AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve been following an increasingly rancorous argument in one of the online occult forums over why the esoteric community seems so toothless of late (hey, I was going to use one of the darlings of AI writing, “pusillanimous”) compared to its previous vigor. Where is the bracing “bite” of old? There is certainly no shortage of angry metaphysical flexing when fighting about it.

I experienced similar feelings of disaffection as the early-70s New Age zeitgeist unraveled into the entrepreneurial opportunism of the late-70s when the “money-men” found their opening. I started calling the purported “Age of Aquarius” the “Piscean Pipe-Dream” and the “False Dawn.”(Astronomically, it won’t arrive until ~2150.)

These days I see most of the vulnerability in the social-media arena that epitomizes the “attention economy” of influencers and followers that others have mentioned as the cause. It’s superficiality is about as far as one can get from the sense of gravity I’ve always found in occult studies and practice. But I don’t go looking for alignment there anyway (which is the main reason I ditched Facebook as a lost cause) and my public posture as reflected in this blog has been decidedly critical as befits a card-carrying curmudgeon.

It brings to mind the old SNL bit where the waitress takes an order of decaf coffee from a customer and shouts to the counterman “Joe, another cup of ‘why bother!'” (Sorry, that metaphor keeps repeating on me like a mug of bad brew.)

I don’t know that it isn’t just a sign of the times as humanity seems to be backsliding toward inanity in so many ways. “Instant gratification” has overtaken doing the hard work of mastering worthwhile subject matter and education has become more about pushing a social agenda than about arming students with the awareness and intellectual skill-set to avoid being trampled by life. (My friends chastise me for using the term “snowflake” to describe the scholastic victims of inadequate conditioning, but it perfectly illustrates my point that toughness is lacking. They should watch Idiocracy for a glimpse of where we’re headed in the not-too-distant future.)

Tarot reading as I do it has the same goal of fending off self-doubt without resorting to handing out “participation trophies.” If we understand even a little of what the Unseen has up its sleeve, perhaps we won’t feel so powerless when we come up against something we can’t get our conscious faculties around. At its best, divination will apprise us of the “what, why and how” aspects of the seemingly unfathomable circumstances we find ourselves confronting with no clue how we got there.

My style is not the cheerleading exhortation of the “empowerment” crowd but rather the more methodical enumeration of the factors that can be brought under the seeker’s control and those that he or she can only “roll with” as they transpire. It echoes the old Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Imparting that wisdom is what my tarot work is all about. As Monty Python might have said, “Why bother” doesn’t enter into it.