AUTHOR’S NOTE: You may remember the old Bruce Willis-Meryl Streep-Goldie Hawn film Death Becomes Her. I’m paraphrasing the title to support my introductory premise but there is no intended plot connection.

In the occult tarot lexicon, the Death card corresponds to the enigmatic and remorseless Water sign Scorpio. In a previous essay I mentioned that, due to the fact that my astrological birth chart has Scorpio on the Ascendant, I’m not startled by the frequency with which Death appears in my own tarot readings since it vividly captures an intransigent aspect of my personality that I project into the world on a daily basis (we could say it “becomes” me in the same way as showing off flattering garments, but with less stylish flair and far more gravitas; now if I were only skeletal instead of well-fed it would complete the illusion). Here I’m going to expound upon that observation by interleaving it with a few thoughts on a mystical approach to the ideology of rationalism (which one might reasonably assume to be an “apples-and-oranges” comparison).

The following Wikipedia article contains a brief explanation of the historical origin and use of the analogous term rational mysticism. One of its key points comes from Rice University professor of religious studies Jeffrey J Kripal, in his 2001 book Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom. In that work he proposed that the coupling of rational and mystical perspectives is “not a contradiction in terms” but instead describes “a mysticism whose limits are set by reason.” (Although I haven’t read it, this sounds like an attempt to “disambiguate” a few gnarly theistic perplexities.) The article also notes that both Plotinus and Baruch Spinoza were “rationalists with overtones of rational mysticism,” and I’ve long classified myself as a “Spinozan sympathizer” when it comes to religious ontology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_mysticism

I was once a teenage “Objectivist” of the Ayn Rand school and a wannabe intellectual with Mensan credentials in my early twenties (the follies of a misspent youth, long since abandoned!), and I’ve consistently sought a layman’s cause-and-effect explanation for phenomena in the “real world” without delving too deeply into the “hard science” behind it. But an even earlier appreciation for the chimerical source of artistic inspiration also had a grip on me, and much of my youthful artwork was both impressionistic and surrealistic. I instinctively understood that the images I rendered may have exercised my creative sensibilities but they didn’t seem to originate in my own head; instead they were unique visions that came to me unbidden at random intervals. There was nothing I could point to as proof of a direct link to a superior (and definitely quirky) intelligence, it just “felt true” and it produced some highly unusual works once I fully opened myself to its influence. (A friend told me he wasn’t too sure about their artistic merit, but as psychodrama they were great!)

My point is that, for all my rock-ribbed rationalism, there has always existed an undercurrent of extrarational stimulus that pushed the frontiers outward a little further with each manifestation. The major breakthrough came when I encountered the tarot cards in 1970. I was fresh from my art-school experience as a student of graphic design, and both the striking imagery and the underlying occult philosophy of the late-19th-Century tarot spoke volumes to my questing mind. I’ve come across nothing since to dissuade me from the mesmerizing pursuit of these rarefied glimpses beneath the surface of objective reality. (Someday I will write Tarot Saved My Sanity or How a Skinny, Self-Impressed Young Punk Became a Semi-Wise, Not-So-Wee, Curmudgeonly Graybeard; but today is not that day.)

Just yesterday I recognized this five-decade evolution in metaphysical awareness as evincing a state of “mystical rationalism,” in which the hard edges of pure reason are softened by a more inclusive outlook that allows for non-linear flashes of intuition. When I went looking for past occurrences of the term I discovered its opposite number, “rational mysticism,” which grafts sensible inferences onto all speculative assumptions about the numinous world (à la Plotinus, Spinoza, Einstein, etc). However, I’ve always come at it from the opposite direction, treating rationalism as the lingua franca of my personal cosmology and inviting incursions of spiritual insight as long as they can pass the “giggle test” (that is, they can demonstrate plausibility without inciting gales of derisive laughter). Suffice it to say I’m not a fan of unstructured clairvoyance in mystical practice, and analysis often trumps psychic conjecture in my own divinatory work simply because it has a slightly more defensible foundation that produces nary a titter of amusement.

I’m not trying to buttress my recondite assumptions with logical arguments, but rather striving to leaven my deductive judgment with a more flexible and expansive rationale that doesn’t stifle the imagination while still remaining coherent. As I see it, if you can’t prove or disprove something based on credible evidence that goes beyond the purely personal and anecdotal, then you’re left with what I call the “SWAG” (scientific wild-ass guess) system of hedged bets, in which a poker player with Death as his “hole-card” might conclude that there is a better-than-50% chance of it being a winner. (Let’s consider it the “wise-man’s hand:” when the Grim Reaper comes to the table, wise men call in their shaky wagers since the risk of bluffing is too great, and those who stay in the game must be very sure of their odds.) Or so it seems to this “mystical rationalist,” and it’s generally how I run my tarot readings even when Death has checked out for the day: I call it the “Hamlet defense” for stray epiphanies and other random or mongrel hunches that sometimes encroach on “giggle territory.” I may be pragmatic but I’m not entirely blind to the operation of “outrageous fortune,” whether it manifests as the “slings-and-arrows” of adversity or 24-carat, solid-gold dumb luck. I just try to keep it in perspective.