It is traditional, at the end of the year, to revisit the predictions made at the beginning of that year. I did my best, last January, to view the future, but it didn’t turn out quite as expected:
The New Year’s rolled around once more—
As hopeful as can be—
And so I took some quiet time
To brew a cup of tea
It wasn’t for the calming drink
Oh, no, I wanted more:
I had to read the leaves to see
What this year has in store.
This year, to find my fortune,
Reading tea-leafs is the way!
Why trust in Nostradamus
When you could have had Earl Grey?
But with the sort of clarity
Enlightenment achieves,
When I looked into my teacup
All I saw were… soggy leaves.
I had to try a second time—
Perhaps it’s in the stars!
Some interactive influence
With Jupiter or Mars.
Positions of the planets,
I believed with all my heart,
Would tell me of the coming year,
And so I made my chart.
Astrologers had told me,
“As above, so too below”
But as I worked the numbers
It was clear, I didn’t know—
Our lives do not depend
On distant balls of rock or gas;
Some ancient fortune-teller
Pulled the whole thing from his ass.
The third time is a charm, they say,
And so, to test that quote,
I thought I’d read some entrails
So I sacrificed a goat.
I’d heard it said, with skill and care,
My future could be seen
In length of small intestine
And position of the spleen.
I dumped out all its viscera—
Its liver, lungs, and heart,
Esophagus to rectum, and
I wondered where to start
Consulting with the ancient charts
I thought I might be nuts;
The only thing I really saw
Were lots of smelly guts.
I thought I might try augury,
But found it for the birds
My Ouija Board was useless,
And it spelled out nonsense words
My tarot deck, a waste of time,
And so, of course, was prayer;
No use to talk to heaven
When there is no heaven there.
A Cheiromancer told me
She could read it in my hand
When she asked me for some money
I began to understand
So… no more reading crystals,
Smoke, or fire, or cookie crumbs—
For Two Thousand And Eleven
Take the future as it comes!
Did you know, that in Cockney Rhyming Slang, “Tea Leaf” stands for “thief”?
[Clap clap clap]
Liked this one. I’ve had friends very much enthralled to divination of all sorts.
This might sound a bit hippy-dippy, but I kind of like tarot cards. I find that although they (obviously) can’t predict anything at all, they can help you see and interpret things in new and interesting ways. They can help you learn what you already know. You take this set of fairly powerful symbols (at least within a euro-oriented cultural mindset), shuffle them at random, and then you interpret what you see. The interpretation and the narrative you see in those symbols will only be a projection of your own mind… you’ll see what you “want” to see…sort of like how a rorschach test can tell us a bit about someone if they consistently see a certain uncommon kind of image. By doing this you can end up arriving at new and interesting insights or perspectives on a question or problem or whatever.
It’s like instant paraedolia, a mental mirror, or a way of imposing a forced constraint on your interpretation of something. Constraints sometimes bring out our best creativity. Like you know how writing poems in formal structures ends up with coming up with much more creative, interesting ways of writing than you might have come up with in free verse? Kinda like that.
So yeah… tarot cards obviously have no supernatural powers whatsoever, but they do have some cool psychological potentials (and yes, you could theoretically swap out every card for a different symbol, or completely rewrite the “meanings”, and it would still be an interesting tool).
They’re also often very pretty and beautifully illustrated. :)