In the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, after the ascension, the eleven need a twelfth to take the place of Judas. There are two candidates, Joseph called Barsabas and Matthias. The apostles pray: thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men, shew whether of these two thou hast chosen. Then they cast lots, and the lot falls on Matthias, and he is numbered with the apostles. Nobody in the New Testament ever suggests they did anything wrong.
Yet the same scriptures forbid divination in the strongest language they have. So were the apostles diviners? What is the difference between casting a lot and divining? And when a student shuffles a deck of cards, is she casting a lot or doing something else entirely? The fellowship does not read cards. Some of our students do, and their question deserves an honest answer rather than a slogan. The answer, we think, comes down to providence.
What the Law Forbids
Begin with the hard verses. There shall not be found among you any one that useth divination, says Deuteronomy, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. Regard not them that have familiar spirits, says Leviticus, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them. And Isaiah: when they shall say unto you, seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?
Notice something about every one of these passages. None of them names a tool. Not one speaks of cards, or dice, or bones, or oil on water. What the text forbids, every time, is a relationship: consulting the dead; keeping a familiar spirit, a spirit that speaks through a person; prying hidden knowledge out of something that is not God. The Hebrew has a separate word for the one who inquires of the dead, the one who keeps a familiar spirit, and the one who reads omens. They are different practices, but they share a source. Each goes somewhere other than God for what only God can give.
Our friend, who has read the cards for a lifetime and helped the keepers build this room, said plainly what it would have been convenient to leave unsaid. A great deal of what is done with tarot cards today falls within those verses, not by a stretch but squarely. If a reader shuffles and says, I am channeling a message from spirit; if a guide is said to speak through the cards; if the reader says, the cards told me; if messages are pulled from the collective or delivered from the other side to people who never asked for them: that is consulting a familiar spirit. That is what Isaiah was talking about. It makes no difference that the medium is cardboard instead of a bowl of water. The verse was never about the medium. The people who told you that the cards were dangerous were not entirely wrong.
What the Law Commands
Now read the verses that are seldom quoted. The lot is cast into the lap, says Proverbs, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord. A lot is a randomized draw, something shaken in a vessel or drawn from the fold of a garment so that no human hand decides the result. Scripture says: cast it. And then it says that every decision it produces belongs to God.
This is not a stray verse. The lot runs through the whole of the Bible. Joshua divided the land among the tribes by lot. The courses of the priests in the temple were assigned by lot, and on the Day of Atonement the high priest cast lots over two goats, one for the Lord and one to be sent away into the wilderness. When the sailors on Jonah's ship wanted to know who had brought the storm on them, they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah, and it was right. The high priest carried the Urim and the Thummim in the breastplate of judgment over his heart. No one now knows exactly what they were, but every scholar agrees on what they did: they gave an answer from God through a process the priest did not control.
In the gospel of Luke, the old priest Zechariah is chosen by lot to burn the incense in the sanctuary, and it is there, in the place where the lot had sent him, that the angel comes to tell him he will have a son, who will be John. And in the upper room the eleven cast lots for an apostle.
The Lot in the Desert
The desert community lived by the lot, at least in its language. The Community Rule uses the word constantly. Humanity is divided into the lot of God and the lot of Belial, the children of light and the children of darkness. When a candidate has completed his year of instruction, the Rule says, the many shall be asked about his affairs, and if the lot goes forth for him he shall draw near to the council of the community. Scholars still debate whether the lot there means an actual casting or the decision of the assembly, or both at once. The word itself tells us how the community understood such decisions: as given, not made.
The Temple Scroll goes further. It says that the king of Israel shall not go out to war until he has stood before the high priest, who shall inquire for him the judgment of the Urim and the Thummim. Whatever the Essenes thought of the temple of their own day, they expected the stones of judgment to be used again.
And when the historian describes the Essenes who foretold the future, as several of them famously did, as the page Essenes Known by Name recounts, he tells us how they did it. They foretold, he says, by reading the holy books, by various purifications, and by being always conversant with the sayings of the prophets, and they were seldom wrong. Their foretelling was a kind of reading. It did not consult the dead or keep a spirit. It read what had been revealed, read it long and purely, and listened.
So What Is the Difference?
We have two things sitting side by side in the same book: divination, forbidden and called an abomination, and the lot, commanded, and its outcome assigned to the Lord. What separates them?
