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Do Oracles Lie?
Jun. 26th, 2025 11:23 amMost people who consult oracles on a regular basis—tarot, geomancy, runes, I Ching, etc.—have had the experience of a reading, perhaps a series over a period of time, that made no sense. It’s frustrating, and I don’t know why it happens, but I want to put forth a hypothesis. First, let’s consider the possibilities.
Divination is Rubbish
Those with a materialist worldview will not be surprised to hear of confusing divinations. In their understanding, that’s because all of it is a dance of delusion. This possibility can’t be ignored as inconvenient by those of us who value the advice of oracles. Could I be wrong? It’s happened before. There is no way to prove that divination works. First, prove to whom? The implication is that the scientific doubter is the ultimate judge of what is right or wrong. This mandate is granted to them by the consensus of those who hold sway in societies, not by a divine power which they don’t believe in, or by any burden of proof.
That word “proof” is also problematic, because the scientific method doesn’t prove anything. It tests hypotheses and tries to falsify them. If they can’t be falsified, the efforts are refined until they narrow in on a reliable heuristic. Nothing is ever proven. There is no such thing as “proof” in an absolute sense, only a difficulty in falsification under present circumstances, within the present paradigm.
The third barrier to proof is that oracles are not atoms. They don’t behave. You can’t isolate them from surrounding variables. They act like real living people with personalities. Have you ever forced a friend to submit to a rigorous and tedious series of experiments to prove to you that they exist? Likely, if you can’t take their word for it, that person will shrug and wander off to do more interesting things. Such is the case with an oracle.
We won’t get far with this explanation for those reasons, and because it defies the personal experience of many practitioners who get very good readings upwards of 90% of the time. Skeptics will claim this is confirmation bias. If so, it should work all of the time. The question would become “How are we all able to delude ourselves about oracles just short of 100% of the time but not exactly 100%?” In fact, many reading are much too precise to be delusions. Another figure wouldn’t have described what actually happened. We will have to pass by this possibility, since the arguments end up talking across one another.
Lack of Skill
It’s possible I’m not so good at divination that I can always suss out the answer. This is true of readings done in advance, but when looking back and comparing to how events actually played out, it’s usually easy to see what the reading was talking about. Rarely does it make no sense.
Beginners often don’t understand what type of questions to ask (each oracle has strengths and weaknesses), or which keyword of a figure to apply. Improved skill probably does lead to better results, but even with years of practice people encounter odd readings. Maybe there are more theoretical quandaries to work out for everyone involved. Physicists, too, don’t understand a number of problems in their field and yet the get reliable results with the majority of principles that they do understand. This is an important clue.
Disruptions of the Medium
People have proposed that the astral light, the collective unconscious, the aether, whatever you choose to call the medium through which subtle communication passes, can be disrupted by external events sort of like static coming in on a TV channel back when antennas were still popular. For example, Dion Fortune posits in the Cosmic Doctrine that sometimes a Great Entity (essentially a star) on a higher plane passes between us and the Central Sun, causing something akin to a gravitational disruption and weirdness for a little while.
This would affect oracles differently at different times, as they draw from different wells. This probably has an effect, but it would not be very common and we would expect to see it sustained over a period of time, whether days or even months.
Beginner’s Luck
People often have a lot of success with a good oracle when first starting out. If they keep it up, they will meet with challenges, and if those don’t deter them, they will at last come to a working understanding that is neither as miraculous as it was the first time nor as miserable as it was in the intermediate stage.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect describes exactly this process in learning anything new: a confident beginner phase, a slog filled with doubt, and a steady but humble increase in understanding. This effect can also be seen in human relationships. When we meet a new lover, we go through a honeymoon phase, deal with the difficulties of integrating ourselves into a relationship with another human being, and if we survive that, settle into a stable pattern and a long life together. The same is true in different shades of other types of relating, whether it is a parent to a new child, a pair of coworkers, or any other sustained pairing. If this is also true of human-oracle relations, then the intermediate stage will involve confusing readings and crises of faith before finding a rhythm that is not quite miraculous in the long run.
Parapsychology research clearly shows that novelty plays a big role in getting evidence of psi (paranormal phenomenon). Oracles deal with things outside the ordinary senses, and so are subject to this effect. When we start to lose interest, or simply become habituated, the readings don’t hit as hard. We can change oracles and lovers every few months, but that’s not fruitful for many. One possibility might be to find ways to renew our passionate attention to readings. It will never be like the beginning, but it doesn’t have to fall into the doldrums.
