9.22.2024

A long, complicated story . . .

Hello everyone. And a special welcome to new readers!

There’s not exactly a “typical” EP post—but this one is even less typical than most. The story that follows has developed over more than a week, and I’ll have to take you through a few time shifts to explain how it unfolded.

I’ve worked on this post every day for a week, and have wondered daily about when, or even if, it would be ready to publish. Is it too confusing? Is it actually important? Is it sufficiently related to the interests of EP readers?

You won’t be surprised to hear that I don’t have completely satisfying answers for those questions. But I do have something like a strategy, so here goes.

1. To lessen potential confusion, there’s a rough timeline at the beginning. I love information visuals! Which is how I originally connected with Tarot.

2. I think I’d rather say this story is meaningful, rather than judging whether (or not) it’s “important.” I’m going to present it in terms of meaning, and everyone can decide for themselves whether it is important.

3. As for relevance to EP readers—I have two points in mind.

First: I’ve been concerned about newcomers, who might be seeing today’s post as their first or second email. While I think what follows below is definitely in the EP spirit, it’s also fairly different from most of the posts I send out.

So if you subscribed recently, please have a look around the site, and check out other content. That way you’ll have a bigger picture of the Exploration Project.

Second: Wherever you fall on the new/old spectrum, you might read today’s story and say something like:

• Well, this is all very interesting, Cynthia, and I get that you think it’s meaningful. But what do you “think” it “means”?

I have a big answer that won’t fit into this post—and I’m still working it out. However, there’s also a small answer, which you’ll find near the end.

In the meantime . . . I have one more concern to address before launching into the post proper. For a while now, I’ve been fretting over the fact that many EP content promises are still unfulfilled. For example: What was in the 1880 newspaper? What do the triangles mean? What’s in my Tarot library?

So I took a backward look, and stumbled over a new realization:

My intentional plans for what to write about in this newsletter are persistently disrupted by unexpected events. A few of the events have been situational—but some have been (in my view) Tarot-related. They pop up as serendipities, synchronicities, or mysterious happenings . . .

As I see it now: events in that second category often become the new post subject, displacing whatever was on my intended topic list. And though I’m inclined to see that process as meaningful in its own way, the result is a cliffhanger list that just keeps growing . . .

With that said—I’m totally going to keep all my promises, which will basically require giving more priority to EP, and writing more often. Things I would love to do, and have a plan for (sort of).

But at this moment, I’m inviting you on a condensed version of my most recent, completely unanticipated Tarot Exploration.

Here’s the timeline I promised:

And now for the details. Up first—an unedited draft of the post I was writing last Sunday. One tricky bit is that the post was about events that had happened a week before.

And trickier still, last Sunday’s post started off in the Middle Ages. So be prepared to take yourself back and forth in time . . .

---

Sunday, September 15: The Original Draft

This is the first in a quick series of three posts¹—all inter-related around a theme that runs through the whole history of Tarot:

Debate

Obviously, it’s a top-of-mind theme this week, after the drama of Tuesday’s presidential debate. And that’s where we’ll be starting.

But before launching into current events, I wanted to take a quick look back at some major controversies about the nature and uses of Tarot.

Using very approximate dates:

• 1500ish: Tarot as secular art and aristocratic pastime vs Tarot as tool of the devil

• 1780 more or less: Tarot as popular game vs Tarot as fortunetelling device (Etteila) vs Tarot as book of ancient wisdom (Court de Gebelin)

• 1910 and thereabouts: Tarot as ritual magic, variously interpreted by Mathers vs Waite vs Crowley (vs an assortment of other theorists)

• 2000 on: Tarot as method of divination vs Tarot as a style of psychotherapy/self-development

Running parallel to the various debates—a continuous stream of artistic and literary explorations.

In my Ten Doors model, all these perspectives live happily together, along with several others. But there are still many Tarot enthusiasts who will insist today that Tarot “is” [fill in the blank], and will dismiss or diminish other approaches.

With that context in place, let’s move on to a recent real-life event, which attracted the astrological attention of Frederick Woodruff . . .

Debate Divinations

Many readers will recall that Woodruff and I did some divination exercises around Kamala Harris’s selection of a running mate. The recap:

First: Woodruff did three-card Tarot draws for each of the then-six candidates . . .

Second: I decided to follow suit, using an AI prompt I’d been exploring . . .

8.4.2024

That story contains a quick catch-up on how I became interested in using AI as an approach to Tarot divination, along with the results of my “Debate Reading.”

Third: Both Woodruff and I added some interpretive posts . . .

