Introducing GalaxyQ, Planet M's flagship newsletter
In the inaugural issue of Planet M's flagship newsletter, I wrote about my first tarot card reading. An excerpt:
In my research for this story, I found that fortune-telling really hasn’t changed all that much in human history or across cultures. Sure, the Mesopotamians used entrails to divine answers to their questions — “particularly the liver and the lungs,” Chris Godsen writes in his book, Magic: A History — but they also used the stars, too. The Zodiac was created in 410 BCE, according to Godsen. The Vikings cast runes, little stones with symbols on them, each with a specific meaning that shifts depending on how the stone is cast. Egyptians were fond of interpreting meaning from the distorted language of dreams, because they believed dreams were messages from the gods. In ancient China, The I Ching or Book of Changes used yarrow sticks or coins to help the user consult the so-called 64 hexagrams. The Romans saw omens in the flight patterns of birds. The Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi. Scrying, the practice of gazing into mirrors, water, or crystal balls took off among mystics in 15th-century Europe, and astrology among Europeans really came into its own not long after that. Tarot cards had been around for centuries as an Italian game called tarocchi before being adopted for fortune-telling sometime in the 18th century.
None of these methods, of course, predict the future. My psychic does not really know that I’m supposedly in for a period of good luck or that my insurance company will suddenly start showering me with the money I’m owed. But there’s a reason humans have practiced and reinvented and repurposed divination methods since apparently the beginning of time — they can and do reveal secret information. It’s just secret information we already know but need help to access directly. We’re talking about the subconscious, and its role in generating thoughts, feelings, and behaviors before they enter our conscious awareness.
The human brain has pretty much one job — to keep you alive. It does this by distributing energy throughout the body based on the environment. Running from a tiger on the savannah is going to look very different, energy distribution-wise, than say a night at home watching Netflix. The brain is also a prediction machine. It is constantly trying to guess what’s coming next so it can be prepared to shift your body’s energy supply where it’s most needed as quickly as possible. Is a tiger likely to jump you in the Starbucks line? No. So, energy can be more broadly distributed.
Read the rest of the story and the whole issue – including a story from Harry Houdini — at Planet M.