Divination Log

On the purpose of cards

Cards, I believe are not real, they don't work, they're not actually magic. However, I believe that, following my own axiom of infinite depth in any work of art, or perhaps even a belief in pure reason that an given card spread can be analyzed and understood as the mutual psychic projection of the questioner and the diviner. I myself have a special role in this since I mostly read for myself, which may or may not be taboo, who cares. I break a lot of rules. I don't use a Rider Waite deck, and sometimes I draw on cards that are not tarot. I ask questions to the cards that have very special meaning to me alone. I have a general deck (Sacred Rose tarot) and a mechanistic deck (Disco Elysium Skill Cards). The skills tell me how to do what I want to do, and how that will be expressed as the 24 archetypes each of them represents. It provides specific guidance on how to do the thing you're alread about to do. It does not give answers. The tarot deck gives answers. It can answer big questions.

The different spreads

Readings

Tarot: What will happen with the Triadic view of the self?

6 card spread:
  • Nine of Cups
  • VI The Lovers
  • 0 The Fool
  • Reversed Six of Pentacles
  • Three of Cups
  • Eight of Pentacles

Skills: How do I prepare for my bike journey

5 card spread:
  • Empathy
    • The central problem with the bike journey is empathy? Understand others, mirror neurons, the bike quest is a journey to understand myself through understanding others, but this implies there may be other issues than simply pedaling quickly...
  • Reversed Shivers
    • What's going to help me is getting extremely invested in the cities I visit. It's a journey I have to undertake with my whole heart, surrendering myself from location to location, even if it makes me seem crazy.
  • Savoir Faire
    • What's going to hurt me is thinking I'm too cool, thinking that this is inherently interesting, thinking that if I embark on this journey it will simply make me better by virtue of having undergone tt.
  • Pain Threshold
    • Knowing the above, I can experience a lot of pain. Tying it back in to the top card, I have to embrace the empathetic suffering of others to become a more well rounded individual.
  • Authority
    • Or I can invest in myself, become a person who is self reliant, potentially at the cost of empathy.
It's important to note that in these readings, there is not necessarily both good options. I'd much rather have some perverse type of self confidence than endless suffering. I have to know why I'm going on this bike ride to do it, and the training will come naturally from there. I'm doing it for myself, I'm doing it to understand who I am and how to exert myself. I want to be authortiative. I want to understand my authority. Authority is the card that scares me the most, but pain threshold is probably a worse outcome draw than that. I've drawn authority as an outcome before and it made me reconcile with the position I'm in with other people. I could very easily hurt them very very badly, and I don't want to do that. This time though, it's not Authority over someone else, it's Authority over me, and I can live with that. In fact, I probably can't live without it.