I am a scientist. Although I am a biologist, my deepest interests focus upon the nature of reality. I am inviting you to take this walk with me along the border of superstition and science to look at the phenomena of prophecy. Most humans are frightened or confused by the ugly ideas and sinister connotations of fate, and its attendant existential dread. Do not fear though; I am a scientist and I will be your guide. I will endeavor to show you that prophecy (as prediction) is simply an extension of the human capacity for foresight, and although its theological foundations are controversial, it may function at social or personal levels and meet several needs in the human psyche. I expect you to bring your own personal biases and worldviews to the interpretation of prophetic phenomena; that is only human nature. The motives of both the questioners and the prophets will obscure our attempt at objective analysis of prophecy in general, but, in the end, I hope to show you that each person can choose what part prophecy plays in their own life. I will encourage you to make to make an informed decision about the meaning of prophecy in your own life, consistent with your own experience.
I am also a fortune-teller. I ask my tarot cards for guidance along our journey. There is no magic here; we are simply going to let the laws of probabilities set the theme and direction of our discussion. We simply have to allow the universe to unfold something interesting before us. (Trust me; this is less evil and a lot more fun than statistics!) It is my custom to draw three cards from the deck of seventy-eight. These three reveal sequentially: 1) the qualities of experience that bring us to the present question or moment; 2) the qualities of the present moment, and; 3) given that we stay on this trajectory, where will this question or moment lead us to. The cards come up The Sun, The Emperess, and the Eight of Cups. I laugh. I call my tarot cards sassy, for they are always pointing out the obvious.
The Sun
The card of the Sun portrays a classically handsome, beautifully proportioned man with golden hair, crowned with laurel leaves and bearing on his head the golden disc of the sun. He has golden wings and wears a short robe of dazzling white. In his right hand he holds a bow and a quiver of arrows; in his left he cradles a lyre. Framing him are two columns and a portico built of pale golden stone. Behind him a golden-green landscape, dotted with laurel trees, glows under a hot blue sky
How appropriate that we should meet Apollo, the sun-god, lord of knowledge and prophecy in the first card. He was the son of Zeus, by Leto, the Goddess of Night. Skipping childhood, he immediately set out to establish a sanctuary. The spot he chose, a mountain gorge at the base of Mount Parnassos, was guarded by a giant serpent, Python, which he slew and then set up his own shrine, Delphi. At this shrine, he established an oracle, spoken by a priestess called Pythia. Apollo did not put words in her mouth, but rather visions in her mind. Her oracular divinations were considered to be immutable law, although her words might have double meanings. For this reason Apollo was considered to be a tricky, but unerring deity. He managed to successfully take prophecy and prediction out of the realm of the underworld. History shows that the Oracle at Delphi was open for business for nearly 1,000 years at the turn of the last millennia. Neither MacDonalds, Xerox, or IBM can even begin to hold a candle to that record.
Apollo, the sun-god, is the image of the power of consciousness to dispel the darkness. He is the spirit of intellectual striving and the vision of the future. Apollo dispels fear and the curses of darkness. He is that indomitable spirit that struggles against superstition, helplessness, ignorance, and bondage to fate. He can help us prevail over our primitive instincts and fears, so aptly represented by the Python. In this image, we get a surprising perspective of what prophecy really is and isn't.
The general definition of prophecy concerns prediction based on divine inspiration. Who or what is "divine" is an interesting debate. Mohammed might be the mouthpiece of one's God, or, alternatively, the Book of Revelation might be the only prophecy, per se, in one's culture. You may "poo-poo" the recent spate of books channeled from higher beings, but the Bible has been a big seller for a very long time, so, in fact, it might be a good model for publishable works channeled from the divine. Once we open our minds to a polytheistic culture, the limit to "divine" gets awfully fuzzy. Scientific predictions aren't normally considered prophecy, but if God is replaced with science, then there isn't a lot of difference. The nightly news might feature weather prophecies if we let knowledge, and all things Apollonian, become divine. Who can say what "divine" is really, and who cares, as long as it works?
