AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot, the main characters await the arrival of the mysterious Godot, who keeps promising to come but never shows up. Some critics see Godot as representing an uncaring God, and the play itself as conveying the futility of chasing after salvation.
Several years ago I discovered the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, which proposes that there is an immanent (“indwelling”) cosmic consciousness present in all things that effectively binds the Universe together (in more secular language we might think of it as the “covalent bonding” of electrons or “Super[conscious]glue” with a metaphysical agenda). He couldn’t escape the anthropomorphic pretensions of orthodoxy, but his ideas prefigured the widespread modern views of pantheism and animism.
As something of a “mystical rationalist” myself, I’ve always found this perspective more compelling than the moral allegories and historical fictions offered by conventional religion regarding what the “god-force” would say and do for/to us if “It” (the most sensible pronoun) should stoop to interact with us in human terms rather than just communicating via vague, easily-misunderstood signs and auguries, superstitious devices that haven’t changed much since the days of the primitive shamans since they are predicated on euphoric hallucination (and sometimes mass-hallucination).
It seems to me that because our senses are incapable of engaging with more than a tiny fragment of this reality, we have no objective grasp of its broader dimensions and can only surmise just how vast and inscrutable it really is. Unless we are blinded by faith, we truly comprehend and accept only what we are able to detect, and from a theological standpoint we are content with our self-deception about the rest after dressing it up with a veneer of imposing rigamarole. Stripped to its essentials, this is little more than pious hucksterism, and I have no use for manifest authority of any stripe, with the priesthood near the top of my list of cynical manipulators right up there with politicians and “cultural influencers” of all kinds.
Among a certain segment of the tarot community there is a strong affinity for “Divine intervention” in the act of reading the cards, usually in the “humanized” form of spirit guides that are deemed more approachable and therefore more likely to engage at a personal level. I suspect these are people who never fully recovered from their early religious conditioning and still suffer from lingering guilt about abandoning it. So there is definitely comfort in sticking with the “humanoid divinity” viewpoint (I call it “God created in the image of Man,” which just about sums up the whole thing although Pascal’s Wager might convince the proverbial “betting man” otherwise).
As I see it, the tarot is entirely honest in its ability to deliver the truth, it’s the reader who places an unnecessary whiff of sanctity on its pronouncements by enlisting external support of uncertain pedigree. Why isn’t it enough to accept that both the practice of divination and our own psyche evince Spinoza’s “immanent god-consciousness” as their spiritual stamp of authenticity? There is no need to get all “uppity” about it, as I’ve seen some online readers do who are convinced they have a “hotline to God.” If we all own a piece of the action, there is no need to buy into someone else’s paradigm and its presumed superiority.
As the old country-rock song goes, “Don’t go buying no-one’s answers if your question was for free,” and the tarot will give freely when asked without the reader having to drag in an “enforcer” even if it makes them feel better about their impudence in trying to dissect the cosmic mystery of “God and Man,” as David Bowie eviscerated it so well in Modern Love. (For the record, I’m not anti-mysticism – I fit perfectly into the “spiritual but non-religious” demographic – I’m just skeptical of almost anything human beings believe without reservation since there is almost always a “catch.”)
