Sounding the Depths

'I know the Church doesn't look too favourably on tarot and so on' wrote my friend Ms Trollsmiter, 'but I got this I Ching reading for you'. I had shared a tough situation on LiberFaciorum, and this was her attempt to shed some helpful light on what was happening.

I was surprised as Ms Trollsmiter is a firmly sceptical soul and not the sort of person to be favourable to woo-woo of any sort. I know Cylene has been doing tarot readings for a couple of years. She looks at it as a means of tapping her unconscious in order to find ways through issues that she faces, and this is surely correct. I don't think either of them regards the way the hexagrams fall or the cards turn out as directed consciously by a superhuman power: instead they are something like mental tricks, means of reordering thought in order to bring extra insights into a situation which has become stuck conceptually. I think of the parallels with William S. Burroughs's 'cut-ups' and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, methods of breaking through normal processes of thinking to develop creative ways forward.

Of course a Christian's way of reading the Bible is different in that we believe a positive and personal intelligence is at work behind that text, but not that different: very few Christians, I suspect, actually believe the Lord directs their Bible reading in a very specific way. I very regularly find insights (though sometimes very oblique ones) into things that are happening to me in my daily scriptural reading, but given that I read sequentially it's completely incredible that my eye is being purposefully directed to particular passages or lines. Instead, like Providence itself, Scripture moves forward in a great wave and in that mighty force we find something that helps - sometimes.

In this case, my advice from the ancient Chinese divination tool of the I Ching was a contradictory combination of the very directive and the vague ('do not attempt to force the status quo because you are no match for the forces of change ... A sensitive and innocent outlook allows for a rebirth in your thinking. Allow a child to be your guide'). I wasn't sure what to make of it. It could mean anything from 'Go and ask Bella at the infants school what to do' to 'Give up and go to bed'. Actually I quite like that interpretation.