Dead Rabbits—Or—"Too Much Perfection is A Mistake"

Let us start with a quotation, from an old movie called El Topo (The Mole).

“The mole is an animal that digs tunnels under the ground, searching for the sun. Sometimes his journey brings him to the surface. When he sees the sun, he is blinded.”

Of course, he isn't "blinded". He was always blind. And he seems disinclined to grow eyes just because he seeks the sun.

Another line from this movie: "Too Much Perfection is A Mistake".

But striving towards more than none might make you better than a worthless scumbag—which is all El Topo, the eponymous gunfighter-Fool of the movie, can rightly claim to be.

Not only does he have to cheat to win, but he, or that is Alejandro Jodorowsky (among his various Wikipedia-listed part-time jobs is "tarot reader") who plays El Topo and is the film’s perpetrator, mass-murders 300 rabbits and lets them bloat up in the blazing Mexican sun just to make a dumbass movie about how dumbassery is some kind of path to illumination.

And when I say 300 rabbits were murdered, I mean just that. No CGI. No standins. No dummy rabbits. Nope. Because the film was shot in Mexico back in 1970, where and when apparently they had no rules governing the abuse of animals, or people, or much of anything except (thankfully) lots of rules governing the distilling of tequila, the rabbits all had their necks snapped (Jodorowsky claims he killed all of them by hitting them with a karate chop), for the sake of surrealism.

El Topo, psychomage or psychopath, gloats over the presumably fake dead body of an opponent, and just a few of the really dead 300 cute furry animals slaughtered by Alejandro Jodorowsky in an afternoon's bloody movie-making.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a director in the mold of Z. Z. von Schnerk (as you shall see also a "perpetrator"). Who is that you may ask? I have to admit I didn’t know until recently, when during my connection quest I discovered him and how he was relevant to our story. We shall get back to Perp von Schnerk later, but now I shall start where all stories really start, with a dead rabbit.

You see, this all began when I was reflecting upon certain signs of my own—mainly that a few days ago during a walk, I encountered a dead rabbit on my path, covered with flies, and recalled as I sometimes do the vivid, disgusting, images from El Topo. Regardless of what I now think about this film, and its director, I must admit that it definitely made a long-lasting impression on me.

I first saw this movie about 1973 or so, and was not sure what to expect. People exulted about it being a movie you had to do LSD to fully appreciate. There have always been people who cannot appreciate much of anything in life unless they are viewing it through a veil of acid. There are others who have done so much acid or something, they can never break through the veil of accumulated brain damage.

But, I did no drugs, as I wanted to to take the movie straight up, unaided and unadulterated by mind-expanding clutter. By the end of the thing, I recall thinking to myself, a self that was young and naive and wanted to believe that countercultural naturally meant better, that maybe I had seen something very profound—or a real piece of shit. Or maybe a profound piece of shit. I knew I wanted to find out more about the movie, and the person who made it, because I had never seen anything like it (maybe for a good reason).

Fortunately, the director had put out a book explaining it, since he knew that pretty much nobody was going to get whatever the hell it was supposed to mean. In retrospect, and looking at it now after spending most of a lifetime studying symbolism, the use of symbols in El Topo is often very bloodily earnest, but unfortunately penetrates interesting ideas only about as deep as a pushpin.

The film’s chief spiritual viewpoint, if it has one at all, is that the only way to personal salvation is through egoless self-sacrifice to aid the downtrodden (who won’t prosper one bit for the aid, but hey, that’s what reincarnation is for, right?). It’s a dumbed-down, blood-engorged derangement of the beatitudinal notion that the lower down one falls, the higher up he shall be lifted, unless of course one is a rabbit—or worse—a woman.

Which bring us to another criticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky, at least the version of him perpetrating El Topo’s reign of notoriety in the 1970’s. Jodorowsky tells us a good deal in his book about how the film came to be made, and in one section he details how he came to meet, and exploit, a young disturbed woman, named Mara Lorenzio.

"Yes, the first woman, the blond, came to my home one day. She was in bad shape. At one time in her life she had taken LSD in great quantities, and had suffered. She had been in a hospital for mental illness. I said, "I will make a film with you. You will have the starring role." And she believed me. She didn't know who I was. And I didn't know her name...One day she said, "My name is Mara." After we filmed the movie, she left. I don't know where she is."

In the movie, El Topo tells us "Mara" means “bitter water”, like the sort a woman carries within her until it is sweetened by the seed of a man. Whereas El Topo can bring forth food (turtle eggs from the sand) and water (from a phallic stone stuck by his bullets), Mara is completely infertile, and can produce nothing to help sustain them in the desert. She is reduced to circling El Topo, chanting “Nada, nada, nada”, until El Topo decides he can take no more of this nagging nihilism, and does the one thing which to him seems the appropriate cure for her condition. Pulling off his weapons, and untying his pants, thus releasing his instrument of sweetening, he strikes Mara to the ground, tears off her clothes and rapes her.

The result is that her water becomes sweet, and she can then produce eggs from the sand and water from the stone. Also, for some reason, “love” is produced, although it is the vengeful sort of love required by a woman living for and through a man, which is to say the sort that comes with the continual price of the man proving he is worth the woman's sacrifice. And Mara’s price, which seems perfectly justified, given El Topo’s brutalizing of her, is that he go gunning for the four Gunfighter Masters of the desert, so he can be proclaimed numero Uno. One gets the impression that Mara hopes the price will be too much for El Topo, and he will be killed in the quest. If not of course, she will have the best gunfighter as her lover—or rapist—so she wins either way.

