“It’s all bullshit,” the sarcastic buxom redhead quipped as she called me out on reading her Tarot cards. “I wrote a paper about this stuff last semester entitled, A History of Fortune Telling and the Sociological Effects on the Masses.”
“Wow, that’s amazing,” I stated, Knowing my normal routine stack wouldn’t work on this one. She wasn’t going to start telling me her dreams and demons just because I cold-read her Tarot fortune. She was a tougher nut to crack, an intellectual, like me. And strangely I was more attracted to her because of it.
“Is this what you do? Go around reading girls’ Tarot to get their phone numbers?” She was drilling into me again, probing for cracks in the foundation of my game. But, all the while she was doing it with a slight devious smile. My calibration said she was interested, or else she would’ve just walked away, instead of verbally fencing.
“No, it’s more than that. Allow me to explain.”
I’d been here before with my back pushed against a wall by analytical women that just didn’t completely swallow my “Gypsy” routine. They had deeper questions and they knew that the answers weren’t in my cards or their palms. But what they never knew is that I had the key to unraveling their analytical minds buried deep in the history of the esoteric arts.
All esoteric arts across cultures, languages, religions, and times have the common denominator that they serve as devices for psychological investigation. The modern field of psychology was born in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated to psychological research at Leipzig University. Prior to this, outside of religion and philosophy, humanity was on its own to seek answers to the anxieties that plagued daily life and for council on the weighty decisions that must be made.
The esoteric arts evolved to fill this void encompassing diverse types, from the cliché crystallomancy, seeing the future in a crystal ball, to the involved Zi Wei Dou Shu, the combined art of reading Chinese astrology along with constellations to determine one’s fate path. The point was that for most people distraught about the present, worrisome about the future, or concerned about the past these methods brought them peace so that they could lead fulfilling lives.
The esoteric device in every varying art is replaceable. It is required only as a root designed to draw individuals out of their mind to reveal to the fortune teller their problems. In the scholarly article Social Meanings of the Occult, by Danny L. and Lin Jorgensen it is stated that when deciphering life problems people have “many possible paths to addressing recurrent problems, seeking solutions, creating identities, and associating on the basis of common beliefs. While some people are inclined to do this on a casual basis or as a matter of entertainment, other people make it a career or a way of life.” One could easily replace the incense and Tarot cards of a Gypsy with the leather couch and dream journal of a psychotherapist, both inducing similar effects. In good fortune telling there is no actual reading of the future. The real art is in drawing out someone’s questions and the inherent anxieties and answers that are attached to those questions in the mind.
Based on these philosophies I’ve never thought of the esoteric arts as ways to predict an individual’s future. What I do view them as is a quick way to get to the mental meat of someone you just encountered. Normally, people aren’t apt to dissect their fears, desires, and secrets with a random person they meet at a bar. This means that generally speaking a routine of boring conversations volleys, sometimes dragged out over weeks, occurs before you really get to know someone. It’s almost improper by our social morays to approach a woman and say, “Tell me what you want the most from life.”
But, if you approach with a Tarot deck and tell her to “Ask the cards a question that is dear to your life” then that’s a different story. Suddenly you have broken a down a barrier two people immediately sharing their real selves with one another. The next time you find yourself being busted on a cold read by and intelligent skeptic feel free to paraphrase my thoughts here. This intellectual diatribe is a DHV in itself.
