonly dream of airplane crashes but have one the night before you are due to fly, you are better off skipping the flight than attempting to change the outcome with magic. When it comes to getting the seat with extra legroom, however, I have something else in mind.