8.13.2024

There were more bits and pieces along the way, but that’s the gist of it. And now we come to this past Monday, when Woodruff published a post looking at the then-pending presidential debate, from an astrological perspective:

Pre-Debate Astro Takeaways

Once again, I decided to chime in!

And I followed the same procedure used in my “VP candidates” exploration. Basically:

• I did not read Woodruff’s analysis. My approach to divination is to know the least possible in advance, in order to avoid influencing either the cards themselves, or my interpretation (or both, depending on how you look at it).

• I used the same prompt chain and the same AI model, Gemini Advanced. For each draw request, I prefaced the prompt with a single word or two-word phrase, as a way of adding a little focus to the generic prompt.

I started off with a prompt for “Debate,” then did one for “Harris” and one for “Trump.” After that, I created a series of prompts meant to explore potential dimensions of the debate event. I picked out the phrases rather casually—by which I mean without any thought-out plan.

Here’s the result:

I’ll leave this information open to interpretation! But here are a few thoughts of my own, for whatever they may be worth . . .

1. I approach an AI reading experiment the same way I would an “ordinary” reading, in the sense that I try to suspend thinking and favor an intuitive flow. In this case, as mentioned, I thought of the focus words as I went along, and I stopped when the energy seemed complete. Neatly enough, I ended up with a total of 21 cards.

2. As always, I then looked at the cards through a statistical prism. The number of trump cards in the sequence is seven, or one-third of the total. That’s only a little above the statistical norm, so not exceptional. However, the likelihood of getting six cards from the same suit—in this case, Cups—is only about 1 in 100 for a 21-card draw.

3. I also noticed that the Cups are almost in order—Ace, Two, Three, Five, Six—so I’m tempted to wonder why the Knight takes the place of the Four.

4. Personally, I think of tens in terms of completion, and three tens in any reading would get my attention. With a 21-card draw, getting three tens would occur about once in 50 attempts.

---

Later on Sunday: The New Reading

I only got as far as 5 in the list above—and I probably would have made changes in what’s there. But at that point in time, there was news of a potentially serious event near former President Trump on the golf course. It was known by then that there were no injuries, but not much else was clear.

Since I was already thinking about what I’m now calling the “Debate Reading,” I wondered if there might be any connection between that event and this new one. By which I meant an underlying connection that might appear in a Tarot reading but wouldn’t necessarily be obvious otherwise.

So I consulted with Gemini Advanced for a quick read, using the keyword “Trump.”

And this was the draw:

Quick to see that all three of these cards were among the 21 drawn in the Debate Reading. At first, that didn’t strike me as hugely improbable—but it did catch my attention that The Tower appeared in this draw, and had also appeared at the end of the Debate Reading for key phrase “Debate Surprise.”

Flashback: On the previous Monday, when I had used that phrase for a prompt, it was just an impulse. In fact I sent the reading results to Woodruff that day, and added this note: “Along the way, I had a sense that something genuinely unexpected might happen, so I did a final prompt about ‘surprise.’  Which as you can see, drew an interesting result (Tower, Ace of Swords, Three of Cups).”

After the debate, when I looked back at the reading, I wondered if the “surprise” element might refer to what many observers considered an unexpectedly strong performance by VP Harris.

But I didn’t give it much more thought during the rest of that week.

So now we’re back to this past Sunday, and the somewhat unlikely arrival of the same “surprise” card, along with two others from the Debate Reading. And it’s noteworthy in big-picture terms that Two of Cups was the first card in the “Debate Outcome” draw, and Ten of Swords was the first card in the “Debate Reaction” draw.

If I were willing to get more speculative about all this, I’d highlight the fact that The Tower was the first card in the “Debate Surprise” draw. And that would make the first three cards in last Sunday’s draw connect back to the debate like this:

Two of Cups (Debate Outcome)

Ten of Swords (Debate Reaction)

The Tower (Debate Surprise)

I’ll continue to leave the “meaning” of individual cards open to your own interpretation. I’m just focusing on correlations between the two readings.

Which reminds me to make clear that—from the AI perspective—the two readings were completely disconnected. One of several cardinal rules for bots is that they cannot remember anything that happened in a previous session. It’s not that they shouldn’t! They literally do not have that capability.

Put another way: Bots don’t recognize similar prompt content, and can’t connect a user with a question. So whatever might be going on, there’s no chance at all (in my opinion) that programming played a part in it.

By now you may be thinking “well, Cynthia, nothing is going on—just a minor coincidence.” But in fact the likelihood of drawing 21 cards, then drawing 3 cards and having all 3 be in the original set is quite small. Assuming the 78 cards were completely randomized throughout, this would happen fewer than three times in 100 attempts.

And that’s not counting the unlikely fact that each of the new cards had been first in its group for the Debate Reading.