A Hypothesis
I was inspired by another possibility after reading The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen. The author’s arguments are too complex to summarize in a short essay, but we need to understand the qualities of structure and antistructure.
Structure refers to a system that is organized, orderly, reliable, follows well-established social norms, and thrives under stable conditions.
Antistructure is disorganized, chaotic, unpredictable, defies convention, and disrupts patterns.
We tend to find antistructural conditions in times of transition. In human life, puberty is a time of danger and defiance when old ways of relating to other people break down and in traditional cultures, are reordered in initiation rituals. We see the cycle of building up order and breaking it down at all levels of life. Civilizations rise, go through a creative phase, calcify in their habits, then disintegrate. Scientific paradigms solve problems, build theories, encounter intractable questions, then fall apart to be replaced by new paradigms.
The transitional phase belongs to an entity or archetype that Hansen calls the trickster. He is not a thing or a person, but a constellation of qualities—a form that is filled by convenient actors and events who pass through and are replaced as needed. Cultures with a developed trickster figure usually fear and despise him, but he also has divine aspects. One function of the trickster is to point out the absurdity in the things we have come to accept unthinkingly, to break down our habits so that we have room to make new ones. This is critical for societies to continue to adapt to changing circumstances. Were a tribe in what’s now the American Southwest to become stuck in one pattern, they would die when conditions changed and their habits failed to meet new demands. It’s painful to break down structures, but necessary for survival.
We take oracles to be living and wise, at least about certain things. Perhaps in their wisdom, they understand the uselessness of complete rigidity and the flaws in the notion of absolute truth. Maybe oracles are subject to that form against their will. If we always got completely reliable readings, we would tend to fall into scripted ways of interpreting our divinations which could lead to unexpected disasters in the event of a black swan—an unforseeable shock.
Since we communicate with an intelligence of a very different type using a limited set of figures, we are employing a system not unlike a language. Any system will eventually reveal its limitations, its intractable questions (languages have thins they are not good at expressing). There is no scientific theory, no religious doctrine, that doesn’t run head first into these eventually. They serve to show us the limits of what can be known using a particular method, and encourage us to think in other terms.
This may be a feature of all systems which happens to crop up in divination, as well. No system exists in a vacuum, and outside pressures eventually bring cycles of disruption which have to be examined for their causes and reintegrated to prevent similar issues in the future, thus remodeling the system.
It’s even possible that a wise oracle knows that there is no absolute system from which to observe all other phenomena standing outside of it—not that we can access, anyway. With the risks of rigid thinking in mind, maybe oracles voluntarily take on a trickster role on occasion, throwing us curveballs in order to force us to reexamine what we think we know, to drop the habit of unflinching and dogmatic trust in exchange for an eye attentive for deception, and to restructure our broken systems to work more effectively under changing conditions.
If that’s the case, wonky readings should be taken to indicate that our thinking has stagnated, or that we are experiencing a transitional phase in our lives which requires fresh attention. This feels like a frustrating trick, and maybe it is. But it also inoculates us against bad habits and ushers us into new ways of relating to the world and what we think we know is going to happen in it.
Divination is Rubbish
Those with a materialist worldview will not be surprised to hear of confusing divinations. In their understanding, that’s because all of it is a dance of delusion. This possibility can’t be ignored as inconvenient by those of us who value the advice of oracles. Could I be wrong? It’s happened before. There is no way to prove that divination works. First, prove to whom? The implication is that the scientific doubter is the ultimate judge of what is right or wrong. This mandate is granted to them by the consensus of those who hold sway in societies, not by a divine power which they don’t believe in, or by any burden of proof.
That word “proof” is also problematic, because the scientific method doesn’t prove anything. It tests hypotheses and tries to falsify them. If they can’t be falsified, the efforts are refined until they narrow in on a reliable heuristic. Nothing is ever proven. There is no such thing as “proof” in an absolute sense, only a difficulty in falsification under present circumstances, within the present paradigm.
The third barrier to proof is that oracles are not atoms. They don’t behave. You can’t isolate them from surrounding variables. They act like real living people with personalities. Have you ever forced a friend to submit to a rigorous and tedious series of experiments to prove to you that they exist? Likely, if you can’t take their word for it, that person will shrug and wander off to do more interesting things. Such is the case with an oracle.
We won’t get far with this explanation for those reasons, and because it defies the personal experience of many practitioners who get very good readings upwards of 90% of the time. Skeptics will claim this is confirmation bias. If so, it should work all of the time. The question would become “How are we all able to delude ourselves about oracles just short of 100% of the time but not exactly 100%?” In fact, many reading are much too precise to be delusions. Another figure wouldn’t have described what actually happened. We will have to pass by this possibility, since the arguments end up talking across one another.
