8.13.2024

So--what about those VP readings last week?

As many of you know, I collaborated with Gemini Advanced (a Generative AI bot) to produce a 3-card Tarot “reading” for each of the final six candidates being considered by Vice-President Harris as her running mate. If you haven’t seen that post, or would like to refresh:

And here are links to my earlier discussions of Tarot and AI:

A Quick Recap

Back in April, I experimented with a generic AI prompt chain someone had created to generate 3-card Tarot readings. I found the results unexpectedly interesting. Weeks passed! Then I saw this post by Frederick Woodruff, based on his 3-card readings for the VP candidates.

I decided to do the same thing, but using the AI process. And I published my findings on August 4, the day before Harris was scheduled to announce her decision.

Important note: I did not look at Woodruff’s readings before I ran my own. I try to know as little as possible that might affect the cards, and I’ve decided the same practice should apply even if there aren’t any “real” cards!

After the AI reading was done, I scanned Woodruff’s post, and noted that the two candidates who had the most positive results in his reading were also the two who were most prominent in mine. But I still did not look at the cards he pulled.

That was partly to avoid both “confirmation bias” and “competition bias.” But it was also because Woodruff reads almost exclusively with the Crowley-Harris Thoth cards—and looking at them makes me feel dizzy. Literally.

I’m not sure what that latter bit signifies! Lucky for me, though, Woodruff offers plenty of commentary on his interpretations. And I learned that in the original reading, Walz’s cards had seemed to suggest significant challenges.

In fact, he seemed the most problematic of the whole group . . . .

So when news broke that only Walz and Shapiro remained in contention, Woodruff did another pull to see what was going on—and here is the result in a nutshell:

Tim Walz: The Star and Wheel of Fortune...Wow!

For a guided tour of these twists and turns, consult this must-see video:

That’s the background. And here’s a retrospective assessment of the cards that came up in my AI collaboration.

Now that we know . . .

In posting about my experiment, I didn’t interpret the individual 3-card spreads. At the time, I wanted to focus on the whole group.

But once Walz was selected, I went back for a closer look. In my spread, as in Woodruff’s, Shapiro and Kelly were obvious stars. Both shared the World card with Kamala Harris, while none of the other candidates had a trump card.

Shapiro, who was considered by many to be the front-runner, had two trumps—and not just any two! He drew The World and The Fool, first and last cards of the Major Arcana.

On the other hand . . . Walz was the only candidate who did not have a Pentacle card. Pentacles dominated the whole group of 21 cards, and a Pentacle card was the one thing shared with Harris by everyone but Walz.

Not only that, Walz had one of the only two cards that are often perceived as negative. The other (Six of Swords) belonged to dark horse J. B. Pritzker.

Walz’s negative-ish card was the Seven of Cups, which is often interpreted along the lines of self-deception, susceptibility to temptation, or escapism.

Personally, I have always had it filed under “all things to all people,” so that was the first thing I thought of—and it seems to correlate with the way Walz has been perceived since his selection. Both in good ways (which seem to fit pretty well) and bad (which seem like a stretch, but there you are).

The other two cards in Walz’s trio were the Two of Cups (which he shared with Kelly) and the Three of Wands. Pleasant enough—but rather small cards in the great scheme of things!

At this point in my thinking about the VP cards, synchronicity intervened, and I got some inspiration from an unlikely source.

All about the energy . . .

I’m a news junkie anyway, but I had pricked up my ears even further in the several days after the VP pick. So I turned on Stephanie Ruhle’s Friday night panel discussion, and about six minutes in, I heard someone say:

Walz is this interesting yin-yang energy match.

“Someone” turned out to be a Slate podcaster named Mary Harris, who I’d never heard of before. She went on to say—and I’m paraphrasing for brevity:

Harris has “prosecutor” energy, “cop” energy, while Walz has “teacher” energy, “coach” energy. It’s an interesting statement of what Kamala Harris herself thinks she needs.

(You can listen to the whole thing here—it’s interesting—but that’s the gist of the energy part.)

Mary Harris’s interpretation seemed spot-on to me. So I took another look at the whole group in my spread, this time from an “energy” perspective.

My conclusion: Shapiro and Kelly both had very high energy in their cards, and both shared Major Arcana energy with Harris. In a way—and this was my first thought when looking at the cards for substance—they cancel each other out.

By contrast, Walz did not have a trump card, but did have the Two of Cups, suggesting the potential of a close emotional connection. Plus the Seven of Cups, suggesting a willingness and ability to fit in, as needed.

Personally, I have had a warmer response to Walz than I usually do to public figures—and the key for me seems to be his physical presence. Partly through body-language, and partly with gestures, he appears to be connecting very directly with whatever is going on around him.

A final observation for now. Sharing the powerful World card could make two people strong allies in a collaboration of equals. But when there’s a structural power imbalance (boss and not-boss), two people with the same amount of ambition don’t necessarily make the best team.

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Triangles!

Maybe because of all the 3-card readings, I suddenly found myself thinking about triangles. Which I hardly ever do. My geometry goes to circles and squares, as a rule.

But that night I drew three triangles, just idly. I thought about what to do with them, and decided to join them with another one—like so:

It looks like something familiar, but it doesn’t seem to be. Or at least Google didn’t find any analogues.

I couldn’t think of any particular meaning or purpose for putting triangles together in this particular way, so I set the whole thing aside. Until the next morning, when it suddenly seemed obvious.

I’ve left the drawing blank for now—so think of your own uses for it, if any! I’ll tell you in the next post what I came up with. (Hint: It involves adding a circle.)

Of course I went looking for a triangular Tarot deck, and was reminded all over again that there’s a Tarot connection for everything. In this case, the charming Trilateral Tarot, created by Mara Ann Thorson in 2012.

At first I couldn’t find out more about the deck—but then I did . . .

Another cliffhanger!

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As always, thanks for reading. More soon, C