Some traditions would elevate their own cultural predictions over the general morass of omens, predictions, fortunes, and forecasts by making them not-quite-predictions (simply messages) from a divine source. Then, since they are not-quite-predictions, they do not get tested by experience. The adherents of message-bearing prophets will advise their brethren to assess them by "how they resonate with a particular level of our existential reality, which is deeper than the conscious mind". This idea does not resonate harmonically with my generally scientific hypothesis-testing outlook, but a careful look at the documented history of the Delphic model of successful prophecy shows the Pythia never literally said what course events would actually take, but rather only indicated what was the best way to proceed. If one wants to retain their credibility, perhaps one should not commit to a verifiable prediction, but rather make statements that merely have tacit assumptions about future conditions. There seem to be many semantic traps in this prophecy business.
In modern times, our own cultural predictions have taken another of the labyrinth paths to escape that despicable label of "fortune-telling". We no longer need divine sources because we have the computer and thousands of professional prognosticators employed in think-tanks, consulting agencies, and universities. Konrad Kellen, senior staff member of the Rand Corporation's think-tank, says "Being sophisticated modern people they do not look for the course of future events in the stars or the entrails of fowl. Instead they ask for a printout on when the North Vietnamese will surrender and the computer tells them." The western world culture, rational as it might be, seems to be still spending those prophecy dollars for an old product in a new package.
But true Apollonian prophecy is not about superstition, whether in the form of astrological charts or demographic models. It's about knowledge, knowing not fearing, being fully conscious, and not reacting instinctively. It may be that Apollo really doesn't care about the source or form of the underlying data, since all knowledge is divine. It may simply be a question of using that innate ability to foresee consequences and pushing the envelope.
Apollonian prophecy is also not about being chained to fate. Does everything and every person have an appointed function in this universe? Are we part of the big machine of life? Perhaps our lives are ordered by the dynamic patterns of life around us, leading us to an inescapable future and only the phylogenetic limits to our conscious minds keep us from understanding and facing our fates. Does the future exist in the now? I have no rational data to evaluate these possibilities, but we can look at the next card for our answer.
The Emperess
The card of the Empress portrays a beautiful earthy woman with rich flowing brown hair, obviously pregnant and standing in a field of ripening barley. Her gown is woven of many different plants, and hemmed with leafy boughs. Around her neck is a necklace of twelve precious stones. She is crowned with a diadem of castles and towers. Behind her, in a background of fertile fields, waters flow into a pool.
Meeting the great goddess Demeter here is somewhat of a surprise. She is the Earth Mother, ruler of all nature and protectress of defenseless creatures. A practical goddess, she taught humankind the skills we needed to enter the agricultural age: ploughing, tilling the soil, grinding wheat, and baking bread. She is an older goddess than all others, being the original fertility goddess. Demeter and her daughter, Persperone, represent, if not mythologically cause, the temporal rhythm of the growing seasons and the need for the seed to be returned to the earth for next years' harvest. There are many good accounts of the abduction of Persperone by Hades, which the reader is referred to, if this story is not familiar. The essential story is the fertility goddess Demeter, as a mother grieving over her abducted daughter, threatens to leave the earth in a state of endless winter, but negotiates with Zeus and Hades to have her daughter back for most of the year (during which is our growing season). The rest of the year, Persperone must spend with her abductor/husband Pluto, while Demeter sulks, and winter descends upon the rest of us.
I struggle to interpret this card. Demeter is pregnant here. The Earth Mother is not just about gestating, birthing and nurturing our biological offspring, for she also shows us the inner experience of the Great Mother, having the wisdom of nature. Safe and secure in the present moment, in tune with the cycles of life, Demeter is not about being a creature of spirit, but being one with the earth. Does this only reflect the creative moment when I drew the card, and so represent this process of nurturing my ideas, giving birth to an essay? I see the possibility for three other complementary interpretations.
The first interpretation concerns the issue of unborn children. Certainly our gestating children are the biggest mysteries in our lives. What will they be like? Who will they resemble? Will they be happy? What is the child's destiny?. The pregnant mother questions and fantasizes endlessly. Pregnancy is an experience of open ended possibilities, which brings us back to the issue of fate.
