[published in "The Flatland Oracles," my previous blog, on July 19, 2005]
My dear friend, Elinor Spancel (not her real name...), is a Tarot reader---a professional. Naturally, I don’t believe she can really foretell the future, but at the same time, she is always right. For this reason, I sometimes consult her in times of severe doubt and stress.
She’s a skillful reader and a conscientious one and therefore doesn’t pretend to foretell the future. She tells you what you should do in the present. She tells you how to avoid the outcomes you don’t want and increase your chances of obtaining the ones you do. And isn’t that what we all really want from an augury, from prayer, or even from our therapists? And it's what you never get.
Elinor is very clear that she can't foretell the future. She says it's impossible to describe the characteristics of an entity that doesn't exist. Elinor told me back in college, when she first got interested in divination, that the only real use of an oracle is to tell you what you should be doing now, based on the factors---both internal and external----that are already in place. If you look at those carefully, you won't know what is going to happen, but you might get a sense of the direction in which events are tending and what you need to do in response. And for this reason, she's not like any other fortuneteller I've ever heard of.
