Divination and “AI”

I am an esotericist who takes divination seriously as a thinking process, neither more nor less different from electrical engineering than film theory differs from medical diagnosis.

Contrary to what some esotericists and most civilians imagine, when doing divination using tarot cards (or I Ching hexagrams, or runes, or astrological charts, or whatever) one need not believe that the Cosmos delivers wisdom through a spooky process which controls which of these tokens come up.

Each token in a divinatory system (a card or rune or whatever) has a complex, multivalent meaning. Famously, the Death card in tarot does not necessarily mean actual death — readers take it more often as signifying sharp changes and transitions, carving away the unimportant to attend to the important, and so forth. I personally like tarot because of how this manifests in the complexity of the imagery on the cards, but even a spare, simple rune has this quality; isa (ᛁ) signifies ice, stillness, reflection, observation, facing fear, endurance, the antithesis to primordial fire, and more. Learning a divinatory system involves developing a rich, complex sense of what each token can signify.

During divination, drawing several random tokens offers the reader a big bouquet of symbolism rich in meaning. The reader’s mind surveys that, picks out elements, and synthesizes those into a description of what they see the tokens “saying”. This is not a reasoned process, it is an “intuitive” process. Reading tarot, I find that different elements of a card stand out for me in different readings; I may focus on the fallen king under Death’s horse in one reading, then in the next reading find myself thinking about the odd sunrise (or is it a sunset?) between two towers in the background.

What are the mechanics of that “intuition”? One can conceive of it as receiving information from spiritual forces & entities, or one can conceive of it as an entirely psychological-materialist process. Practitioners commonly describe how everything feeds a divinatory reading — not just the tokens but the querant’s question, what the reader notices about the querent, what the reader knows about life, et cetera. This is the kind of subtle mental process Freud was trying to address by talking about conscious thought being the tip of an iceberg which included “das Unbewusste”, the unconscious. Does das Unbewusste draw on information from spirits or other cosmic forces? Jung thought so, and many readers find it useful to think so. Jung would also say that the Cosmos arranges synchronicities — meaningful coïncidences — so that the hand of the Cosmos chooses the right tokens to appear. But one may also presume that contemplating a novel mix of arbitrary symbols just brings forward analysis das Unbewusste does on information it has received through mundane channels, that perceiving meaning in the spread of tokens is just a useful illusion.

Esotericists generally counsel resisting the temptation to overthink those mechanics. I embrace a radical agnosticism on where the insight “really” comes from … though in doing divination I find it very helpful to pretend as hard as I can that the particular tokens which come up contain a carefully-composed message from the Cosmos.

The relationship between a querent and a reader parallels the relationship between a reader and a spread of tokens. What a querent absorbs from a reading is the querent’s own process of “intuitive” interpretation drawing on the set of ideas the reader presents to them. I submit that this double cascade of interpretation further demonstrates how divination is a structured thinking process; doing divination solo, a querent drawing their own tokens without a reader, is notoriously difficult.

Software systems attempting to deliver divination have been around for decades, but they are unsatisfying. Having a computer program spit out a fixed meaning for a tarot card or astrological correspondence — “beep trine between the Sun and Saturn signifies a need for caution in financial & business concerns beep” — does none of the subtle analysis I describe above. This is the same difficulty as doing divination solo.

But I wonder about LLMs, the technology animating recent discussion of “AI”. I have a hunch that they might enable better divination robots than the proceedural software systems of the past. The way I describe the mental process in divination above seems to rhyme with the way people (sometimes dangerously) project meaning into the output of LLM babblebots. Maybe a querent can exercise the Eliza Effect with an LLM as a substitute for a human reader? Or cultivate that as a skill easier to develop than ordinary solo reading?

Over on Bluesky, a wise esotericist I know challenges this suggestion:

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.

As both an esotericist and as a nerd skeptical of “AI” boosters’ breathless enthusiasm for supposed applications of LLMs, I share that impulse, but I am also trying to resist becoming a reflexive LLM hater.

I think they were partly responding my original thread’s implication that an LLM might do a human spiritual process, which I do not want to suggest.

Rather, considering the potential usefulness of a divination robot 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 tokens to provoke their own spiritual insight? Can an LLM do the necessary work of symbolic refinement to provide something useful to that purpose? Does divination 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?

I don’t know. Surely someone is trying the experiment?