My Tarot teacher – Dolores Nabors, who died last year at 88 – taught me that there are two things a reader should never do. Dolores said to never predict a death, and to never tell someone their spouse is having an affair. The cards may always be right, but readers are fallible humans – sometimes we get it wrong. And if we’re wrong about a death or about an affair, we can cause great harm to our clients.
I don’t always follow Dolores’ rule to the letter, but I absolutely agree with its spirit. We have an obligation to relay the messages we divine as clearly and as accurately as we can. If that means we have to deliver bad news, so be it. But we also have an obligation to remember that we might be wrong, or that a key player may suddenly change direction and change the course of events with them. So we need to buffer bad news with realistic odds for and against what we see.
I hear there’s a Twitter argument going on about the ethics of reading astrology in regards to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some are making predictions about how the invasion will go. Others are saying this is unethical. I’m not familiar with the specifics of the predictions and I have no intention of trying to evaluate them.
Instead, I want to talk about the ethics of divining world events. What can we see and what can we say about it?
Long range divination: themes, not specifics
I sometimes compare divination to turning on your headlights when you’re driving at night. Your headlights won’t tell you how to drive, but they will show you what’s in the road ahead of you, so you can make a timely and informed decision for yourself. And also, the further out you go, the less useful your headlights are. If there’s a stalled car 100 yards in front of you, you can see it clearly. If it’s a quarter mile ahead, it’s not quite so clear. If it’s five miles ahead on a curvy road, you can’t see it at all.
The further out you go in time and the broader you go in scope, the more divination communicates themes and concepts rather than specific answers.
Every January I do divination for the coming year. It’s useful, but more for understanding events as they happen than for any preparations they inspire.
Astrology is generally more useful for predicting long-range events than Tarot, runes, or other sortilege. But remember that while numerous astrologers warned us that 2020 would be a very difficult year, no one saw that the worst pandemic in a century was coming.
If I do a reading for something that may or may not happen next week, I expect to get an accurate and specific answer. If I do a reading for how things are going to be six months from now, I expect to get themes and possibilities.
So if someone tells me they can predict specific outcomes in world events, I’m going to be skeptical about their abilities, or their ethics, or both.
The future of nations is extremely complicated
A nation is comprised of many people. The population of Ukraine is 44 million – the population of Russia is 144 million. It’s tempting to think of Russia as the extension of Vladimir Putin, but while Putin exercises an extraordinary amount of power, he isn’t the only oligarch in the country. His orders have to be carried out by a chain of people, all of whom are humans with varying degrees of competence and commitment.
Nations are influenced by weather, which is growing harder and harder to predict as the climate changes. They’re influenced by geography and natural resources, by religion and culture. And in this interconnected world of today, they’re influenced by people, trends, and events in other nations.
An accurate divination has to be able to project where all these moving parts are going to be at any given moment in time. That’s beyond the capacity of our conscious minds. It’s beyond the capacity of computer programs. And history shows it’s mostly beyond the capacity of divinatory skills.
If you’re divining for world events, have some humility. You’re dealing with a very complicated situation.
Our Gods aren’t big on sharing details about the future
Are the many Gods omniscient? I tend to think not, but I do believe They have far more knowledge and wisdom than we do. That makes Them much better at foreseeing major world events. Occasionally, one or more of Them will share some of that foresight.
The Morrigan – and Others – have warned us about Tower Time for over a decade. Bad things have happened and more bad things will happen. But specifics? As I often say, the Morrigan has many virtues – transparency is not one of them.
Conventional wisdom across many religions and cultures says the Gods don’t tell us much about the future because They want us to focus on the present. Christianity tells its followers to simply trust in the Christian God. Most Pagan religions encourage us to concentrate on living virtuously and heroically regardless of the circumstances.
But still, we want to know what’s coming. We want to prepare ourselves and be ready for it. And so we do as people have done for thousands of years: we consult the stars and the cards and the omens, and we see what we can see… even if what we see is rather blurry.
We have an obligation to tell the truth as we see it
So far I’ve mainly talked about how difficult it is to divine for world events with any degree of accuracy. We need to be honest about what we can see, and about what we can’t.
But sometimes the message is clear. Sometimes the Tarot spread defies the laws of probability. Sometimes the alignment of the stars and planets points in one clear direction. And sometimes our Gods tell us “this is coming – make sure people know.”
When that happens, we have an obligation to relay what we see honestly, accurately, and completely. And that begins with being honest with ourselves about what we see.
The problem is that many times, a God will speak in images and impressions rather than in words – not unlike a Tarot reading. And then we have to translate those images and impressions into words. That means choosing words very carefully, and clearly separating what we heard or saw from what we think it means.
The Gods may be infallible – we are definitely not.
We have an obligation to communicate our level of uncertainty
On one hand, I understand that people come to diviners and astrologers seeking clarity and certainty. We read for ourselves because we want a solid answer and we can’t get one through ordinary means. Occasionally we get the crystal clarity we want.
More often, though, there is at least a bit of uncertainty. In dealing with world affairs, there’s usually a lot of uncertainty. Diviners usually express that uncertainty by making broad and general predictions, and that’s fine. But even if we get a very precise answer, we have an obligation to express our level of uncertainty.
Maybe you can express this as a percentage: “I’m 75% sure this will happen.” Maybe you can express this as a confidence interval: “I think this is going to take 6 months, but it might be as little as 3 months or as long as a year.”
We don’t live in a deterministic universe. We live in a probabilistic universe. Integrity demands that we make our predictions in probabilistic terms.
Your reading, their reality
Some of the complaints I’ve seen about astrology and divination around Russia and Ukraine are grounded in the fact that it’s rather unseemly for someone a half a world away to be making casual predictions about a war that’s killing thousands and displacing millions. This isn’t a game.
Done properly, divination isn’t a game either.
If you have something useful, share it. But as I hope is clear by now, if you’re making specific predictions about world events, I’m rather skeptical.
You will not get every reading right. No one gets every reading right. That’s OK. Examine your failures, see where you went wrong, and figure out what to do differently next time. That’s how we learn and grow. It is not unethical to be wrong.
It is, however, unethical to claim that we know more than we do, or that we know with more certainty than we actually have.
And for those who are curious, my own prayers about the future are being answered as they so often are: “just keep moving.”
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