Mara combines the very worst, most misogynistically imagined, qualities—she is vain, cowardly, greedy, dishonorable, and utterly disloyal. When El Topo finally achieves the quest, and in so doing achieves a level of spiritual mastery as well (although this manifests as nothing much more than belated self-loathing), Mara dumps him for the demonic lesbian who has shadowed the couple during the whole quest.

The lesbians then crucify El Topo with bullets, leaving him to die, as they ride off into the infernal regions infested by purely saphhic sensibilities. El Topo, or whatever is left of him, survives to lead (or actually finish off) a rebellion of cripples and freaks against an evil town—whose symbolism and rotten citizens are intended to remind us of the USA.

Remarking about the rape scene with Mara Lorenzio, Alejandro Jodorowsky made a truly remarkable admission in his book, which has so far gotten very little attention, other than to include the occasional mention of it as evidence, apparently, of Jodorowsky's authentic auteur rakishness.

Jodorowsky writes, again in his book El Topo:

"When I wanted to do the rape scene, I explained to [Mara Lorenzio] that I was going to hit her and rape her. There was no emotional relationship between us, because I had put a clause in all the women's contracts stating that they would not make love with the director. We had never talked to each other. I knew nothing about her. We went to the desert with two other people: the photographer and a technician. No one else. I said, "I'm not going to rehearse. There will be only one take because it will be impossible to repeat. Roll the cameras only when I signal you to." Then I told her, "Pain does not hurt. Hit me." And she hit me. I said, "Harder." And she started to hit me very hard, hard enough to break a rib...I ached for a week. After she had hit me long enough and hard enough to tire her, I said, "Now it's my turn. Roll the cameras." And I really...I really...I really raped her. And she screamed."

Jodorowski, unphased that he has just admitted to a heinous violent assault on an emotionally vulnerable human being, tried to ennoble his act, seeing in it a theRAPEutic connection to the idiotic notion he has of the meaning of the rape in the movie:

"Then [Mara Lorenzio] told me that she had been raped before. You see, for me the character is frigid until El Topo rapes her. And she has an orgasm. That's why I show a stone phallus in that scene ... which spouts water. She has an orgasm. She accepts the male sex. And that's what happened to Mara in reality. She really had that problem. Fantastic scene. A very, very strong scene."

Or hey...very, very strong evidence of Jodorowsky's perpetrations.

Except. Mexico. 1970. Nobody seems to have given a damn about Mara Lorenzio (if that is even her real name). In fact, the notion of allowing mere decency to impede the making of his movie, would likely have struck Alejandro Jodorowsky as sinful.

He points out that a "complete break" with "any aesthetic, ethical, moral, mental, emotional or political commitment" was "really good".

While this attitude informed and inspired a lot of the filmmaking of that era, and a whole lot of occult aspirations in every era, it has some not-so-subtle, and not-so-small, dangers in practice. One of the most obvious is that the auteur, or the magus, or the asshole-in-charge-of-dumbassery, is going to actually start believing in the holiness and infallibility of the little head he's using to think with.

I was thinking (mostly using my bigger head) about this cinematic trainwreck called El Topo, when I had the serendipitous fortune to watch an episode of the old British dramedy, The Avengers. This particular episode from the 1967 season is sarcastically entitled Epic, and involves the kidnapping of Mrs. Peel, who is made to appear uncharacteristically vulnerable, by a has-been and murderously looney film director. The latter, whose name is Z. Z. von Schnerk (i.e. schn[ook j]erk) has high hopes of returning to the directorial A-list by making a film that positively reeks of realism—including the actual murder of Mrs. Peel.

Recalling Jodorowsky's brag that "When I wanted to do the rape scene, I explained to her that I was going to hit her and rape her", we note at one point in Epic, Z. Z. von Schnerk bloviates to his literally captive audience about how he is going to make a star out of her by killing her:

"Mrs. Peel...Mrs. Peel? I am Z.Z. von Schnerk. Director, writer, producer, scenarist, film-maker extraordinary, and perpetrator of this plot...We...are making a movie, Mrs. Peel. And you are the star. Unfortunately it is a downbeat movie, and the heroine dies. A tragedy, Mrs. Peel. A drama! That will place me forever amongst the ranks of the immortal movie makers! Confusion! Desperation! Fear! Horror! Death! And all of it authentic. Filmed exactly as it happened."

Or..."And I really...I really...I really raped her. And she screamed."

Mrs Peel showing justifiable pain, not from her bonds, but from having to listen to the direction of insufferable blowhard, and cinematic perpetrator, Z. Z. von Schnerk.

And so we are once again delighted by an example of the depths of doltish debauchery to which the human soul can fall when it takes a silly stereotype, ripe only for sardonic derision, and attempts to make it a rubric for an authentic initiated aesthetic.

I think the time has come, indeed we are late in doing this, when we in the occult should encourage the use of what we can call the von Schnerk scale of charlatanism. This scale shall measure the degree of ego bloating that occurs in those whose alleged initiation or spiritual development suggests they should be demonstrating a marked increase in humility and compassion, instead of an unseemly surge in narcissism.

Perhaps it should go something like this:

1-Buddha, Christ, Santa Claus
2-Pythagoras, Socrates, W. C. Fields
3—Cagliostro, Aleister Crowley, Donald Trump
4—God, Timothy Geithner, Oprah
5—Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kim Jong-il (as portrayed in Team America: World Police), Z. Z. von Schnerk

Finally, just to show you this critique is not merely aimed at Jodorowsky's F5 folly on the von Schnerk scale cinematically, but also Tarotically, just watch this incredibly silly, erroneous, Da Vinci Coding, perp'd by Alejandro Jodorowsky against Mara Tarotica. It is instructive to consider that part of this lesson is devoted by Jodorowsky to telling us the true meaning of Tarot charlatanism.



