SPoT ~ Pierre Ouellet's Graduate (Dissertation) Research Workshop Abstract

Graduate (Dissertation) Research Workshop

Abstract for Pierre Ouellet's Presentation

Tarot: Divination as Social Practice

February 26, 1999; 235 Northrop Frye Hall

Victoria University, University of Toronto, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Divination is defined as the act or practice of attempting to foretell the future or explore the unknown by occult means. Throughout history, it has been practised as a communal social activity having specific objectives and taking place for particular reasons at significant moments in the life of the collective or its individual members. Consequently, these practices assume particular and specific meaning for their participants. Furthermore, the practices of divination, either as reading or as being read, can be considered in terms of their semiotic nature that is, in terms of how the generation and manipulation of a given set of signs serve to beget meaning which can be interpreted as relevant, either as a theoretical explanation of the world or as an engagement in the practices of everyday life.

This paper proceeds simultaneously along several complementary paths and allows these various conceptual strands to merge into a coherent overview of divination as method, theory and practice. It begins by discussing divination as a social phenomenon whose existence can be traced in Western culture from pre-Hellenic times to the present. This general introduction further divides the practices of divination into two principal categories autoscopic practices, which are the result of the internal mental processes of the medium and heteroscopic methods, whereby external signs are read by the diviner for their meaning as portents or auguries. This will be followed by a brief examination of the implications that each of these methodologies might have for exploring the unknown or foretelling the future.

Early systems of divination generally presupposed that the visible or material world was the reflection of the invisible world within which spirits and other forces were constantly at odds and at play. Such a notion can be found in the original conception of hermeneutics, as the art of interpretation connected with divination, of early Greek philosophy. This was a process of explanation, interpretation and translation which Plato discusses, for instance, in the Epinomis. A more recent conception of hermeneutics is suggested by Todorov whereby both interpretation and divination exist as hermeneutic arts whose only purpose is the discovery of meaning, or, at least, its recovery. While hermeneutics reveals secondary and tertiary meanings which lie beyond the primary level of a given text, divination uncovers meaning in objects and circumstances which, at first, seem devoid of it.

Another productive investigation of divinatory practices which informs this paper is to be found in the anthropological field work which focussed, earlier this century, on what were then termed "primitive cultures." Notable examples of this type of work are the writings of British anthropologist E. Evans Pritchard and of his American counterpart Victor Turner. In two remarkable essays on the subject of religious ritual of the Ndembu tribe of Northern Rhodesia, Turner contrasts and juxtaposes divination, which is the process of making visible what had previously been hidden with another proactive practice, which he terms revelation, and which seeks to articulate, in a ritual setting, that which defies verbal or conceptual expression. "Thus divination is a mode of analysis and a taxonomic system, while revelation is the prehension of experience taken as a whole." Turner always keeps in sight the social function of such practices as he theorises that "Divination seeks to uncover the private malignity that is infecting the public body, while revelation asserts the fundamental power and health of the society and nature grasped integrally."

The overview of the historical and anthroposocial aspects of divinatory practices is followed in this paper by a specific look at the Tarot as an example of a relatively recent divinatory system which combines, in its best versions, the autoscopic and heteroscopic methods in a unique and particular way. This section begins by considering the esoteric or occult claims made regarding the Tarot in terms of its origins and the nature of its symbolic language. This examination is then complemented by a less fanciful exoteric commentary which questions these assertions and proposes to explain the Tarot in scientific terms.

The second interpretation of the Tarot, which might be termed its mundaneû story, allows one to witness the transformation of a simpleû deck of cards into an impressive system of divination while the possibility of any logical or occult reasons for such an occurrence are denied. In this light, the Tarot appears as nothing more than a clever fabrication which requires both the credulous involvement of misguided individuals and the dishonest efforts of con artists of varying degrees of sophistication and skill. The weakness of this thesis, or rather its blindspot, lies in the fact that only certain communal or individual social practices and beliefs are acknowledged as valid or socially useful and therefore given credence while other ways of knowing or being in the world are simply dismissed. Of course, by using a tightly focussed empirical frame of reference grounded within the always narrow and rigid definition of scientific methodology, one is able to continuously discredit a great number of human endeavours, including religious practices alongside the more esoteric divinatory practices such as the Tarot. The question then becomes, how can one explain not only its continued appeal and its presence throughout the ages as a social practice but the unflinching loyalty of those who engage in this activity as something more than simply a symptom of collective neurosis?

The next section of the paper proceeds to examine a typical reading of the Tarot in light of a limited number of relevant theoretical models. The following questions are central to this inquiry: how can divination be understood in relation to religion, magic or science (to borrow an already well-elaborated anthropological formulation), how does divination intersect these activities and engender epistemological perspectives and positions? On the practical side, what are the ontological implications of acts of participation and engagement in a divinatory practice such as the Tarot? How do the divining and divined subjectûs conceptions of time, memory, probability and causality become implicated in such a practice and informed or shaped by it? Is divination a function of the inevitability of personal or communal crisis, and must it be understood as a form of intervention, an attempt at redress and reinterpretation? Finally, how are genuine and lasting notions of self and identity possibly constructed when mediated by divinatory practices? This particular aspect of the problem under investigation is highly complex. If identity and subjectivity can be determined or inscribed by oneûs engagement in divinatory practices such as the Tarot, what are the implications of such imbrications in terms of social practices and community? In other words, what happens when individual and collective orient to the future in different or contradictory ways?