Lack of Skill
It’s possible I’m not so good at divination that I can always suss out the answer. This is true of readings done in advance, but when looking back and comparing to how events actually played out, it’s usually easy to see what the reading was talking about. Rarely does it make no sense.
Beginners often don’t understand what type of questions to ask (each oracle has strengths and weaknesses), or which keyword of a figure to apply. Improved skill probably does lead to better results, but even with years of practice people encounter odd readings. Maybe there are more theoretical quandaries to work out for everyone involved. Physicists, too, don’t understand a number of problems in their field and yet the get reliable results with the majority of principles that they do understand. This is an important clue.
Disruptions of the Medium
People have proposed that the astral light, the collective unconscious, the aether, whatever you choose to call the medium through which subtle communication passes, can be disrupted by external events sort of like static coming in on a TV channel back when antennas were still popular. For example, Dion Fortune posits in the Cosmic Doctrine that sometimes a Great Entity (essentially a star) on a higher plane passes between us and the Central Sun, causing something akin to a gravitational disruption and weirdness for a little while.
This would affect oracles differently at different times, as they draw from different wells. This probably has an effect, but it would not be very common and we would expect to see it sustained over a period of time, whether days or even months.
Beginner’s Luck
People often have a lot of success with a good oracle when first starting out. If they keep it up, they will meet with challenges, and if those don’t deter them, they will at last come to a working understanding that is neither as miraculous as it was the first time nor as miserable as it was in the intermediate stage.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect describes exactly this process in learning anything new: a confident beginner phase, a slog filled with doubt, and a steady but humble increase in understanding. This effect can also be seen in human relationships. When we meet a new lover, we go through a honeymoon phase, deal with the difficulties of integrating ourselves into a relationship with another human being, and if we survive that, settle into a stable pattern and a long life together. The same is true in different shades of other types of relating, whether it is a parent to a new child, a pair of coworkers, or any other sustained pairing. If this is also true of human-oracle relations, then the intermediate stage will involve confusing readings and crises of faith before finding a rhythm that is not quite miraculous in the long run.
Parapsychology research clearly shows that novelty plays a big role in getting evidence of psi (paranormal phenomenon). Oracles deal with things outside the ordinary senses, and so are subject to this effect. When we start to lose interest, or simply become habituated, the readings don’t hit as hard. We can change oracles and lovers every few months, but that’s not fruitful for many. One possibility might be to find ways to renew our passionate attention to readings. It will never be like the beginning, but it doesn’t have to fall into the doldrums.
A Hypothesis
I was inspired by another possibility after reading The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen. The author’s arguments are too complex to summarize in a short essay, but we need to understand the qualities of structure and antistructure.
Structure refers to a system that is organized, orderly, reliable, follows well-established social norms, and thrives under stable conditions.
Antistructure is disorganized, chaotic, unpredictable, defies convention, and disrupts patterns.
We tend to find antistructural conditions in times of transition. In human life, puberty is a time of danger and defiance when old ways of relating to other people break down and in traditional cultures, are reordered in initiation rituals. We see the cycle of building up order and breaking it down at all levels of life. Civilizations rise, go through a creative phase, calcify in their habits, then disintegrate. Scientific paradigms solve problems, build theories, encounter intractable questions, then fall apart to be replaced by new paradigms.
The transitional phase belongs to an entity or archetype that Hansen calls the trickster. He is not a thing or a person, but a constellation of qualities—a form that is filled by convenient actors and events who pass through and are replaced as needed. Cultures with a developed trickster figure usually fear and despise him, but he also has divine aspects. One function of the trickster is to point out the absurdity in the things we have come to accept unthinkingly, to break down our habits so that we have room to make new ones. This is critical for societies to continue to adapt to changing circumstances. Were a tribe in what’s now the American Southwest to become stuck in one pattern, they would die when conditions changed and their habits failed to meet new demands. It’s painful to break down structures, but necessary for survival.
We take oracles to be living and wise, at least about certain things. Perhaps in their wisdom, they understand the uselessness of complete rigidity and the flaws in the notion of absolute truth. Maybe oracles are subject to that form against their will. If we always got completely reliable readings, we would tend to fall into scripted ways of interpreting our divinations which could lead to unexpected disasters in the event of a black swan—an unforseeable shock.
