Comments on “Reasonable believings”
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tarot
My current belief is that the tarot works, but it’s evil. It’s a pack of Platonic Ideals. If you have one, I strongly advise you to stab it, burn it, mix the ash with salt, and scatter it in running water.
Could you elaborate on this? On the tarot working, and on it being evil?
"The tarot works but it's evil"
That’s partly a casual joke. But:
Divination methods can “work” by giving something for your unconscious or imagination or feelings to work with. Useful insights do come out of practices like the tarot. They can also generate delusion.
Part of the reason the tarot in particular works seems to be that it’s a collection of “archetypes” or generic myth fragments that are deeply embedded in the “cognitive grammar” of our culture. So they are a fast, effective way of shifting yourself into the “mythic mode” which I wrote about very briefly here.
The “evil” part is that the its archetypes are partly derived from the Neo-Platonic occult tradition, which has real value but which is also (in my opinion) highly distorted and distorting in some ways. It will tend to guide your unconscious/imagination/feelings along particular lines that may be harmful. And there’s some of the Medieval worldview in there, and a bunch of 19th Century Romanticism. These also are problematic, in my opinion.
Great article
Excellent article!
Great post!
I would love to read the output of a “book, or an extensive research program” about this (written or summarized by you)!
I particularly liked the ‘fact’ versus ‘belief’ distinction.
Grounding all of the ‘believings’ in ‘reasonableness’, and especially in the sense of ‘accounting’ for those ‘believings’, seems very insightful.