divination or

so i guess one thing i want to get out of the way early on is that i am not talking about using the cards to predict the future.

case is emphatic on this point. what he calls "divination" is something other. a reading of the energies present at a given moment in a given situation. to paraphrase not all that closely. and to not get into this whole business about "inimical astral entities."

the cards have been, for me, a tool for what I call "structured rumination." you bring yourself in your present situation to the table, you lay out some cards in a spread, with position assignments indicating what a card in that position will refer to, and then sit and consider.

the eight of cups, disentanglement, or what crowley and his crowd called "indolence," turns up in position nine on a celtic cross, as something you may have overlooked. and as it happens, yeah, i had not thought of that. what would it be like to just walk away from this.

and the eight is maybe well or ill dignified by cards in the surrounding positions, and over here is the page of cups, and down here is another eight.

and suddenly the whole thing falls into place as a sort of mandala, with several cards seeming to lie in this cluster in the foreground and others in that, farther back, and with almost visible lines of connection running through these cards here and those over there.

and then it shifts and resolves into a different set of connections. and you can almost see how the two fit together.

and after twenty minutes or half an hour of quiet reflection, you come away with a somewhat different perspective on whatever it is the cards seemed to be talking about.