It cannot be randomness, because the lot is random. It cannot be the seeking of guidance, because the lot is sought for guidance. It cannot be the object, because scripture never names one. The difference is who you believe is answering. The diviner seeks an answer from a being that is not God, through a channel God never commissioned. The one who casts a lot has nothing but God and a bag of stones, and the whole purpose of the bag is that it removes the human hand and the human ego and leaves the outcome entirely to providence. One reaches sideways into the spirit world. The other reaches up, and then gets out of the way.
This is why the line is so fine. A reader who says I am channeling energy and a reader who says the lot is cast and the Lord disposes can be sitting at the same table, with the same deck, doing the same shuffle. One is doing what Isaiah forbade. The other is doing what the apostles did in the upper room. From across the room you cannot tell them apart. You can tell them apart if you listen.
A Concordance, Not an Oracle
Those who read the cards on the right side of the line describe their practice this way. The cards themselves have no authority at all. They are a fifteenth-century Italian card game, as the page The Cards and the Letters recounts, and nothing in scripture commissions them. Over the centuries, however, they have been made to stand for something else. Laid on the paths of the Kabbalistic tree, each card is tied to a Hebrew letter, and each letter carries a meaning that comes from the Book of Formation, and through it from scripture, rather than from what the picture happens to make the reader feel that evening. Read that way, a deck is a concordance. No one thinks a concordance is inspired. It is useful only because of the text it indexes, and only for as long as it indexes that text faithfully. Our friend says the work could be done with twenty-two plain cards bearing one letter each, and nothing would be lost but atmosphere.
Notice, too, how little the lot itself does in such a reading. It says: look here. It does not say what here means. The text does that. The moment the draw is treated as a message, the cards speaking, the reader has walked back into divination by a side door. The cards are a language, not a machine.
And they cannot tell the future. A student who wants to know whether she will get the job should be told honestly that the deck cannot say, and neither can the reader. The law gives the reason: the secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever. Revealed means already given, in the text and in creation, not in private vision. Revealed things are read. They are not extracted. Prying out of the unseen world what was never offered is the very thing the law calls divination.
The book of Job has a word for the role such a reader might rightly play. It speaks of a messenger, an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness. His uprightness: where he stands, not what will befall him. A true interpreter hands the person back to himself, standing more clearly before God than he was before. He does not set himself between them.
On Angels and Voices
No one studies the Kabbalah for long without meeting the angels, among them the seventy-two names that the Kabbalists drew from three verses of Exodus. How is a student to tell an angel from something pretending to be one? The apostle warns that the adversary himself is transformed into an angel of light, which is not much help. Manoah spoke face to face with an angel and did not know what it was until it went up in the flame of the altar. Scripture often shows how hard angels are to recognize.
It also tells us how to test a message, and the first thing it says is that being right is not enough. In Philippi a girl with a spirit of divination followed Paul through the streets crying out something entirely true: these men are the servants of the most high God, which shew unto us the way of salvation. He cast the spirit out anyway. My guide was accurate proves nothing. In scripture the angels are sent. They come in God's time, deliver his word, point to God, and depart. Nobody has an angel on call. Anything that comes when you call it is answering to you, and no messenger of God answers to you.
The safest practice, those who read on the right side of the line tell us, is never to need the identification at all. Ask no voice to answer, and there is no voice to authenticate. If something turns up uninvited, as it sometimes does, do not engage it. The page Keeping the Door says more.
Three Questions for Any Reader
Here are three questions a student may put to any reader of cards, stars, or anything else, including the fellowship.
- Declared or hidden? Is what you are reading something that has been revealed, or something that belongs to the secret things?
- A page or a voice? Where does the meaning come from: a source you can open and check, or a voice you must take on trust?
- Could this be a lot? Could I cast this lot and ask God, and God alone, to show me where I stand?
If the answer to the last is yes, the student is in good company: Joshua, Jonah's sailors, the high priest with the stones over his heart, the old priest at the altar of incense, and the eleven in the upper room. She is doing nothing they did not do.
So, Is It Evil?
If what is meant is the deck, no. The question was never the cards. The question is who you believe is answering, and if a student gets that right, the rest usually follows.
The fellowship's own practice keeps the two plainest doors described on the page Asking and Commanding: we ask, and we notice. We have no need of cards, and many of our students would find them a distraction from the watch and the lamp. But we will not tell a student that the apostles sinned in the upper room, and we will not tell a reader who keeps the line that she stands outside scripture. She stands where they stood.