I believe that existence through time is like a moving trajectory, a vector through the fourth dimension. There are angles and velocities, but they are mutable. We can change these variables through a process of making choices and adjusting our own direction. I believe that being totally trapped by fate only happens under certain very restrictive conditions, that human life normally never encounters, for humans always at least have a choice of attitude . I further believe that the pregnant present, in a sense, gives birth to the future. The future is, in part, determined by its own evolutionary history as defined by all of its ancestral moments that went before it, but, like the unborn child, it is in some sense self determining. Psychologist Rollo May wrote, "Thus the moment always has its 'finite' side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. But the moment always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities. Time for the human being is not a corridor; it is a continual opening out." Demeter, in the pregnant card of the present moment, reminds us that our individual minds give birth to our experience of the future unfolding
The second issue raised by the Empress is that of utilitarian values. Demeter was no frivolous goddess. Fertility and agriculture were her domain. Could this card be speaking of the utility of prophecy? From his think-tank perspective, Mr. Kellen says that the desire to know the future is motivated by man's two most primitive drives: fear and greed. Our ability to predict the future seems unparalleled in the rest animal kingdom, but if it derives from our evolutionary history, we would expect natural selection to always favor survival (hence fear) and reproduction (hence greed). However, in a seminal book, The Selfish Gene, evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins says that because humans have foresight, we have the ability to transcend the blindness of gene replication and bypass the evolutionary stable strategies inherent in natural selection. "We, alone, on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." How curious that Almighty Science, with its mission of making the world predictable, now allows that humans, on the basis of their ability for foresight, might overcome the limitations of natural selection and to be motivated by more than just fear and greed. Well, we scientists are only human after all!
Historically, prophecy has been utilized as a tool to minimize social disorder. Catherine Morgan makes a very convincing argument that the primary function of the Delphic Oracle between 700 and 800 BCE was to serve as an outside mediator for the city-states of Greece. She suggests that although divination had long been practiced to provide solutions and explanations of the mundane problems of life, because of the profound social/political changes taking place during that era, limitations of the local mechanisms for conflict resolution between city-states drove the city-states to look to Apollo's sanctuary for mediation from a higher level, a divine authority. The Oracle was an aid to decision making, a mechanism to eliminate social disorder, and tool to establish consensus in difficult times.
Similarly, the renowned prophecies of the American Indian Hopi tribe, can also be seen as stabilizing conditions during periods of social change. Armin W. Geertz, in his recent book, Invention of Prophecy, showed that despite sensationalistic misrepresentations, the Hopi prophecies are not precognitive, but rather reflect a mechanism to put the changing factors of the Hopi environment into a cultural context. Prophetic statements of the Hopi, except a general prediction of the end of the world, are never revealed prior to the occurrence of the conditions to which they refer. Tying change to the cultural authority of the past through retrospective prophecy, allows a continuity to the overall cultural and individual meaning of existence. Prophecy is more useful than a simple aid for decision making.
Let us dip back into the well of meaning associated with the Empress card. Look closer at the ancient fertility/earth goddess myth, whose name, before it became Demeter, was Gaia. Gaia was the Delphic property owner before young Apollo picked it to be his sanctuary. Ah, we have come full circle! The myths loose their distinctions. The myth of Demeter and Persperone are only a different telling of that of Gaia, and her child Python. Gaia may have been a nurturing earth goddess, but several of her chthonic children (Python, the Cyclopes, the Furies, and the Titans) represented the consequences of transgressing mother earth. In each story belonging to this large family of fertility myths, there is always one figure of a pair which is associated with beneficence to humankind, and one figure associated with death and decay: Eros and Thantos, Cosmos and Chaos, Zeus and Typhon, Artemis and Hekate, Apollo and Dionysus. Wait a minute! We know Apollo from the last card, but who is this Dionysus?
