Yesterday was my birthday, tomorrow is St. Valentine’s (feast)day, and today is St. Agabus’s feast day. As a cartomancer this is fitting, as he is the Saint of diviners and fortunetellers. For those who seek to pierce the veil between what is known and unknown, those who dare the future by playing in the present, he is often known as their Patron Saint.
As someone who reads the cards poetically, piecing together the answers to questions image by image, I approach this concept of prophetic divination, fortunetelling, from a somewhat removed perspective. I want to re-examine this. If I believe in being able to tap into the divine, tap into what is unseen and receiving answers, and if I believe in a healthy interaction with the ancestors, then why is my perspective on fortunetelling apart? And when I speak of my interaction with what is unseen, I do so as one who is constantly working out approaches to phenomena that are not tangible. I also speak as one who sees the universe as an animist universe. As I construct my worldview and my experience in this world, I am constantly aware of my impermanence, and of the transience of reality. There is no such thing as solid reality. Reality is a constant flux of construction, destruction, and reconstruction. What materializes as worldview and experience instead, is Deleuze and Guattari’s dynamic rhizome:
Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible to neither the One or the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five etc. It is not a multiple derived from the one, or to which one is added (n+1). It is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.
–A Throusand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
In other worlds, this dynamism of understanding self and what is is a constant becoming, intertwining, and outpouring, continuously played out in the middle, in the present. Given this realization, why not play with the prophetic reading? Why not delve into what the future holds? Why see the future as disconnected from a cartomantic reading? If all truth oscillates in this rhizome, then why not invite Saint Agabus to open and bless my prophetic eye, to be able to pierce the unseen?
The more I continue walking life and living, the more I realize the importance of circles and the circularity of experience. All things come full circle. As I make my way back and re-examine old notions, challenging instilled belief structures, I loosen my grip on what I know for certain and embrace more fully the mutable, the unknowing, and the ever-becoming.
For this reason I accept foremost, fearlessness. This is the key to tapping into the ever-becoming. This is the key to piercing the veil and wording the invisible in any -mantic endeavor. Therefore on this day, in honor of Saint Agabus, he who pierced the invisible, welcome fearlessness. Sling the cards readily and let them fall where they may.
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