(jk)

The Story of "Scantz", the Graveling

Showtime's useful show on Death and Life focused
on dysfunctional but stylish Grim Reapers
Greetings, we have not spoken here for a bit, but I think you will enjoy, in a manner appropriate to twisting hanged men, today's story of the most well-paved road of good intentions and misapplied editorial sensibility (no, not respecting this blog, inane rodents).

As I suspect, long before you reach whatever end this comes to, you may be asking yourself—what the hell does this have to do with Tarot—I will ask for your indulgence and patience (limited as I know it is), for the connection will become clear anon, more anon for some than others of course.

So, I have lately been taken with an old Showtime series, Dead Like Me. You may now, and not anon, see some connection between a series so named, and Tarot, given that the pack generally sports a card called Death, having something we are told to do with death, more or less depending upon what alleged Tarot expert you ask.

Anyway, Dead Like Me tells the story in a brief two seasons (cancelled after that) of Georgia ("George") Lass, a poor lass of eighteen years, KIA'd by a falling toilet seat left over from the Mir space station. This is that kind of extraordinary luck I like to call winning the asshole lottery. Beyond the humiliation of being dispatched so ingloriously (one character refers to her as "the toilet-seat girl"), George is interrupted in her path to the afterlife by being chosen to become a "Grim Reaper", a taker of the souls of the about-to-die, but also a guide to the them to their final destination.

Reapers are working something out by being bureaucrats for Death. In George's case, the work addresses the fact that she never learned in life just how precious and poignant (she got how pointless) life could be. Basically, it was probably going to take her a good part of a lifetime to wise up about a lot of things, especially because she was so smart she figured she had it all figured out at eighteen. It was easier to just kill her and give her the Grim Reaper's crash course to the Universal truthless truth.

I highly recommend this series, which is available from a number of sources now, as a great instructor on many ideas and attitudes about Death and its intimate relationship to Life.

OK, got that? See the Tarotic connection? Good.

Unfortunately, that's not what we're here to discuss, well not mainly. It's just the introduction. As I said, I've become much interested in this series and as part of my research into it, I started where many of us would start in such a venture, at the Wikipedia article about Dead Like Me.

Now, if you haven't seen the series and intend to, you'll probably not want to read much of that article because it is full of spoilers. The bit that concerns us is brief, and won't ruin a thing for you. It describes the other principal agent of Death in the show—the little nasty creatures called Gravelings. Whereas Grim Reapers are the human, thoughtful side of Death, Gravelings are like cartoon forces of wicked irony, and are the ones who actually enforce the myriad ways in which people meet their demise. For example, if somebody is going to slip on a banana peel, and fall into an oncoming bus, the Graveling will be there a few minutes earlier to eat the banana and make sure the peel has been left in just the right place. And the Graveling will probably laugh about it when the victim gets his desert.

In the Wikipedia article about Dead Like Me, there is a section describing Gravelings, which makes the following claim:

"According to the episode, "Vacation", Gravelings are given one day off every few years by the Graveling boss, Scantz, who resembles the rest of his kind besides having different skin color and markings. Despite the holiday, most Reapers are disgusted by his presence for his lack of manners and violent behavior."

As it happens, I had just watched "Vacation" when I read this, and I didn't recall any Graveling boss, and certainly no Graveling named Scantz. What I did recall, and what I confirmed when I watched this segment again was the following:

As the episode's premise is being set up, Rube, the head Grim Reaper (the fellow who hands out the reaping assignments) tells the other Reapers, who are gathered at their local haunt a waffle-house diner, there won't be any reaping that day. When asked why, Rube explains that the Gravelings are taking the day off, and so it's a vacation day of sorts.

Rube then explains to the Reapers that their colleagues are actually in the diner, gathered at a booth over to the side of them. As is explained earlier in the show, even Reapers can't usually see Gravelings at all, and then only if they look at them indirectly.

Rube then says: "Look over there...don’t look right at it...you gotta look askance."

His fellow Reaper Mason, who is not exactly a thesaurus, doesn't know what the word "askance" means. And he asks "a-what?"

And Rube replies: "Skance...out of the corner of your eye."

Rube then looks askance to demonstrate, and they all do it and spot the tableful of misbehaving Gravelings. At one point one of them, never specified as a boss or leader, tosses a glass at the Reapers. Clearly there is general contempt between these co-workers.

Rube (Mandy Patinkin) looking askance at Gravelings—
not at a Graveling called Scantz!
Now, the smart ones amongst you have probably already figured out the trick and the lesson here. Hell, maybe you are the beneficent type and are already scuttling over to Wikipedia to fix the article and remove the shame of the anonymous scribe and hopeless English student. If so, you will be demonstrating not beneficence, but incredible insensitivity and rudeness. Why? Oh, because this blunder concerning the Graveling boss Scantz wasn't the product of a whimsical and brief assault upon the flimsy integrity of Wikipedia. Oh no! It was the product of a LOT of work and editorial contemplation.

The first entry of this Scantz skanking was made on February 16, 2009 and actually contained the name Sconz, not Scantz. A number of revisions, on grammar, on style, took place to the Sconz entry over the next hours. Eventually, maybe after help from a second listen to the episode segment, the name of the alleged Graveling leader was changed to Scantz. At this point, another poster (although maybe the same person with another account name) took over and continued whipping the text into whatever prime shape seemed right for conveying a bit of misinformation.