In the winter months, while Demeter sulked, Apollo would leave Delphi for the land of the Hyperboreans, and Dionysus would rule the sanctuary. Dionysus is called "The Twice Born" because he was gestated by his mother (either Demeter, Persperone, or Semele, the princess of Thebes in different versions of the story) and also by his father, Zeus. Hera, the legitimate wife of Zeus, persecuted this illegitimate son, driving him first mad, then driving him from his homeland to wander Asia for many years. Upon his return to Greece, he persecuted those who refused to recognize his divinity. Dionysus taught the Greeks the art of viticulture and wine-making, and became known as Bacchus to the Romans. The appeal of Dionysus is ecstasy, which his followers found in orgies of fantasy, drama, and madness, during which they often tore living animals (or humans) to bits and devoured them. Dionysus is a figure tied to the ancient fertility four-parted rituals involving killing, eating, burying, resurrecting (seemingly to be a precursor of the Christ) which corresponds to the harvest, consumption, planting, growing cycle of agriculture. He is the embodiment of the Wild Man archetype.
The myths are all jumbled! If Dionysus wasn't the son of Demeter or Persperone, then he descended into Hades to retrieve his mother, Semele. Children of Gaia, the Titans, seized Dionysus, cut him to pieces, and either devoured all but the heart or, perhaps they gave his bones to Apollo to be buried at Delphi. Or was it Perseus that slew him? Another story has it that Gaia was in collusion with Zeus and Hades in the abduction of Persperone. Was she Demeter's enemy? Did Apollo kill Python? Or did Python kill Apollo? Was Dionysus resurrected, or was Apollo? Are they singing the dirges for Python or for Apollo? It's not clear-cut who is good and who is evil, as the heroes and villains constantly exchange places All of our fertility myth figures are engaged in an incestuous orgy of intrigue, combat, and death, with only a constancy in the pulse of chaos overcome by order becoming chaos overcome by order, ad infinitum.
Following the Empress down this path, we come face to face with a tangled web of meaning created by the story telling process. The tales told about the Delphic Oracle are quite different than the historical evidence. Ancient authors have used the Oracle over and over in legends, including the Homeric epics: the Iliad and the Odyssey. In legend, the oracle is enigmatic, metaphorical, and equivocal, using the words out of their usual meanings. The god's meaning is almost always interpreted wrongly, and that misunderstanding is what makes the story. Some of the ancillary devices in prophecy-related story telling are animal guides, offended gods, riddles, and aphorisms. These patterns of story telling are archetypal. Modern man still finds fascination in these same ancient motifs. Even some of our phrases like "Leave no stone unturned" are but 2,500 year old echoes of the Delphic Oracle.
The story telling process is organic. Hoping for a kernel of hard crystalline truth in the stories' core, mythologists tear away the layers, one by one, until, like a endlessly peeled onion there is nothing left. Realizing that our cultural meanings are made of the flimsiest of antasmosing tissues, the trend is to become disgusted with the whole business of prophecy and want to wash our hands of the matter. Stay with me here and let's look for the reasons prophecy has no solid core. This is where we must bring the prophets in for analysis.
Who is serious about prophecy in modern America? The most obvious groups are the Christians, the scientists, the New Age cultists, the members of the Society for the Study of the Future, and the members of various Native American religions. To sample their flavors, let's compare the BIG prophecy, the End of The World, between these groups. Christianity ties it's end-of-the-world prediction to the Second Coming of Christ. The Hopi Indians are waiting for the return of the true White Brother. The New Age cultists often tie their end of history to the last day of the Mayan calendar in the year 2012. Scientists pose some interesting options: either a) when all of world is completely understood and we have the ultimate paradigm nailed down, or b) when we have so destroyed the ecosphere that the planet can no longer support life (option b is considered more possible). I don't know that the Futurologists have an end to the future, for it would certainly put them out of business.
Is there a common theme in the motives for all of this prophesizing? Perhaps these prophets are motivated by a desire for power and control? Our cultural prophecies echo in our ears: "The prophets obviously know more than you. Send your money now! You can be saved." "Don't look at the here and now, focus on something which does not yet exist! Life may really be horrible and unjust but be complacent. Don't make waves for this is just part of the one big plan (it was, after all, foretold) and the forces that oppress you in the present, will have to face their own karma on the final judgment day". The motives behind most prophecy can indeed be dark. Even in the most minimal case, the prophet stands to profit through this ego-gratifying process of fostering an illusion of control and omnipotence. Never trust a prophet more than you would trust a salesman!
And why would you want to be asking those kind of questions in the first place? Come to grips with your existential fears! Yes, we all are going to die! Loosen up your grip on control and security! Dare to live! But, we are getting ahead of our story. Next card, please.
