Enchantment

Vs the mundane

In my life I have a good amount of time for reading, and I’m blessed to be a fast reader, so combined, those two things mean that I’m able to read an awful lot about Tarot here on Substack. Because, let me tell you, there are a lot of Tarot people writing away here!

And I really enjoy that reading. I’ve read loads of Tarot books through the decades, and have garnered much from them, but, they do start to seem all alike after awhile. Not so much with Tarot essays here on Substack. Each writer is unique in their Tarot practice, and that really shines through, keeping everything interesting.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Today though, I read an essay that I found a bit disturbing. Depressing in a way, I guess.

I won’t link to the essay here, because I don’t want to hit another writer with anything negative. I’ll just say that it bothered me. And that’s rather strange for me, because I very often read things that I disagree with, I simply disagree and move on. But this one stuck with me.

In essence, the writer proposed that one can/could/should, read Tarot by simply drawing the cards into a little spread, and then ask AI to interpret them. In other words, let AI do the actual reading.

And that is sad to me.

I think we can all agree that drawing cards into a spread, and then reading word for word out of the ‘Little White Book’ does not make a proper Tarot reading. But, what can AI do other than just that? Perhaps it can add a few ‘nice’ words here and there, but it is trained on all those ‘Little White Books’ it can’t move beyond them. By its very nature it can have no intuition, it can’t connect with the unconscious, nor the divine. It’s a computer with a predictive text model. X’s and O’s. Ones and Zeros.

Sad.

It is sad to see such a wondrous tool, something that I see as connecting with the sacred denigrated to a sort of weird text and symbol based video game.

That stuck with me today as I spent much of the day cleaning and organizing my office. A chore that I typically put off until it becomes almost impossible to sit anywhere in the office given the books and papers scattered everywhere.

Eventually all the no longer relevant paper was bagged for the trash. All the books went back up on the shelves. All the book bags were hung. The still relevant paper filed away. The wood was oiled, and the dust was scattered. I even gave the whiskey glasses a good washing.

The long avoided project done, I returned to Substack.

And when I did so, I found a really delightful essay from

Paul Hughes-Barlow

entitled: Taro As Grimoire.

It renewed my faith that not all are abandoning the sacredness of Tarot for AI and ‘pick a pile’ readings on TikTok.

I won’t claim that I know how Tarot works. Indeed, I don’t imagine that anyone can honestly make that claim. But decades of experience has proven to me that it works. Over and over again I have seen that Tarot works. Not sometimes, always. I can’t explain it, but when I work with the cards I can feel that there is something there, something guiding them, something guiding me. I can’t explain it, but I understand it as sacredness, a communion with the divine.

Enchantment if you will.

Something that will never be found by those using computers to give them ‘readings.’ And that’s sad to me, for those who take those shortcuts are being cheated. Cheated by themselves.

I see this in another part of my life as well. I’m an extremely active Freemason.

There was a time, long ago, when Freemasonry was widely seen by Masons as sacred, enchanted if you will. A time when it was viewed romantically and mythically. Then a huge membership boom hit it immediately following the two World Wars, a tidal wave of new men who focused almost exclusively on it’s business and charitable efforts.

Masons still opened their Lodges, thereby transforming mundane space into sacred space, and closed them a couple of hours later, changing that sacred space back to the mundane. But little to nothing sacred happened between that opening and closing. Just discussions about bills to pay, meals to plan, fundraisers for institutional sized charitable endeavors. It was like that for decades.

But that’s all changing now. I see it every day. Young men, men in their 20’s and 30’s are joining Lodges and slowly transforming them. More and more reawakened, re-enchanted Lodges appear each and every year. Because these young men want to return Freemasonry to what it was long ago. They want to explore sacred things within the sacred spaces they build.

Enchantment, the re-enchantment of Masonry, if you will.

There is no doubt that our society is radically divided right now. Political and cultural divisions are everywhere, breaking friendships, families, neighborhoods. Artificial divisions stoked by those who benefit from the conflicts.

But, I see another division impacting our society as well.

A division between those who seek a world of enchantment, and those who seek a sterile world of consumerism.

What is Tarot without intuition and enchantment but a video game or a rote formula regurgitated from memory?

I know that I’ll never understand it, but clearly some prefer that second form, ‘answers’ without meaning. Cards without depth.

Me?

I’ll continue to look at my cards as sacred tools. Tools with which I can commune with the divine. Maybe I hold an overly romantic view of life, but I seek to be enchanted in the few short years I have on this earth. A sterile life of plastic and algorithms holds no draw for me.

Maybe that’s why The High Priestess has always been ‘my card.’