And to this day and moment (just checked), the mythformation about Scantz the Graveling still resides in the Dead Like Me article on Wikipedia.

The thing is, how did this happen? Yeah, I know, some barely literate bozo, or maybe a kid or something, thought he was being helpful and made a really dumb mistake. Or maybe it wasn't even that dumb, but was innocently ignorant, but still resulted in a glaringly bad bit of information—indeed the creation of a mythology which has no factual or originally intended basis. And it wasn't just glaringly bad information on some dimwit's blog—but in the only encyclopedia that matters any longer.

So, again, how did that happen? Well it happened for the same reason so much of occult and postmodern Tarot happened. Because when it came down to it, the motive to inform and reveal—something, anything—trumped the motive to get the facts straight and to tell the (sometimes pretty pedestrian—or just plain silly) truth.

More tomorrow on the general and Tarotic dangers of that motive—and the corresponding one of wanting to believe pretty much anything—especially dangerous in the democratic daze of the internet.

(jk)

New Tarot News!

Yep, the newest edition of Tarot News has just been published. Check out the stories on the death (and life) of Hajo Banzhaf, and also the usual mix of Tarot articles, including an update on the silver-lining boom for psychics in the depression, and also how one faux-psychic drew the Slammer card.

As you know, this blog has been slow lately. I will be coming back for more regular updates, but busy time here, so it won't be as regular for a while as I would like. However, if you've been reading Onion-Peelings, there will be something new for that shortly. Keep an eye out.

See you at Tarotica.com and at Facebook.

(jk)

Mary Greer & Cold Reading, part I

A funny thing happened along the way to my finishing my series of postings on Tarot reading. First off, I had to make tarotica.com, which has kept me pretty busy. But in addition, Mary Greer seems to have begun replying to my earlier postings—in a way. The least I can do is to return the favor, especially since she has decided to embark on a public campaign to promote a most questionable proposition.

---

Introducton—Once upon a time on alt.tarot

Let's see, where to begin? So many interesting possible entry points on this one. We could start back in 1947, the year Mary Greer was born (Aleister Crowley tastefully left the Greer-beset Earth a few weeks later), and also the year a movie got made that few people saw back then, but which has been resurrected of late to be recognized as one of the darkest and best of the genre called film noir. That movie, Nightmare Alley, is important to our story in a number of ways, not the least of which is its focus on Tarot card readings, and cold readings. We'll say more about this in a later posting.

Let's pick a midpoint to begin, back in the year 1996, when for a few months Mary Greer had been trying out that new-fangled internet thingy—actually Usenet, which wasn't the internet—but that's OK, it was online and Mary was talking on the newsgroup alt.tarot, which she thought was the internet. It was never a smooth ride for Mary on that forum. There were no moderators for her to cry to if somebody should rudely ask her about all the silly and stupid things she had written in her awful books about Tarot. There was not even a faithful constituency to affirm her as a Tarot luminary. And most annoyingly, there was this poster, who Mary had labeled the "net flamer" in a newsletter she had sent out warning people about the dangers of internet Tarot. That poster had been particularly rude to Mary, disputing her in the most insolent way when she had first posted to alt.tarot back in 1995. What was his problem anyway? What had she ever done to him? Of course it might have been what she had done to Tarot that was the problem.

Mary persevered however, and in fact if you wanted to be online talking about Tarot in a world-wide forum, alt.tarot was the place to be in 1996. So she didn't initially have many options. One day, back in May 1996, Mary was answering a question about Tarot reading techniques, and she was addressing part of the question that asked about what made Tarot readings "accurate".

Mary answered: "I think if we had an absolute answer to that one we'd be an greatly [sic] honored science. Personally I'm interested in what makes them more meaningful. If you just want accuracy then watch body language. You can read as much or more from the querent as you can from the cards."

There are a couple of key points about this:

1. Mary's ongoing problem with the great honor that science, as opposed to Tarot, receives in the world is suggested. She has a common science-envy one sees in newage types (and the deranged base of the Republican Party), which manifests in all kinds of odd ways, for example plotting to humiliate any scientist dumb enough to play her empathy games (see here regarding the sad tale of Robert V. O'Neill).

2. Mary plainly confesses she is a cold reader.

Regarding point two, just in case anybody might have missed this back in 1996, the net flamer, who also went by the name "jk", happily assisted Mary, clarifying what a reading of "body language" constituted:

"This is called 'cold reading'. This is the method preferred by con artists all over. Mary K. Greer has just advocated using a basic tool of the 'grift' as a means of obtaining 'accurate' card readings."

Mary had nothing to say in response to this, but one Mary-defender, Lola Lucas, objected that:

"[Cold reading is] also used by psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and hey, even bar tenders, hair dressers, bankers and cops. Observing body language is part of successful communication and not just the province of scam artists."

Of course, a lot of those people are scam artists too.

The problem with Lucas' argument of course is that the "successful communication" those other cold readers were attempting didn't involve their claiming to read Tarot cards. Lucas also asserted that possibly 80% of the communication going on was body language, which was even more damning of the notion that an alleged Tarot reader was reading cards, instead of people.

Or as it was put to Lola Lucas back in 1996, regarding the 80% claim:

"If that's true then NO ONE should be claiming they are reading tarot cards when they are obviously reading something else entirely. That's precisely why skeptics discount claims of tarot card readers and you and Mary have just given them all the extra ammo they needed because you are publicly supporting people spending 80% of their energy reading crap like body language. What's the other 20%—rifling through their wallets? If that's what you are doing, you are no tarot card readers, you are frauds."

