They insist AI is unavoidable. Jeff Bezos knew Amazon would be the soul-sucking way of the future. Their vision of the future in 2030? “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
Quiet though it’s kept, prediction and speculation is a cornerstone of capitalism itself. It is under the pressure of prediction that our online world took shape. We see this in everything from prediction markets to predictive text.
Though they talk about you like a dog, whether church folk or white folk, we all agree. Humans can predict the future. Future-telling is part of what makes us human.
The question is not whether your enemies will seek to know, and thus act upon, the future. They will. The question is whether we can. It’s whether we will.
I’ve looked, and of course I welcome any information, about when playing card divination entered Hoodoo. I came up short.
This is a question always close to my mind. As I explained in a recent tiktok, while it’s unlikely that playing card divination is a pre-enslavement practice, it’s still traditional.
Which is only to say it has a long history in Hoodoo tradition.
The use of playing cards for divination in Hoodoo was widespread. It’s a practice that spans a wide breadth of regions within Hoodoo.
Shortly after I began reading playing cards, I took a lover who lived on the other side of the city. Whenever I would take the bus to meet him, I’d find playing cards in the street.
At first, I struggled to find the source. Why did I always see playing cards just before I saw this lover? A lover who, except on weekend mornings, would pick me up in a loud, fast car and take me to where I was now walking.
One Sunday morning, after a hard rain and with more time on my hands, I took a moment to look for the source. Were there more cards some places than others? Finally, I saw the door to a gentleman’s lounge, and realized that what the place they came from.
This was a very cosmic lover: psychic, erotic, spooky, and troubled. These were always very cosmic cards. I put them in my wallet, when appropriate. My first marriage ended within a year.
Naturally, because their messages were not invoked by me, but rather whatever is beyond me. They floated out to me to show what I’d ignored. They were uncontainable scraps of information I could do nothing to avoid.
And how soon after exposure, which if not during the kidnapping, happened on the ships, did they turn to it? How quick was the turn to agency, to asking questions, to thwarting the context by which they found it?
Now, to know me is to know I understand that question is deep. That question is a thousand questions in one: “Am I lovable? