Tarot and Intuition

by (jk)

It is of course risky to inquire into where things come from, as one might just run the bad luck of finding out the answer. This is often pointed out as why, if one is fond of what is made in them, sausage factories should be avoided. And that fear is a helpful guide as to why people generally don't like to confront the nature or origin of their feelings about Tarot and intuition. For while people may like sausage, they would prefer not to know how it is made, for example they would prefer not to learn what it is stuffed into (answer: pig intestines—aren't you glad you know that now?). Similarly, much about Tarot which is liked and purchased on account of that affection, and further believed, in support of the passion and the purchase, has similarly uninviting casings holding together the whole mishmash of faith and self-loathing.

The good news for the industrious, if not for the intuitive, is that Satan is if nothing else a sausage maker, a fellow who knows where the bodies are buried and which batch of sausage particular souls have been ground up into. So applying to his vast storehouse of technical knowledge on these matters should serve to enlighten us, as befits Lucifer, bringer of Light. jktarot.com, having a certain "in" with his Dark Majesty, recently interviewed Satan on this question of Tarotic intuition, and along the way we discovered that Mr. S. is no fan of touchy-feely Tarot.

jk: Mr. Satan, where did people get the notion that Tarot has something to do with intuition and what the hell do they mean by that?

Satan: First, I want to say I'm not so sure I like these two-part questions you're always asking. I have the distinct feeling you're trying to put something over on me, and it's supposed to be the other way around you know.

jk: Sorry, I figured you could handle a complex query. I mean Satan is almost as big a deal as being President of the United States, right, so your intelligence gathering must be at least pretty good. No?

Satan: I'm glad you mentioned that, because these days a lot of people are trying to blame a lot of things on me, and that's really not my fault or my problem.

jk: What are you talking about?

Satan: I mean I can't be blamed because you people keep electing or appointing increasingly idiotic leaders. Christ, look at the god you claim to prefer—a bloody Christmas tree ornament—how stupid is that? And this ninny you've got running things, or fiddling with the knobs anyway, in the White House is entirely YOUR doing, not mine.

jk: Actually, the fellow presently occupying the office claims you are working for the other side.

Satan: I'm working for ALL the other sides. Always. But when it comes to the incompetence and inelegant dishonesty of the particularly puerile sort being peddled by these idiots, you don't need a devil to inspire, or to blame, for their natural human tendencies. So didn't you want to know something about Tarot. I've got a busy schedule this morning—there's a good chance Martha won't survive prison or even the threat of it and we've got some kitchen planning to do back at the office you know.

jk: Sorry, right, Tarot. So why the hell do people think that when they use Tarot their intuition is enabled or used or has anything to do with it?

Satan: Have you ever asked them?

jk: Oh yes, many times. And they keep saying I'm working for you.

Satan: I don't think there's much doubt about that, do you?

jk: Or sometimes that I am you.

Satan: Don't get carried away. Well, not yet. Of course these dweebs think you're working for me when you ask them to question their faith. That's essentially what being Satanic is all about, not just taking somebody's word for it, but demanding to be shown. I know all about that impulse. God is the one who likes to accept people on faith, and vice versa, but that's no way to run things. The one thing we all know—people lie—especially to themselves.

jk: So what about it? Where did Tarot and intuition get hooked up?

Satan: First off, it's not intuition, it's something else, or it's a new meaning for intuition, which isn't like the one in the dictionary, but is instead one invented by newage geeks to mean "go with your feelings", you know like Luke Skywalker or something in that ridiculous movie. By the way I just love people who go with their feelings—evil can make little headway in the world without people doing that. The more people stop to think, the more difficult things get for me. So, yeah, I'm all for this feelings are better than thinking thing.

jk: So why reveal the truth to me? Won't that fuck up your mission?

Satan: Who the hell reads you anyway?

jk: Good point. So continue please.

Satan: Like I was saying, if you look up the meaning of the word "intuition" in the dictionary, you come up with some variation on this theme: "truth perceived directly, independent of any reasoning process". A better way to put it would be that whatever reasoning that leads to the perception or the insight is indirect, and not immediately or perhaps ever recognized by the knower.

jk: Does that mean intuition is like magic, or a message from the spirit realm?