Let us just say, in 1996, Mary Greer did not wish to argue that point, nor defend against that allegation, nor in any way acknowledge, more explicitly than she already had, that she was a cold reader. Soon Mary escaped alt.tarot to the safer forum of the Tarot-L mailing list, where moderators would generally protect her from unpleasant run-ins with the truth.

Even though, in 1996 on alt.tarot, Greer had been given an explicit heads-up about the dubious nature of what she was advocating, and that it was in fact cold reading, a couple of years later on Tarot-L, she would claim she didn't understand the pejorative (in other words, skeptical majority) definition of the phrase "cold reading":

"Oops—maybe I'm using the wrong word. I'm glad you asked about that. I've always assumed that a cold reading was one where you had no information from the client. They sit down and don't even given you a question. In the most extreme case they don't even give you any feedback. You are reading cold—just from the cards."

So, Greer claims here that she had her own personal definition for the phrase, perhaps one she taught to others, and that the "negative" or scam-oriented meaning was new to her. At the least, it seems pretty deficient on Mary's part, given that even in 1998 she was supposed to be some kind of Tarot authority, that she didn't even know that "cold reading" referred to techniques used by con artists to fake psychic readings, or card readings. Certainly, hundreds of books about this topic, and which used this phrase, had been published by 1998.

Of course, looking at the bibliographies in Mary's books, one sees pretty much no source that would intentionally serve to educate a reader about the swindling side of Tarot, no matter that the swindling side is one of the most important aspects (at least in terms of dedication by Tarot perpetrators—or practitioners). All one sees in Mary's books are the upbeat, affirming, promotional sources of the Tarot industry and the cartofeminist Tarot agenda. And that agenda was certainly not concerned with allowing some silly facts about fraud and dishonesty to get in the way of its "revolutionary" story.

The point is that over ten years ago Mary Greer was confronted with the real, quite problematic (for an honest Tarot reader), definition of "cold reading".

The Tarot (dys)Connection

Flashforward (from 1998) to a few weeks ago, when the Tarot Connection podcast released its fateful program #93 (of course!), entitled Cold Readings with Mary Greer.

As Leisa ReFalo, Tarot Connection's host, explained: "Mary [Greer] was one of the first people who agreed to be a guest on my podcast, and for some unknown reason it’s taken the longest to kind of get an idea and a topic together."

Tarot Connection has been podcasting since July, 2006, so it took Mary and Leisa 2 1/2 years to "kind of get an idea and a topic".

And what was the topic that took them 30 months to decide upon and prepare? Well, the title tells you that, huh? Yep, cold readings! And not cold readings explained in all its ugliness, or as a warning to Tarot readers that they should beware the pitfalls of their employing such techniques and moving into scamland. Oh no, Mary Greer had after all affirmed cold reading as a good thing over a decade ago. Nope, the terrible news she had decided to announce on her Tarot Connection debut was that she was shocked to learn that there were whole bunches of people out there using Tarot cards and cold reading techniques to take advantage of people!

Of course, maybe Mary was simply playing Leisa for a complete rube, because her allusion to Casablanca's Captain Renault could not have been merely Freudian, do you think?

Here is Captain Renault (upon discovering that Rick's Cafe Americaine is allowing gambling—which of course Renault knows is going on since he regularly gambles there): "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

And here is Mary Greer, who was laughing when she said this, expressing a similar tribulation of the soul in discovering the nefarious Tarotic cold readers: "And I was shocked! I was absolutely shocked! So I just had to find out, I mean here’s an area of Tarot, after 40 years of devoting my lifetime to Tarot work that I had no real knowledge of."

Now was Mary laughing as she said this because she knew she was feigning shock? I would have more respect for her if she was able to display such a jolly cynicism. But I'm pretty sure it was just her subconscious choosing the appropriate turn of phrase for what she knew to be true—that it would be rather shocking, or pathetic, if she'd managed to go 40 years pretending to be knowledgeable about Tarot and its cultures, and yet she only recently discovered that a big cold-reading culture in Tarot is devoted to using the cards for fraud.

On the other hand, the good news that Mary and Leisa seemed only too delighted to announce was that, if you took the fraud part out, you could really go to Tarot town, or at least to the Tarot-reader bank, using these cold reading techniques the frauds have so generously developed and published. Won't using the cold reading techniques make you a fraud? Oh no, Mary says, it's not the cold reading that makes you dishonest, it's your "motive" in using cold reading. If you want to make people feel better, and you want to give them a "successful" reading, then obviously anything you can employ to do this is just fine. Or so she says. Of course lots of scam artists claim to make people feel better too—in fact no doubt some of them do that too—for a while.

The Evils of Science and Skeptics

Now, we should add that it isn't just the Tarot grifters who have supplied this data for all you aspiring con artists out there. Nope, as Mary notes in her two new blog entries on this same topic, the nasty old skeptical people, you know like Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer, are also big on supplying everybody with cold reading tips, in part of course because they like to use these revelations to point out the scamful techniques employed by alleged psychics and Tarot readers.

It is important to note that Mary fully admits to a considerable bigotry regarding the skeptic community, which of course is largely the scientific community too:

"I see professional skeptics as fundamentalist proselytizers for a religion of science that operates within a mechanistic world view. Many of these professional skeptics have been described as pseudoskeptics by Marcello Truzzi, in that they take the negative rather than an agnostic position—denial rather than doubt. Besides the paranormal, this group of skeptics also target criminal profiling, many forms of psychological therapies and personality tests, alternative health practices, cults, cold fusion and, until recently, global warming and the greenhouse effect, among many, many others."

In other words, skeptics are equal-opportunity doubters. Not just picking on Mary's faith, but petty much everybody's. So what's wrong with that?