Since we communicate with an intelligence of a very different type using a limited set of figures, we are employing a system not unlike a language. Any system will eventually reveal its limitations, its intractable questions (languages have thins they are not good at expressing). There is no scientific theory, no religious doctrine, that doesn’t run head first into these eventually. They serve to show us the limits of what can be known using a particular method, and encourage us to think in other terms.
This may be a feature of all systems which happens to crop up in divination, as well. No system exists in a vacuum, and outside pressures eventually bring cycles of disruption which have to be examined for their causes and reintegrated to prevent similar issues in the future, thus remodeling the system.
It’s even possible that a wise oracle knows that there is no absolute system from which to observe all other phenomena standing outside of it—not that we can access, anyway. With the risks of rigid thinking in mind, maybe oracles voluntarily take on a trickster role on occasion, throwing us curveballs in order to force us to reexamine what we think we know, to drop the habit of unflinching and dogmatic trust in exchange for an eye attentive for deception, and to restructure our broken systems to work more effectively under changing conditions.
If that’s the case, wonky readings should be taken to indicate that our thinking has stagnated, or that we are experiencing a transitional phase in our lives which requires fresh attention. This feels like a frustrating trick, and maybe it is. But it also inoculates us against bad habits and ushers us into new ways of relating to the world and what we think we know is going to happen in it.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-27 02:12 pm (UTC)My working definition of divination is the interpretation of symbols to read the astral (or ether or whatever you want to call it). Tarot, runes, etc., provide symbols to interpret.
What I am now wondering, though, is if tarot, runes, etc., are the oracle, or is the person doing the interpreting the oracle? A quickie internet search seems to say that in ancient Greece, it was the person doing the interpretation. (And definitions of words change over time, so I'm not trying to start a semantic argument. It is just making me think about the group of symbols someone chooses to interpret. Does each group develop its own egregore (if that is the right word)? Or, with Tarot, would each deck develop its own egregore? Or, are there entities on the astral plane who inspire someone to create a deck, a system, or whatnot, so they have a way of communicating to people who are doing the divination?)
I have been working on developing 'an oracle' (meaning a system of symbols) for my adept project. I will say that it definitely has an attitude/personality. (If you ask about a specific situation, the three symbols always have a relationship to each other. If someone asks a 'general' question, the symbols do not and the reading feels like gibberish.)
And creating the oracle was not something I decided to do, it was something I felt compelled to do. And lots of little quests I've done in the past that didn't seem related to an oracle at all somehow ended up very involved. So it very much feels like an entity wants a way to communicate.
Anyway, much to ponder. Thank you for the post.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-27 03:24 pm (UTC)I see the oracle as a non-human intelligence that communicates things. So let's take tarot. To me, there are three things involved. A tarot oracle, the cards/symbols which are a language it uses to speak, and me, the receiver.
When I hear terms like Oracle at Delphi it definitely seems to refer to a human woman. I take it that something is communicating through her. Now it's possible that the tarot cards or the woman at Delphi are reading patterns in the astral light, and there is no intelligence involved at that end. This would change my hypothesis a little bit, not a lot. But to me, it feels like there is at last an egregore if not an intelligence guiding the sortilege or vision process.
For example in scrying, it involves perceiving images in the astral, but one often calls on gods or spirits to guide the process and communicate things. My working assumption, which could be wrong, is that well-established oracles have such a guide. As for making new divination systems, they may either pick up a congenial oracle (who may well have inspired the desire to create the system in the first place), or they may tap into a nearby intelligence or egregore.
JMG's Sacred Geometry Oracle works well, I assume because sacred geometry is so well-established and perhaps held many of those meanings latent in geometric symbols that were discovered rather than invented. Something like a Lenormand deck may have tapped into other cartomancy oracles (egregor or intelligence).
Hope that explains my position, but I posted this hoping to hear the flaws in my thinking and this is an important point, so thank you.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-27 07:27 pm (UTC)And I agree with you that an oracle might deliberately provide a confusing reading, to nudge the receiver out of complacency.
Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2025-06-27 05:45 pm (UTC)Some are very clear that oracles are from the god (either directly or through an intermediary): obvious examples are Homer, Plato's Symposium, Aelius Aristides's Sacred Tales, Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles, Synesius on Dreams, etc. Others involve the skill of the prophet to a greater or lesser degree; Apollodorus has many myths where this is a trope. Others take no stance but their interpreters make a lot of it: Herodotus tells a lot of (honestly pretty funny if you ask me) stories about the misinterpretation of the Pythia, and people have been arguing over them for millennia.