AUTHOR’S NOTE: This will surely offend some people, but I’ve never been especially thin-skinned, and I make no apologies for my non-religious attitude. Consider this an entry in my “tarot curmudgeon” series.

I’ve always understood that early shamanistic cultures performed human sacrifice – and later, animal sacrifice – to summon their gods and thereby curry supernatural favor. (Those gods were not only vengeful and jealous, they seem to have been vicariously bloodthirsty.) It was a grisly ceremony with the goal of paving the way for divine cooperation. Eventually, more civilized holy men introduced prayer and song to replace blood-letting in these rites. But then there is the Catholic Eucharist, in which the symbolic body and blood of Christ are consumed in a state of mystical rapture. Talk about a ghastly premise. Seems it wasn’t enough that Jesus had to be sacrificed and then returned from the dead, now everyone wants a piece of him! (I know, there is more to it than that but, given the way it’s verbalized, I can’t escape the vision of ritual cannibalism.) I don’t know why they can’t just sing their hymns and mouth their devotions and be done with it.

I was drawn to this subject by the number of tarot readers I encounter online who claim to receive their insights directly from a divine source (I call it their presumed “hotline to God”). Since they are technically conducting a shamanistic act of entreaty, I’m wondering what their personal sacrifice is. A tiny corner of their soul that is gradually nibbled away like a piece of cheese in front of a rat? An IOU that will come due when they join the choir invisible? I can hear them singing in earnest unison, like the youthful congregation in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life: “Every card is sacred, every card is great. If even one is wasted, God gets quite irate.”

As a “Spinozan sympathizer” I really don’t think that (small “g”) god talks openly to anyone; such putative conversation entails a suspension of disbelief on our part. This god is immanent and not extant; if we can hear ourselves think without distraction, we can detect its “small, still voice” of conscience and moral advocacy without having to conjure a glorious anthropomorphic eminence who parts the clouds to instruct and chastise us. I came across an interesting observation in Benebell Wen’s I Ching book regarding Tao that is directly applicable to my discussion here. The Tao (and, we might suppose, the indwelling god-consciousness of Western civilization) “has no agency and is a non-being.” It is “just where things come from.” Although Spinoza still proposed a humanoid personification of (large “G”) God, it was a distributed presence and not a centralized entity, and as such it is easy for the rational philosopher to demote the deity to “lower-case.”

Personally, I think much of this god-talk coming from tarot readers is highly suspect if not downright delusional, in the same way that purported “spirit-guide” and “angelic” contacts are dubious at best; we convince ourselves that our inner dialogues are not local but are in fact external messages from a disembodied being. If I’m going to travel that path, I would have to assume that my intimations of truth arise in a god-besotted personal subconscious – or at worst in the Lower Astral where lesser spirits abide – rather than descending via a pristine psychic channel from an exalted plane of existence. (And as all know who have practiced astral projection – aka “scrying in the spirit vision” – not every discarnate apparition is willingly helpful and may in fact be perversely misleading). Such mischievous meddling aside, I’m going to shamelessly paraphrase a Jimmy Buffet song I heard earlier today: “Some people claim that there’s a daimon to blame, but I know . . . it’s my own damn fault.”