Mary complains: "As guardians of a scientifically-defined “truth,” they believe that to trust subjective experience threatens the fundamentals of science and must be eliminated. It’s essentially a fear-based stance."

Of course after almost a decade of George Bush and his faith-based maniacs running the world to the edge of several abysses, I would not wonder that the skeptics might have some genuine fear of the tactics and the disastrous impact of the advocates of "subjective experience". In the end of things, genuine doubters are hardly a match in threatening the well-being of the world compared to the genuine (or worse yet, the fraudulent) faith-based affirmers.

Now, I will wrap up part I of this report by pointing out that Mary's ultimate object is to convince her readers and listeners in any way she can that the worst thing they can possibly do is to think about these issues in any way. Of course what she wants them to do instead is to feel! As we shall see in part II, her attacks on science, on skepticism, on reason, are intended to dovetail the skeptics into the same ethical joint as the cold-reading mentalists. Both of them she says have hateful attitudes towards the victims of cold reading. The skeptics think the victims are basically stupid. And hey, so do the mentalists.

What Mary wants people to be instead is something she calls "empathetic", and for them to realize, as she claims, that "cold and warm reading techniques are normal modes of human communication—the ways in which we come to know, interact and empathize with others—that can add value to the tarot reading experience."

In other words, Mary argues that to deny Tarot readers their rights to cold read is inhuman, and so long as they cold read "nicely" it's OK.

Yep, that's actually what she's arguing.

We'll talk more about Mary Greer's version of empathy, and her love for cold reading techniques, in part II, in which I will provide a more detailed critique as well of the Tarot Connection podcast. Separately I hope as well to get a review of Nightmare Alley done pretty soon. But you should definitely see it if you get the chance.

(jk)

Announcing Tarotica.com

"On December 10, 2008, my old website jktarot.com was taken offline. The reason? Well, chiefly, I have been wanting to move everything to tarotica.com, and so I finally did. While I realize it would have been wiser, in the traditional sense of wisdom, to have kept the old site up while I was developing this one, I decided to forgo worrying about wisdom, and just go with the new thing."

The new thing: Tarotica.com

It will be a few days before most of the legacy content is back in place, so if you've linked to my website, keep checking back at the tarotica.com home page for updates. However, the FAQ and Deck Guide are already back up, along with some other things.

(jk)

Tarot, A Questionable Proposition, Part II, The Psychic Psywindle

Part II, the Psychic Psywindle

“The folly of the psychic reads in the folly of the querent.”—A. E. Waite

Let us start with a simple question. Perhaps you will want to pull out your decks and read along to answer it.

How did an otherwise obscure actress (Youree Dell Harris) rise to enormous infamy portraying a Jamaican Tarot reader named Miss Cleo? Why, amongst all the other peddlers of Tarotic offerings, was Miss Cleo the one who resonated so perfectly with the public?

Well, let's face it, for the late-night losers of the world, and isn't that just about everybody at some point in their lives, Miss Cleo offered salvation through the one thing she clearly had that they didn't. And it wasn't just her Tarot cards. Nope, lots of people have those. It wasn't just her kindly but teasing manner as she unraveled one Gen-X dilemma after another with her fake-Jamaican guffaws. It was the fact, which is to say the lie, that she was a psychic, and was clearly reading people's fortunes with great vision and happy client outcomes (so far as we could tell at the end of the ads). Miss Cleo had the power!

Miss Cleo: “You give a lot of money to this man. You laugh, but you know I’m telling you the truth, don’t you?” Yep, she knew the truth that her real name wasn’t Miss Cleo, and that she wasn’t a Jamaican Tarot psychic or any kind of psychic—and that a lot of people were giving a lot of money to her company. But hey, for a few years there Miss Cleo was the public face of Tarot—which is not solely the fault or shortcoming of the scam artists who ran that operation. Nope, it develops naturally out of the assumptions and the outrageous gullibility of the regular crew of perps and twerps (i.e. clients) peddling and and getting scammed by psychic Tarot.

Except of course it wasn't psychic power, but the power of scripted television informercials that carried Miss Cleo and her company (the infamous PRN—"Psychic Readers Network"), to such enormous success. At one point, PRN was so absurdly rich from its multi-faceted scam, that Nancy Garen, the not-nearly-as-famous-as-Miss-Cleo tarotbook writer of the SPOC (standard piece of crap) book "Tarot Made Easy", sued PRN for half a BILLION dollars!!, claiming copyright infringement because PRN used her silly book to do their crappy fake Tarot readings. Keyword in the whole horrible homily—CRAP—oh yeah and psychic. And, you know, swindle.

Crap-psychic-swindle. Or maybe psychic-swindler-crap.

But the point is that the 2002 despoiling of the Tarot world, which saw Miss Cleo fall and the ghastly opportunity of Sniperfest played out in all its bloody glory, served to fix in the public's mind in a way that it hadn't before, that Tarot cards and psychics were joined at the hip in a kind of Siamese synergy of charlatanism.

Is this view of things Tarotic, especially as Tarot is peddled by the Tarot industry, unfair? Or extremely old news?

Now, I have always tried to keep an open mind about the psychic question. In other words, the premise that one might be able to get psychic suggestions—or we might call them backwards vibrations, like ripples in time, of the future—is not wholly ridiculous to me. I myself have the usual narratives of amazing or at least unlikely occurrences one discovers in the exploits of occultists, and which usually get attributed to something like psychic powers.

