Contrary to what many esotericists and civilians imagine, one need not believe that the Cosmos delivers wisdom through which tarot cards or I Ching hexagrams, or runes, or astrological charts or whatever come up. Divination is a thinking process just as electrical engineering or film theory or medical diagnosis is a thinking process. It uses the cards-etc as an instrument to help convert semi- and sub-conscious understanding into a conscious form. One can conceive of this as creating an opening for the perception of subtle information from spiritual forces & entities, or one can conceive of this as an entirely psychological-materialist process. I myself embrace a radical agnosticism on where the information comes from, though in doing divination I do find it helpful to think as if the cards-etc contain a message from the Cosmos.
The random cards-etc present the reader with a big bouquet of multivalent meanings. The reader’s mind picks out elements of that stew, informed by everything the reader knows about life, the querent they are reading for, the question at hand, et cetera, including from spiritual forces if one conceives of the process that way. The reader takes what they notice and synthesizes it into a description of what they see the cards-etc “saying”. This usually informs a dialogue with the querent, who engages in a second layer of interpretation as their mind responds to the reader’s analysis and to their own perception of the cards-etc.
One can do divination solo, the querent responding to the cards-etc directly, without a reader, but this is notoriously difficult. The double cascade of interpretation supports a helpful sense that the insight comes from outside the querent’s own mind, even if one thinks of that as entirely illusory.
In summary, the reader draws cards-etc, notices patterns, stirs in a bunch of familiar classic ideas (change! growth! passion!), assembles that into a coherent-sounding story, and presents that to the querent; the meaning emerges from the querent’s experience of all that.
This sounds a lot like the way people project meaning into the output of LLM babblebots. I am an esotericist who takes divination seriously, and I am a skeptic of most LLM applications … but this makes me wonder whether the I think the Eliza Effect might make LLMs good at supporting divinatory readings for people.
Over on Bluesky, a wise esotericist I know challenged me suggesting this:
This idea is disgusting to me on principle. This only makes sense to do if you don’t think spiritual matters are real, because if they are, then the unethical and exploitative nature of the tech is surely a form of spiritual pollution you wouldn’t want touching your divination.
I share some of that reflex to reject LLMs as an instrument for spiritual work; my suggestion is an attempt to confront my own reaction by framing a question to explore.
I think my original thread implied that an LLM might do a human spiritual process, which was a mistake on my part. This challenge made me more clear that I am asking whether a robot plus cards-etc might provide a better instrument for solo divination than cards-etc alone. I truly have no idea.
Divination may require an input of spiritual insight beyond what lies within the querent — if not a human reader, Something Else, like a conscious nonhuman spirtual entity. If so, this suggestion is a dead end; an LLM ain’t gonna be able help with that at all.
The usefulness of a robot in divination depends on a couple of big ifs. Are there querents who do not need the full support of a human reader’s insight, but do need a more digestible instrument than raw cards-etc to provoke their own spiritual insight? Can an LLM do the necessary work of symbolic refinement to provide something more digestible?
Surely someone is trying the experiment?