“Now, what if – as magical lore suggests – intention bypasses the ordinary flow of time, manifesting the goal in the future and thereby causing events unfolding in the present to be pulled toward that goal? This (referring to one of his experiments) suggests that some intentional effects may involve processes that – from a conventional perspective – run backward in time. And experiments like the present one, as well as dozens of other studies investigating precognition and retrocausation, also suggest that time behaves in enigmatic ways at the everyday, human scale, and in particular that goals pulling from the future might be associated with our intentions.”
– from Real Magic by Dean Radin (elided for compactness)

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Dr. Radin’s use of the term retrocausation (by which the “pull” of the future becomes a scientifically-palatable way of saying “Fate”) runs afoul of the tarot-reader’s taboo that the future is not inextricably bound to the past by the nature of its antecedents. So much for the “free will” and “not carved in stone” arguments, eh? This perspective requires a radical rethinking of “first principles” in the art of divination.

As I read this theory, the future “reaches back” into the present and predisposes it to respond in a way that makes the future situation inevitable. Radin’s premise is that our destiny is an intended state of magical transmutation that doesn’t “just happen” to us. Aleister Crowley once described it as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” We could see it as a “back-end-loaded” chain in which each state depends on a previous development that it called into being, or “the ends define the means.” In manufacturing it is called “process control,” but in magic it is presumed to be a purposeful act of willpower that operates outside the bounds of conventional logic.

The assumption behind this essay is that in any three-card “past/present/future” tarot reading, each card except the first one preordains the identity of the card that preceded it, which could not have been other than what the random pull determined it to be or the result would have been different. Thus, the three cards form a causal evolution that operates in reverse order from what is normally expected to occur in deterministic space. The future dictates the present, which is in turn predicated on the past according to the same premise.

Objective randomness in drawing tarot cards from the shuffled deck to populate a spread is the “holy grail” of the average tarot reader, but I don’t see it that way. A lack of sequential preconditioning in the deck of cards is the status that ideally precedes the shuffle, which then redistributes the cards in the proper order to produce the narrative. If, as is typical, the last card placed into the layout signifies the anticipated outcome, every card that came before it contributes to its testimony in some consequential way, whether as causal factor or transitional adaptation. Each sequential card calls for an intended input and the previous card does everything in its power to honor that intention.

In my own practice I’ve always read the cards in a spread as a continuum and not as segmented “bins” of meaning that must be coaxed or coerced into agreement; this integration enables the “gestalt” overview that I perform for larger readings. While my style is more literal than mystical, my approach to the flow of projected events and circumstances is always organic rather than mechanistic in scope, with every card symbolizing the “seed-state” of the next card and the “flowering” of the preceding one. Paraphrasing Alfred Korzybski, the “map” of cards is not the “territory” it delineates, but instead consists of “signposts” that depict the route to the destination, and occasionally the time of arrival. This often demands a good deal of imagination to pull together, but that’s all part of the fun of divination.