Of course, for that matter, I've also been abducted by aliens, seen heaven and hell, talked to God and the Devil, also various angels and demons, and am now engaged in a magickal working with a demonic spirit called Hadit with the goal of furthering the Thelemic Apocalypse—and by the way it's going quite well thank you (from both of us).

Which is to say, that the credibility of any occultist reporter on his experiences is naturally and I would say necessarily shelvable in the sci-fi/fantasy portion of the perceptions of any reasonable person.

On the other hand, a residence on those shelves, whether or not justified, is validation of the diamond-hard truth to millions of people of whatever is being claimed. Those people are not very bendable by and to the facts. They live their lives in the constant search for new pastures from which to graze faith.

And of course the very notion of psychic powers is that there is some kind of communicating going on that is not explainable by the facts. That is fine if your main object is to faith-graze. But so many of the modern promoters of Tarot want their wares to have a respectability to them that one is not likely to find in an evangelical revival.

The Bible tells us psychics or those possessed by the power of the python, are associated with evil, and need cleansing or, if you are Old Testament, then the remedy would be killing. Of course, the Bible does not deny that this demonic-psychic power is real.

On the other hand, we have many examples of the Miss Cleo brand of psychism, which while seemingly obvious frauds are nevertheless relied upon religiously by countless wretches.

Is there a happy or true medium, so to speak? Some psychic quality or connection to Tarot that is neither evil nor fraught with fraud?

And how did Tarot cards end up in the psychic boat in the first place? Or is psychism in the Tarot boat?

The answer to the first question will depend upon the interests and worldviews of the people we ask. The answer to the second question invites historical surveys and more unhappy facts that the current High Priestesses of Tarot have declared verboten—and also very boring. Where does the truth lie, and is that a trick question?

Scientists have actually looked pretty hard and long into the question of the existence of psychic powers and have only recently nailed a pretty convincing coffin-lid in place, saying a big "no" to the probability of there being any psychic powers.

As we have said, that fact will only be interesting to those still susceptible to the suggestions of facts. And of course, the mind is awfully complex, isn't it? Perhaps scientists will someday discover the place, i.e., outside of fantasy, where psychic ability exists. But, as with the famous Face on Mars, the evidence so far has been disfiguring to the faith-based position—at least from a scientific standpoint.

Fortunately, science gets its say and then the anti-scientific and anti-rational forces get theirs. They get that say on school boards where they deny the validity of evolution, and they get that say in tarotbooks where they blather on about the inherent psychic powers of everyone!!—despite the continual inability of Tarot readers or any other brand of psychics to correctly predict even the most glaring of horrible events in the world.

Are Tarot psychics indifferent to the lives they could save by giving us accurate predictions of catastrophes? Or are they merely interested in doing the work of very microcosmic meddling?

If you ask them, you will often hear an excuse to the effect that of course they knew about something like the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai, but they knew nobody would believe them or it wouldn't be safe to say anything, so they kept quiet about it.

Isn't that a good point? What might become of a psychic who accurately predicted the horrible events in the world? She might be scooped up by friend or foe and spirited away into a dark hole from which she would never be heard from again. One might point out that if that is the concern, then even acknowledging one has an undocumented psychic power might be dangerous.

At any rate, in Tarotmania, and the rest of the psychic realm, there is always a surplus of unsupported claiming, and a paucity of any evidence demonstrating any psychic powers exist.

Now, this is not to say there is a paucity of seemingly amazing insights from alleged psychics, unfortunately rooted in the cold-reading of clients, a practice now being promoted as an aide to psychic sensibility, instead of what it would seem to be, a way to fraudulently appear to be psychic. Things have gotten so bad in the Tarot world on that count, that, as we have noted earlier, "psychics" now operate by having their clients conduct the readings themselves, with the cold-reader as facilitator of the pretense.

Now, at the end of this review of the regrettable condition of Tarot psychism, I would point out that maybe it is possible for a person to look at a Tarot card, and psychically obtain information not otherwise available. Maybe that is true.

But the problem is that over and over again when we look into the details of claims that it is true, we find either an unwillingness on the part of the psychic to offer much detail of the alleged feat, or indications that yet another fraud has been worked using Tarot cards.

As a final point, I am not in any way arguing here that psychics should be prevented from doing their work in the world. Without swindlers, where would the gullible look for solace and bitchslaps? And nor am I saying, as might seem a reasonable point of view, that the work of swindlers is obviously of no relevance to the "real" work of Tarot. I have in the past felt that might be the case, and perhaps have even articulated it to be true, but my view these days is that, as with any carny-religio enterprise, including a goodly portion of the work and representations of the Catholic Church, it is absurd to imagine that that the peddlers of the metaphysical should be regulated by the laws of the physical realm.

I have seen enough of fraud at every level and in every nook of Tarot to know that if you take out the fraudulence of it all, if you make it pristine and honest and gods forbid—respectable!—you might as well take it out back and shoot it and be done with it. There is a class of Tarotic denizen, the Tarot-is-just-a-card-game advocates, and by the gods they are a dumpy dour crew, who would gladly kill the occult version. Michael Dummett would have deeply loved to have accomplished that task with his bigoted histories of occult Tarot, but alas he merely bored people with his endless ranting about how Tarot had been stolen from gamblers.

Tarot, as an occult practice anyway, is not a respectable nor a reasonable activity. It is a carnival, full of masks and intentionally misleading signs. It has always been that, even as a game. And one should not be so big a fool as to imagine he should not be played for a fool at a carnival. In fact, isn't that the very point of playing?