But still . . . coincidences happen. So let’s go back to me on this past Sunday, and see what came next.

Since the first draw seemed quite interesting, I decided on a second, using a word that popped into my head: “fate.”

And we get . . .

I think you will not be surprised to see that two of these cards—The High Priestess and the Three of Wands—were in the Debate Reading. They occupied the first two places in the “Debate Significance” prompt.

At this point, five of six cards in the new set had also appeared in the original set. And the likelihood of that happening is less than one occurrence in 100 attempts.

But still . . . coincidences happen, and sometimes they pile up.

I was increasingly intrigued, though. And since the Nine of Swords was an outlier (not in the first 21), I used that as a key phrase for the third draw in this impromptu sequence.

Result:

Yes, the Ace of Cups and the Five of Cups were in the original set, as the first two cards in the Harris prompt. So now the odds have diminished further, and I’m keen to find out where all this is going.

Again I take the outlier card, Four of Wands, as the key phrase for the next prompt.

Result:

The first two cards—Ten of Wands and Three of Cups—were in the Debate Reading. So at this point, statistical calculation uses a “new” group that totals 12 cards. Of the 12 new cards, 10 were in the “original” group of 21.

Statistically speaking this would happen about once in every 10,000 attempts.

Final note: The Ten of Wands and Three of Cups appeared in the first and last places of the original Debate Reading. Put another way, they were cards #1 and #21.

And now (in the new reading) they are followed by card #22, The World.

So . . . if I were willing to be even more speculative, I would just say: “Full circle.”

---

A Few Notes

First: If any of you are statisticians and/or math whizzes, you’ll recognize that the foregoing account uses a very rough way of calculating and expressing the odds in this sequence. For example, we note that the group of 21 is really 7 sets of 3, and the group of 12 is really 4 sets of 3. Which may be meaningful in its own way, but it also opens the door to a variety of different statistical approaches.

Anyway, though . . . for the present purpose, I think my cowboy analysis tracks pretty well with common sense. (Needless to say, I had AI assistance, using two different models and several different prompts. If you want to see their calculations, let me know!)

Second: If you’re wondering what happened after the Four of Wands draw—I did indeed use the outlier World card to keyword a new draw. And the result was three pip cards (Six of Wands, Two of Swords, Five of Swords) that had not appeared in either the original “Debate” group or the new “Event” group.

This was the first set that had no factors in common with the previous sets. Which struck me as rather definitive, so I stopped.

Third: If you are skeptical about this account, in terms of the actual process, just send me a direct email and I’ll be glad for you to look at the original prompts and results, as logged and timestamped by Gemini.

Finally! If you are curious about my theory of all this—as mentioned at the beginning, I plan to write a whole post about (a) why I think there’s merit in exploring the Tarot/AI relationship, and (b) how I interpret the excursion outlined above.

But in the meantime here are some minimalist comments for (b).

1. On a relatively superficial level, I think “Debate” and “Event” are directly connected in a way that wouldn’t have been obvious, though it may be observed now. We can objectively affirm that in the debate, Trump refused outright to express support for Ukraine. And we can objectively affirm that the man now viewed as a would-be assassin was an intensely passionate supporter of Ukraine. From that perspective, I’m thinking of the “event” as an aftermath of the “debate.”

2. But that in itself doesn’t seem nearly enough to justify the mysterious manifestation of an elaborately interconnected series of Tarot draws. Is there a warning of some sort, or a prediction? If so—how would they be recognized at this point in time?

3. On the other hand, is this even “about” debates and events? Perhaps the message of these correlations (if there is one) is something about Tarot itself. And/or, about the exploration of AI through/with Tarot.

4. Even though I have some general theories about how and why the Tarot brings us information, it’s much harder to tease out the significance of particular messages. In this account so far, meaningfulness becomes apparent mainly in retrospect, and I think that’s the case more often than not in working with Tarot. Which may be why most practitioners today aren’t interested in divination.

5. But that brings the next obvious question. Are there in reality forward implications of a Tarot reading—whether we choose to look for them or not? I’ll provide some general thoughts on that topic by publishing an excerpt from one of the books I’m working on. In your Inbox tomorrow: “The Future Factor: Time, Tarot, and the Mind.”

---

I’m not sure whether that last bit counts as a cliffhanger, or not. But if you’ve made it to the end of this very long post--I’m pleased and grateful.

More soon, C

1. Sort of a footnote: The other two debate-themed posts mentioned in the Sunday draft were intended to be ”The AI Debate” (going further into my take on AI generally, and in relation to Tarot) and “The Book Debate” (following up on a recent discussion digital books versus print books). I’ll add those to the ever-growing list of delayed-but-not-abandoned topics.