For instance, those who view astrology as inaccurate and absurd will quite logically and reasonably deny that planetary positions influence our lives in any way. From their point of view, skeptics are absolutely right—but only because they fail to grasp the basic rule of magical perception and thinking. Of course, the stars and planets as physical bodies don’t exert that kind of influence, but there exists a correspondence—that is, an analogy—between their movements and our destiny, character, and life circumstances. So, what connects these phenomena is an analogy, one that doesn’t exist objectively in the sense of how we today define something as real, but rather exclusively in the mind of the practitioner. The same applies to the reading of tarot cards, geomantic figures, or I Ching hexagrams. Objectively speaking, they’re just symbols someone is playing with—yet the core process of divination, interpretation, and prediction takes place in the practitioner’s mind. It is something entirely subjective, and yet it is often from that position of subjectivity that the diviner accurately perceives what was, what is, and what will be. A successful diviner, in truth, reads from their own imagination. The positions of the planets and stars in the sky, the way the cards were laid out, or the constellation formed by specific symbols all serve as triggers for an inner imaginative process—that is, for a magical understanding of reality. And that understanding is archaic. At this point, it’s useful to present key excerpts from Béla Hamvas that are relevant to this discussion:
“The vision and thinking of historical man rest on logical opposites; the vision and thinking of archaic man rest on analogies... Analogy means that between every phenomenon, person, shape, substance, or quality there is both difference and connection. The fact that everything in the world differs, yet is the same; everything is the same thing, but that same thing appears in multiplicity—this is what the ancients called analogy... In the recognition of analogies, logical reasoning is not decisive but rather a deeper and more elemental experience. Analogies are experienced by manas, the inner sense. It survives by directly perceiving the mutual relationship of inner images revealed before it. Such a direct, logically inexplicable connection exists between metaphysical principles and numbers... Historical man does not think in images but in meaningful oppositions and is completely blind compared to archaic man. The intellectual activity of modern man is abstract and unreal... The hallmark of the world is not in oppositions, but in differences... Everything similar is different and everything different is similar, though similarity never entirely overlaps, and difference never turns into absolute opposition. Opposition is not a property of the world or of reality, but of abstract meaning... To see through analogies is to be sensitive to similarities and differences... In archaic times, human knowledge was not a conceptual construction of abstract qualities, but personified and genetic.”
— Béla Hamvas, Scientia Sacra
If someone in the 21st century
wishes to engage in the occult—or even just to understand the
worldview of ancient people—or wishes to step outside the
frameworks of contemporary thinking, they must learn to think in a
way proper to that world. It’s akin to reviving a kind of
epistemological and cognitive atavism. Of course, achieving this
completely is difficult, but learning tables of correspondences and
practicing their visual and spatial representation is one of the
first steps in that direction.
When we mentally establish a chain
such as: Moon / silver / water / the letter M / feminine / night /
Water trigram / the symbol of the bow / the veil / cyclicality / the
left eye / dog / owl / dream, and when we internalize this
associative sequence of similarities so that it begins operating
automatically in our minds—that is a solid starting point. We won’t
equate these things as identical, but we’ll learn how to connect
what we perceive or confront with the cosmos—and ultimately with
ourselves. Thus, I can take a silver coin and claim it represents the
Moon, even though the coin obviously has no direct connection to
Earth’s satellite. Yet the two objects share a common ideal
quality. That is the nature of the magical link between them. Once my
mind adopts a certain set of such connections, that set can endlessly
branch and expand.
Ultimately, all phenomena are interconnected, yet they differ enough from one another. It is up to our minds to group the properties that link or distinguish them into a kind of inventory of the world. Some have long rightly said that God is everywhere and in everything, yet still cried out that God cannot be in a statue, in stone, in wood, or in a painting. But God most certainly can be in a cloud, in a statue, in a tree, in a painting, in a symbol, a letter, a word, in the stars—and finally, in human beings themselves. This view is, in essence, animistic. Yet animism is the embodiment of the ancient worldview, which was far more immediate than the one that took shape during the historical process and the rise of conceptual thinking at the expense of image-based thought.
Those who declared that God cannot be present in a thing or form effectively severed or cut off that object or phenomenon from the continuity of the world’s unity—at least in their own minds. In doing so, they closed themselves off, and those they influenced, from one potential experience. In that sense, the continuous process of closing off and separating has brought us to today’s neo-barbaric state—where humans no longer respect nature, other people, or even themselves, having separated living from non-living nature. Today, we witness absurd attempts to reunite the living and non-living through some kind of cyborgization process.
Those who once condemned the worship of stone statues of gods or stars feared that people would worship empty objects rather than the divine—but doesn’t the worship of stone mean precisely the discovery of the divine within the stone? That was merely the expression of a turning point that had occurred long before. It was a radical response to the decadence of previous religious-magical formulas, as the historical process represented a distancing from the original unity of the world. The result was the abstract God—God as a concept—which ultimately led to atheism as a negation not only of that abstract God but also of what preceded it, which the concept of God itself had previously negated.
In light of all this, tarot is a form of neo-animism, as its followers often attribute to its images and symbols more than just archetypal significance. As a tool of divination, tarot brings us into contact with the beyond—with the spirits of the tarot. For the initiates, the cards are alive. Moreover, tarot operators have etched all the cards deeply into their memory.