Next—Part III of our sordid soliloquy: The Jungian Jank

(jk)

Tarot Reading—A Questionable Proposition

Part I—Readers and Receivers

For a long time now, I have been reviewing how I felt and particularly thought about reading Tarot cards. In one, large sense, I have concluded that most of what passes in the world for reading Tarot cards, or doing divination, or using or working Tarot cards, is baseless nonsense.

Yes, I know, that's pretty harsh and judgmental and so by the way is the conclusion that George Bush II is a monstrous jackass. But in both cases the wealth of evidence supporting the conclusions is considerable. On the other hand, I still do card readings; I still sell card readings; and I still believe reading cards is a real and to some extent reliably useful (and interesting) activity.

Do I believe Tarot cards, or their readers, can accurately predict the future?

Yeah, I do. Although I cannot tell you definitively how they do it, or if their doing of it is connected to the cards, as opposed to the correct predicting being some insightful talent (e.g., of symbolic interpretation) which could be worked or expressed through any number of divinatory media.

Also, I would address here another question, which is do I believe that computer-generated readings can accurately predict the future?

And again, based on my experience, I would say yes, as I would say computer-generated I-Ching readings and rune readings can provide relevant and insightful comments.

That suggests there is something in the process itself that is working, but since it is still the reader (in this case the reader of the computer reading, the comments of which might be quite rigidly fixed per card) who is making a connection between the general meanings of cards and positions and the specific questions being asked, we are led in the direction of blaming the human being, and not the cards or the algorithms, for apparent predictive facilities.

Where I am headed with this argument or suggestion is that I think in people of gifted interpretive ability, who find making interesting and insightful correspondences and connections quite easy, the tool of choice may not be nearly so important as the native abilities and developed skills of the worker.

Explicitly, what I think is going on in card (or symbol) reading is that the reader, upon being given a context of a question, can apply pretty much any tool and any symbol, to construct an interesting interpretive narrative. Depending upon the receptiveness of the listener, or querent (or receiver), almost any answer will further be adapted by the receiver into a relevant or at least a plausible suggestion of a connection or future.

So, what I am saying is that it doesn't matter what cards come up in a reading—it only matters what question, and context, is established in which to manipulate the tools and interpretations. Further, what matters considerably in the process of perceiving an "accurate" reading are the expectations of the receivers, and whether or not they accept or view the reading skeptically or affirmationally.

I shall note here that I am going for right now (until part III I think) to forego a discussion of simple, dichotomously predictive, readings (i.e., yes and no questions). Certainly, in those it would seem one could crash into mattering, especially if one of the dichotomy turns out to be dead wrong. I would just say in advance of a more detailed explanation of this apparent problem, that Tarot readers and their clients are naturally predisposed to breathe life into dead possibilities. Thus we get a lot of what I have called "rear-view reading", making a reading match what eventually happens, no matter what was originally predicted.

Now, most people who practice Tarot reading, or who purchase Tarot readings, are inclined to affirm the legitimacy of the process (even if they do not understand the process). So, they are also predisposed to seek a "good" or "accurate" reading, even if the reader says things which strike the receiver as odd or unexpected.

In fact, the affirmational receiver is affirmed in his faith pretty much no matter what the reader says. Because either he will be affirmed that what he is hearing confirms what he already believes to be the case, or the possibility (regarding futures) anyway, or he will be comforted that some unforeseen suggestion has been rendered, thus validating the ability of the Tarot to provide insights into the unknown.

Even if the reading provides a troubling or negative outcome, the neurotic receiver will view this as superior to knowing nothing whatsoever of the future, and will validate the process as helpful and useful.

Of course, generally, professional readers, regardless of their skills in interpretation, consciously seek out (through cold reading), and affirm, the desires and expectations of their clients. Their professional livelihood depends upon having clients feel that at the very least the world was not cartomantically pulled out from under their feet (that they were not Towerized by the reader), and better that their hopes and dreams are validated. The latter makes for happy, and returning, customers. Or we might say "unhappy and returning" because it seems the best clients are those whose self-esteem and self-love is so lacking that no amount of affirmation and validation can ever satisfy their neurotic neediness.

Even bad readers know that clients who return to ask the same question over and over again are not being served by having the reader enable the client's neurosis. But, especially in bad times of course, the lure of reliable money may be too much for the working stiffs—and most Tarot readers are that—to turn down.

Those motives of course lead us down the road to accepting a pure cold reading of the client as a legitimate exercise, and it is worth noting that many professional readers and tarotbook writers recommend employing what are clearly cold-reading techniques to ascertain not the meaning of the cards, but the nature of what the client wants to hear.

For example, Teresa Michelson in The Complete Tarot Reader recommends this technique for solving what she calls "reader's block", or the inability of a reader to do his job:

"ASK THE CLIENT"

"If the client is sitting there with you and you are really stuck, try this approach. You can tell the client, if you choose, that one of the cards is unclear to you, and because she knows her question and situation the best, she may be able to help you what it represents."

Given that reasoning, one might suggest that letting the client do the whole reading would be advisable and actually that is recommended by a number of well-known tarotbook writers, who seem not to think it odd that the reader should then expect to get paid for doing nothing. Of course the something the reader is allegedly doing in that kind of do-nothing reading is "facilitating". Right.

Interestingly, many books that recommend cold reading do so under the guise of promoting "intuitive" or "psychic" methods of reading, where allegedly paranormal or archetypal (of the Jungian sort) methods are employed to read—well, something, including maybe the cards, but allegedly the components of the unconscious of the clients. As we shall see, assessing the components of the unconscious mind often involves interrogating the conscious mind, or (as noted above) simply employing the client to do the reading.

We'll look more into that brand of Tarot reading tomorrow.

End of Part I, tomorrow—Part II, the Psychic Psywindle