Satan: In comic books maybe. But what it really means is that the process and the preparation for the insight or the intuition isn't consciously linked at the time the intuition takes place. That doesn't mean there isn't a reasoning process, or some process of conscious thought, that led to the apparently immediate perception.

jk: So it's like a trick?

Satan: What isn't in the human mind? Look at you, having a conversation with Satan via computer channeling. Pretty tricky, don't you think.

jk: Something I picked up while studying the occult. I figure if Aleister Crowley can do it—

Satan: Don't even get me started about that lunatic. The Thelema thing, right? What a dolt. How can I process any souls if he's telling people to act like I want them to? Then it isn't sinful, it's totally corrupt!

jk: So he wasn't working for you?

Satan: OK, so Aiwass was at one time employed by me to do certain administrative duties, the nature of which I'm not going to discuss, but then he got a big head and decided to he could work evil just like the big boys. The ninny thought it would be funny—FUNNY!—if he could convince humanity being selfish and greedy and brutal were virtues.

jk: Does humanity really need convincing about that?

Satan: Remember what you're dealing with. Humans. Naturally impressed with their goodness.

jk: But they're wild animals.

Satan: You're going to do well in our cynics ring. Anyway, of course humans are naturally prone to be selfish and greedy and brutal. They're made out of dirt after all.

jk: Star stuff.

Satan: Whatever. And the thing is God employs—or employed—me to sift through all that and find the cream of the crop. But there never was any cream! Just curds and whey, or more like clods and muck. I mean that the real purpose I have is to remind God that these creatures were a good idea (image of God and all) that just DID NOT WORK! It's when they think they are better than wild animals, when they're told to behave against their natures that my opportunity arises. I can't take people to Hell who are already there, or who valorize their beasthood, because there's no sin taking place.

jk: Isn't that the idea? That Thelema wants to liberate people from sin?

Satan: Right, they're just a pack of particularly lazy Christians. How did we get off onto this? I thought you wanted to know about Tarot and intuition?

jk: Yeah, so when and where did Tarot get connected to intuition?

Satan: Obviously it's about fortunetelling. Everything about Tarot that matters to people these days is really about fortunetelling. It helps if you can convince people that you've got some kind of power, some ability that they themselves either don't possess or which they haven't developed sufficiently. And that's why they need to come to you, the fortuneteller. Now yes, there are a few goons in secret societies who use Tarot cards to play Kabbalistic hopscotch, but they're all still climbing out of the same Tarotic swamp of divinational hogwash.

jk: And so this power they claim to possess came to be called intuition?

Satan: Sure, the implication was that what they called intuition was a direct way of knowing TRUE things, or at least that's how it came to be interpreted.

jk: I think your generic definition did in fact say it was about revealing or acquiring TRUTH. But in fact it's probably better to say that intuition is a way of acquiring or apprehending knowledge or presumed facts. That information is still subject to testing versus reality, or it should be anyway, and so might be true or might not be. A lot of people forget that part.

Satan: But as you yourself have rudely pointed out to people over and over again ad nauseum intuition CAN be wrong. And that's assuming one is actually having an intuitive insight and is not merely guessing. Have you ever noticed how people pay no attention to this when you point it out to them and keep talking about Tarot and intuition as if the latter is an infallible agent for the proper use of the former? That's because people don't like it when you question their faith. In fact, people will kill you when you question their faith. I really like THAT part of it you know.

jk: I'm sure you do. So didn't A. E. Waite talk about intuition and Tarot? He must have known what he was talking about, right?

Satan: How would anyone know? Waite was a mean little bastard—and he really was one—you know. He loved to talk over and around most other people. I think most of the time he figured they'd just assume he had something profound to say, and if they couldn't figure out what it was they'd figure that it must be their problem and not his.

jk: I'd say he was right in that perception of things, wouldn't you?

Satan: As things turned out, yes. Just look at the immense part of the Tarot industry which is devoted to interpreting Waite's cards and his ideas.

jk: Actually, more the former than the latter.

