Beyond coincidence

My interest in the Tarot, though deep and persistent, is largely theoretical. I hardly ever do readings, though of course I know how and even seem to have a bit of a knack for it. I would estimate that I have done fewer than 20 in my entire life.

The less often you do something, of course, the less likely it is that amazing coincidences will occur in connection with that activity -- but occur they do.

One of the most amazing of these occurred fairly recently when, under circumstances on which this is scarcely the place to elaborate, I had occasion to use the Tarot to interrogate a poltergeist so violent that its antics were later to become potentially life-threatening. "Who are you?" I asked, after shuffling and all the other preliminaries, and turned over the first card: The Devil. "What do you want?" I asked, and turned over the next card: Death.

The perfect answer, right? I don't mean that the geist in question was actually "the devil" or anything; I'm talking about dramatic appropriateness. I mean, if it had been a scene in a horror movie rather than an episode in real life, those two cards -- precisely those two, as answers to those two questions -- are the ones the screenwriter or director would have chosen. And those are the two I drew, by "chance," against odds of 6,084 to 1.

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This past Saturday night, I was trying to sort out my thoughts regarding Donald Trump. Despite my brain telling me that he's not on my side, and that whether he or Biden wins out in the end should be a matter of complete indifference, I find that I am not in fact indifferent -- that I think of him as good, that I will be elated if wins and would view a Biden win as an unmitigated disaster.

Brooding over this cognitive dissonance, I ended up turning to the Rider-Waite deck -- shuffling it, asking "Who is Donald Trump?" and drawing a single card -- and that card was The Sun.

Now, this is considerably less impressive than the other reading I have described in this post. Instead of yielding the single most appropriate card, twice in a row, it yielded one of three possible "perfect" results. I had already written that Mr. Trump's 2016 and 2020 victories were predicted by The Tower and The Judgment, respectively, and had identified The Sun as "the other Trump trump" -- so any of those three would have been "perfect." The odds of drawing one of the three from a 78-card deck is 1 in 26 -- not extremely low, but just low enough to be "statistically significant" by mainstream standards.

And if the Tarot wanted to decline to pass judgment on Mr. Trump one way or the other, it could scarcely have chosen a more perfectly ambiguous card. The Sun is traditionally given a positive meaning, but my own recent meditations on it have uncovered a dark side as well. It represents, among other things, the birdemic (the sole ill) and the number 666. In discussing these two sides of The Sun, I have borrowed a concept from Superman. There is the Yellow Sun of Earth (good) and the Red Sun of Krypton (evil), and the card represents both.

And what is President Trump's characteristic color? But of course: orange.