A General Theory of Divination and Probably Other Stuff

I will not be apologizing for leaning into the woo

I can’t remember where I first came across it, but it’s stuck with me for a few years: this idea that divination is real, but that it has little to do with what system you use. Some people will prefer tarot, others astrology, others the I Ching, or cracked tortoise shells, or bird signs or dice or just about anything else. All of it works, not because there’s anything inherent to the images of the tarot, or the position of the stars or whatever else — no, it works because people are psychic, and they just need some framework to structure their psychic powers for them.

Something in this idea strikes me as deeply true. The quality of a tarot reading, for example, has usually corresponded to how “tapped in” the person giving the reading seemed to be. Some people draw the cards, know the symbols, run them through their brain and output a competent interpretation of those symbols… which has nothing to do with you or your life. Another person draws the cards, may have never learned the “proper” meanings of the symbols, but intuitively picks details out of them that apply exactly, precisely, directly to the most pressing issue in your life.

It wasn’t about the cards, not half as much as it was about that person already having access to the latent knowledge somehow. The cards just gave them a way to reel that knowledge in from the unconscious, or the aether.

Similar with astrology, as another example. You can learn all the significations and symbols and signs and everything else and still be pretty much useless if you don’t have the intuition. But if you’ve got the intuitive piece in you already, the stars will be full of little details that let your unconscious spew out wisdom.

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I think we’ve all had moments of strange intuitive sparks. Moments where we suddenly know something (or suddenly have a big, clear hunch about it) that comes seemingly out of nowhere, that’s triggered either by nothing at all, or by something so unrelated it’s almost comical.

I’ve had moments where misplaced punctuation in a text triggered a deep realization about the sender’s life that ended up being true. I’ve suddenly known a secret someone was keeping from me — in surprising detail — by the way their eyes darted away from mine for a split second on a zoom call.

Moms are always good for these. I once got in trouble because my mom saw the way my hand hesitated for a second while spearing a bite of pork, and she suddenly realized I’d been hanging out at a friend’s house that she didn’t approve of.

Some people have a much broader, deeper, and more direct access to this type of knowing. In other words, some people are just psychic. I’m not going to guess how it works, but I’ve met enough of them by now that denying it is like denying the existence of wildflowers or vulcanized rubber.

As far as I can tell, anyone can train their capacity for this kind of intuition — but you can’t really train your way into an entirely new league of intuition. Some people are just in those crazy higher leagues, and that’s how it is.

But one of the ways to maximize the capacity you do have seems to be to pick a system and train your intuition on it. Tarot and astrology are popular ones. Bird signs and cracked tortoise shells are somewhat out of fashion. I think you could do it by examining the litter in your neighborhood, if you were so inclined. As long as you find some kind of lattice to attach your intuition to, and practice practice practice with it until the engine is up and running.

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I’m aware many of you don’t care about divination, or about how I think it works. That’s why I weeded you out in the first couple paragraphs; if you can’t handle me at my “psychics are real and divination systems are trellises for their intuition” you don’t deserve me at my “this applies to basically every profession and archetype.”

There’s not a sugar-coating I can really put around this example, so I’ll just say it: I’m not convinced that the type of medicine used to heal someone matters as much as the person that’s doing the healing, and how much they’ve trained and embodied the capacities of their archetype.

The same way that if someone is truly of an intuitive archetype, and has put in work to shape the way they access and express that archetypal energy, it doesn’t matter much what system of divination they use — in that same way, if someone is truly of a healing archetype, and has put in the work to access and express that archetypal energy, it might not matter that much if they’re prescribing pharmaceuticals, mixing herbs, massaging your shoulder, or placing their hands on your chest to transfer energy.

In the case of medicine, I think it comes down to more of a mixture of the methods and the healer — but I do think that in the majority of cases, the healer matters more. Don’t at me.

This clarifies something for me about modern medicine — it’s absolutely overrun with people who have zero relationship to any form the the healer archetype. It’s swamped with people who are in it for money, status, approval, or control. People who, in other circumstances, could have been bankers or actors or lawyers or whatever else — this just happened to be the job they landed in. The people who truly have The Healer inside them are not only rare, they’re working inside a system that will do all it can to crush that archetype right out of them, amputate its ability to be expressed in any real way. Of course our health and health systems are a mess. We chased The Healer out of the healing professions.

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I think this probably applies pretty widely, to most or all Callings we might care to think of.

If someone truly has a chef-like archetypal makeup, they’ll find their way to making amazing food, no matter what type of training they receive.

If someone truly has the Teacher archetype in them, they’ll manage to foster a love of learning in their students, whether they use methodology from Montessori, or Waldorf, or rote learning, or whatever else they might latch onto.

If you truly have the archetypal energies for leadership, you’ll find yourself leading groups in ways that unite them and pull good work out of them, whether you subscribe to this or that or the other leadership style.

To that point, I’m pretty sure the best thing any one of us can do is get a good handle on our own archetypal energies and find ways to train and express them. There are some things out there that you’d probably be world-class at, if you just let yourself follow the natural gifts and inclinations and curiosities that are in you. And stop chasing the ones you’re forcing yourself to chase.