“Both consciousness and matter exist, but neither arises from the other. They are separate, primitive “substances,” like the warp and woof of the fabric of reality,”
– from Real Magic by Dean Radin, published in 2018.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Wow! Just wow.

I encountered Dean Radin’s book just over a month ago in an r/occult sub-reddit thread, but long before that watershed event (e.g. beginning in 2019 and continuing up to the present), I wrote something very similar in several of my ~2,800 blog posts, with exquisite disregard for redundancy over the years but with increasing economy of expression. I found eight instance where I said essentially the same thing in support of my argument for “how tarot works,” but this one from 2024 sums up my current thinking on the subject. (I had thought to include all of them but decided to spare my viewers the agony of some cringeworthy writing; masochists can locate them by searching on “woof” in the sidebar and might even find the broader context intriguing in each case.)

“Some time ago I wrote that tarot reading amounts to running my mental fingers through the warp-and-woof of the fabric of reality, trying to tease out threads of truth.”

I was going to title this essay “Here’s the Woo, Where’s the Wisdom?” but did not want to once again wax pugnacious on the questionable validity of social-media tarot reading. Suffice it to say that I find much of it to be just so much “woofing” without saying anything valuable from a metaphysical standpoint, while there is only “warped” anecdotal wisdom to be found in most of it.

I want to emphasize that the curious phrase “warp-and-woof” (aka “warp-and-weft”) first impressed me years ago as being related to the weaving of textiles on a loom (well before it began with a spun-chemical transmutation). I don’t in the slightest remember the context, but in 2019 it seemed like a good analogy for the mystical framework of divination. I should also mention that Radin used it in one of seven philosophical opinions describing the relationship between consciousness and physical reality, but did not let on whether he supported any of them unequivocally (which would have been “unscientific” without further explication) but promised to elucidate later in the text.

Another assertion Radin makes is that Universal Consciousness (the “big C” of his theoretical model) is maddeningly difficult to pin down with scientific authority even though it offers ample evidence of its existence in more anecdotal terms. I discussed this in a number of previous blog posts going back to 2017, describing precognition or clairvoyance in my own language as “divination is a form of ‘mentation’ (or cognitive physics) that we still don’t have the ability to quantify with empirical precision despite decades of trying.” In his book, Radin addresses the same psionic principls from an experiential-research angle that I’ve been exploring from an esoteric perspective over the last nine years. As one of my r/divination sub-reddit compatriots said: “pretty nifty stuff.” I added the following observation to one of my earliest essays:

“In terms relevant to the present subject, all existence is a matrix of interpenetrating energy and there is no fundamental difference between one person’s consciousness and another’s, only local distinctions. It’s basically an argument for the efficacy of psychism or mind-reading as the root of cartomantic divination. This is the first of the Seven Hermetic Principles espoused in The Kybalion, the Principle of Mentalism: “The ALL is MIND; the Universe is Mental.”

The idea that our personal awareness of objective reality is an intricately-woven web of consciousness and material phenomena is somewhat outdated according to Radin’s research (he defines it as the “straight-up dualism” of Rene Descartes), but from the perspective of a tarot reader it is probably as deep as we need to go into the “warp-and-woof” of the ways in which prognostication performs its magic. That it does with some credibility seems to be proof enough.