While the esoteric symbolic systems of divination under consideration appear, on the surface, to allow for a wide diversity of particular interpretations, they simultaneously, circumscribe these generated meanings within the context of the reader and the read text. As a result, it can be shown, upon careful reflection, that these varied interpretations exhaust themselves of their own accord and ultimately yield similarity under the guise of difference. It may, in fact, be the work and purpose of all such symbolic or archetypal systems, to privilege the individual as different on the subjective plane while uncovering the commonality of essential wisdoms that bind individuated subjects together into a collective. In this conclusion, one can find a critique of the work of Propp on folklore and of the early structuralists such as Levi-Strauss whose project was based, in part, on the belief that it was possible to reduce any given set of relationships to a finite number of variations or permutations within which all meaning could be contained or generated. This shortsightedness failed to account for the infinite potential for complexity contained within each unit of the set, a situation which is just beginning to be addressed by new fields of inquiry such as chaos or complexity theory applied to semiotics and narratology.

Another significant theoretical approach examined in this paper suggests that divinatory practice might also be understood as a form of narrative deployment or story telling which emerges from a state of desire that seeks its own recovery, through language, from a moment of crisis. This is the reading itself, which is as much about a disclosure of the problem as it is concerned with the possibility of communication itself. Such a narrative is not, in the final analysis, about deficiency, or the dialectic of shortcoming and compensation, but rather about what Sartres would term the "nothingness of being" which demands a necessary fiction in order to fill the ellipsis of meaning created at the moment of loss. These formulations therefore allow for a theory of the Tarot as text both in terms of the subject of the reading (the actual spread, the querent and the question posed) and the reading subject (the individual performing the divination). This conception further informs an epistemological perspective which might best be termed conjectural or experiential rather than empirical, and articulated in terms of intuition or insight within an enlarged theory of judgment which exists at the intersection of formal and intuitive forms of knowing.

In response to the questions raised by the epistemological ground of divinatory practices, it is further proposed that such systems of signs and symbols exist as abstractions at the level of form rather than of content while they remain nonetheless sufficiently rigorous or rigid for codifying and stating the elusive categories of conjectural knowledge. In the Tarot, all the cards are clues, in a sense, which must be interpreted or read on several planes at once through the inferential partnership of the reader and the subject at the moment of the reading. The event referred to and the effect(s) which result from these exchanges are situated, in their uniqueness, beyond simple repeatability or redundancy while they still adhere to some general conception of the universality of human experience. In this sense, each card, and each symbol within each card, can either stand for an archetypal moment, such as the crisis previously mentioned or signify a particular orientation of the subject to the event under consideration as typified by the Fool who proceeds in blissful ignorance of his own dilemma or predicament. In this system, personal characteristics are blended or shaped by the type of events which contain them and these serve to contextualize not only the behaviour of the subject at the moment of the reading but the possibilities of outcome. Conjectural knowledge is, thus, both individual and particular as well as cultural or contingent and both of these spheres, which ascribe identity to phenomena beyond voluntary control, inform each other while preserving, at all times, their polysemic potential.

Throughout this paper, the Tarot is represented as a present-day example of the human questioning which, from the dawn of time, has sought to decipher the future in order to gain an increased measure of material security and psychic quietude. This contemporary example of divination is offered as a parallel to other often contradictory but more scientifically accepted endeavours such as the formulae of probability theory and the various mathematical laws which seek to stabilise chance through approximation and calculation. In this sense, the Spread can be ultimately understood as a complex branching system wherein a particular decision, position or utterance, has a decisive impact of both what has preceded and what is to follow, outside of the strict disciplinarity of linear thought or action. It is worth noting that the Tarot reading, as a practice, can never have a precise objective or goal, but, rather, that it comes into being as a unique momentary encounter wherein the efforts of two previously separate and remote subjects, through the matrix of an external system of contingent symbolic signification, become focussed on the elucidation of a particular situation or problem. This is an act whose outcome is, by its very nature, oriented to the future and can only occur outside of a non-existent present which is proposed, at its limit, under erasure of one type or another. Finally, the simplest explanation for the Tarot might reside in its appeal to the most fundamental of human needs, that which calls for community and seeks mutual support and recognition in moments of crisis. All other interpretations, however interesting and fanciful, mysterious and alluring, thus only serve, at best, to maintain the primacy of imagination as the necessary and essential spirit of collective endeavour and aspiration.

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Pierre Ouellet, SPT PhD II
Master's MRP (complete)

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