Eight of Cups
The card of Eight of Cups portrays Psyche performing the final task Aphrodite has given her: the journey into the underworld to bring back a pot of Persperone's beauty cream. Psyche is shown empty-handed, descending the steps into the darkness of the underworld, her face set in sadness and resignation because she realizes that she will probably not survive the journey. Behind her, abandoned, stand eight neatly stacked golden cups.
Aphrodite was jealous of the beauty of the mortal Princess Psyche, so she sent, via her son Cupid, a magical love potion to Psyche, hopefully to cause her to fall in love with someone quite horrible. Cupid mistakenly drank the potion and fell in love with Psyche. An oracle told Psyche's father that she must marry a winged monster, so she was sent alone in the darkness to her wedding. Psyche could not see her amorous groom, Cupid, and, in spite of her terrors, found herself married to a spirit of transcendent love and passion. Cupid refused to show himself to Psyche, and after a time, she was driven to probe this question of identity, with the ruinous results of Cupid angrily running home to mama. Aphrodite punished Psyche for having been loved and impregnated by her son. The goddess of love made Psyche a slave and required her to do impossible tasks. The last of these tasks was running down to Persperone's place for a few cosmetics. Mortals don't come back from hell, and Psyche knew it, but if she ever wanted to see her husband again, she had to go. In this card, we see her journey begin.
The classic interpretation of this card is that at some point we have to let go of our hopes for the future, let them fall by the wayside, as we continue on the path before us. The only hope for the future is to abandon all hope and let go. This does not imply that by letting go one is guaranteed to get what is desired, because that is not truly letting go. The tarot card book tells us to interpret this card as "Hope for the future must be abandoned." We can only choose to turn and face it without expectation.
Should we really abandon all hope for knowing the future? Psyche's story suggests that perhaps, we would be best served not knowing. Consider it this way: would knowing your fate and being forced to live it out not be worse than the darkest nightmare? If there were no alternative outcomes, could seeing the path before us be more than just a prison? I would urge you to examine your personal needs to maintain a predictable universe. Are you anticipating an end of the world when, on the final day of judgment, all souls will be weighed against a feather? Are you really interested in finding the ultimate explanatory paradigm that promises to destroy the last bit of randomness and close the door to all alternative possibilities, effectively sealing your fate? Why, then, look for what you don't really want to find?
For myself, prophecy is a pastime indulgence, much like buying a lottery ticket, or betting on the races. The tarot cards and astrology offer the opportunity of working through the puzzle of how real life correlates with archetypal patterns. I refuse to take the end of the world seriously because to me it's really only a good excuse for a party. Prophecy gives interesting stories to tell and interesting stories to hear. Events implying precognition have happened to me, but who really knows why? It gives me food for thought, but it doesn't make me a shaman. As a scientist, I have been trained to test the predictions of paradigmatic models. Under the rules of science, my peers can never prove that a predictive model (prophecy) is true, but instead they must concentrate their efforts to show under what conditions the predictions are false. I have personally eschewed the path of model verification and concentrated my research efforts on the description of the existing here and now. I release the need to know the future and elect to follow Psyche down her path empty-handed. These are my own choices in living out my life. You have to make your own choices. In your own life, the prophet is you.
How does this story contained in the eight of cups come to completion? Psyche survives her sojourn into Hades, and is rescued by, and reunited with her beloved husband. By the virtue of giving up her selfish motives, she is allowed to journey into the realm of chaos and return intact. Recall the dark counterpoint images in the duality of the source of divine knowledge, Persperone, Dionysus, and Python . They are the inhabitants of Hades, that realm which represents the deepest root of the human unconscious. This card also implies that by walking down the trail to madness and ecstasy through the unconscious, we can find the necessary element to balance the strict rationality and scientific knowledge that weighs so heavily on modern man. Science, by the old fertility-myth cyce of order becoming chaos, has become identified as the means to our doom. Science, and it's daughter, Technology, have taken roles as the primary source of evil and destruction in the collective consciousness. Who will arise to save us from Apollo's cruel ways? Oh help us, Great Goddess!
This essay was based on an actual tarot card reading.