Satan: Absolutely, and that's where this intuition scam comes in.

jk: Scam?

jk: I know.

Satan: I know YOU know, but we're asking the readers right now, so hush up! Well, readers, do you know? OK, Waite wrote: "The common divinatory meanings which will be given in the third part [of Pictorial Key to the Tarot] are largely arbitrary attributions, or the product of secondary and uninstructed intuition." See, intuition requires instruction to produce an informed, and not an arbitrary or indifferent, insight.

jk: What kind of instruction are you talking about?

Satan: Well, duh...what are we talking about? Tarot instruction.

jk: And what does that mean?

Satan: Did anyone ever tell you that you ask a lot of questions?

jk: Maybe once or twice. So, just because someone says they are instructing you in Tarot doesn't necessarily mean they are.

Satan: Correct, and Waite had a particular idea in mind of what kind of instruction he was talking about. Actually a number of ideas, but his main point was that intuition divorced from a formal instruction in the meaning of Tarot symbolism could only produce ignorant and impertinent insights or intuitions.

jk: How many people do you think would measure up to Waite's standards on that count?

Satan: Very few. Particularly concerning the meanings of his own deck. As you have pointed out, that is why the Tarot industry has worked so assiduously to divorce Waite from his own pack of cards and to "generously" give it to his artist, Pam Smith. What was it that Jungian nincompoop wrote?

jk: You mean Sallie Nichols? She said Tarot was all about dramatic psychic eruptions meant to bring us messages of great import. Basically, she thought books that accompanied Tarot decks and which sought to elucidate them, even when offered by the designer of the deck, destroyed what she understood to be the cards' intrinsic symbolic nature and transformed them into a kind of pedantic allegory, in her view a specific application of the Tarot symbols to a diminished role of text illustration. She says Waite's book forces the cards to "illustrate verbalized concepts rather than suggesting feelings and insights wholly beyond the reach of words." Of course what she means by the latter kind of insights is intuitive ones.

Satan: Funny she would write a book about the truths supposedly hiding "beyond the reach of words".

jk: Yeah, I pointed that out. But people said I was being mean to do so.

Satan: I think it's HOW you do it, rather than the fact you do it.

jk: I've tried being polite. Same effect. Nope, it's just that people don't like it when you point out their feelings are based in their ignorance.

Satan: You know, I said that to God once and he told me to go to hell.

jk: That's pretty much the same thing I get told too.

Satan: I'd say I feel for you, but that's not really what I do.

jk: And this isn't a support group.

Satan: No, it certainly isn't. So, I went over and read your snappy "Jung and Tarot" review. Why are you so angry? You're just like black people who can't get over slavery, or Jews who go ON and ON about the Holocaust. Like I've been saying, people are people and people love to substitute ignorant feelings for pesky reasoned thoughts—which they know from past experience can be wrong. That's why they profess faith in Christianity, a distinctly inhuman and even inhumane religion, while blithely going about sinning like the beastly little devils they truly are. And that's why they love this silly newage version of intuition, which they imagine can't be wrong because it supposedly comes from someplace outside of their faulty brains. It's easier for them to face up to or down to their delusion of what they wish they could be, and to blame it all on some power greater than themselves, rather than to admit to the pretty dismal truth of what they are.

jk: Hmm...but isn't that part of what Tarot is about, that is the part Waite was talking about that was better than the intuition of fortunetellers, or today's "self-discovery" peddlers? Isn't the point Waite was trying to make that in the supposedly inherited wisdom and ideas of the symbols of Tarot, which symbols were in some cases certainly ancient, that by coming to a correct understanding of these ideas one could aspire to and maybe even a achieve a measure of elevation above the madding crowd?

Satan: Sure, but let's not tell anyone else about that, OK?

jk: OK. But it's always possible somebody might read this and get some ideas you don't like.

Satan: I'll take care of them. You just keep working on being obscure.

jk: No problemo, Satan. Thanks for the interview.

Satan: My pleasure, jk.

J. Karlin 3/14/04