Too many so-called “occultists” are not willing to put their money where their mouth is: when pressed on whether or not they can really predict the future, they will pull out such classics as “the future is not set in stone” or “the cards simply give us insight into our current situation; it’s up to us to shape it”.
That’s all well and good if one is primarily concerned with divination as pseudo-psychological self-improvement, but such an approach is decidedly not divination.
Divination is a method of predicting the future; plain and simple.
Not fully, mind you. Something need not be effective a literal one-hundred percent of the time for it to be valid. Even a child quickly comes to the understanding that the weatherman is not a pathological liar nor an impotent shaman promising rain where there is none, but simply doing his best based on the information acquired through meteorological observations.
Nevertheless, meteorology is a valid field of study, and more than that, a valid practice that possesses predictive power.
I believe that divination, true divination that is, is very much analogous to the field of meteorology (perhaps even including the fact that young, short-skirt-wearing ladies have it easier coming up in the scene).
It is emphatically possible to peer into the future and access knowledge and information about events yet to come; that is what any serious occultist or diviner must mean when he uses the term “divination.”
Why then is this such a point of contention? Why is the plain fact that divination is the practice of predicting the future not the default assumption among people who practice the art?
In many ways, this wishy-washy attitude is a manifestation of a broader phenomenon that plagues all of occultism; namely, the absolute refusal to engage in anything that might prove falsifiable.
If we set conditions, it is necessarily true that we might fall short of meeting those conditions. In other words, there is the risk of failure, and this risk of failure is, for many reasons, psychologically untenable.
If one’s entire identity is wrapped up in the idea that he or she is an occultist, tarot-reader, magician, &c., then a blow decidedly to the contrary is absolutely devastating.
Imagine, for a moment, that you cannot in fact predict the future. Go one step further, and suppose that your cards do not even provide you with any sort of genuine insight into “the situation” (whatever that means). Such a thing would of course mean that you have been wasting your time. You are not a witch or warlock; you’re a bum wasting his or her time on useless pastime activities.
But we’ll leave the psychological analysis for another time, since that could be a whole article unto itself. The point here is that one has to be epistemologically honest with oneself. What is it that you’re actually doing, and how are you assessing what it is that you’re doing?
You have to be honest with yourself. Make predictions. If they fail, so what? If you’re a professional reader and you’re afraid that poor performance might negatively affect your reputation, why are you practicing divination in a professional capacity to begin with? If you’re unsure about your skills and you’re hoping to masquerade your lack of confidence by giving vague, unfalsifiable interpretations, then that should inspire more shame than any inaccurate reading possibly could..
If you’re not a professional reader, but just giving out free readings to friends (or possibly even strangers, who cares), well then the old adage applies: you get what you pay for. Might as well give it an honest shot instead.
Either way, taking the easy way out benefits no one. Certainly not the people you’re reading for. Even if your ego is so bloated that you don’t care, you still should because it’s also not to your benefit. You’re not actually cultivating a skill or doing much of anything; well, except maybe making a fool of yourself. Countless people walk away from tarot readings done at country fairs and the like thinking to themselves “well, that was a load of shit; that guy was an idiot”. If you’re content with humiliating yourself like that for 20 bucks, be my guest, but it’s certainly not something any self-respecting person could make a career out of.
If you’re going to call yourself a diviner: divine!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Too many so-called “occultists” are not willing to put their money where their mouth is: when pressed on whether or not they can really predict the future, they will pull out such classics as “the future is not set in stone” or “the cards simply give us insight into our current situation; it’s up to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tarot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154,"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seven-spirits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}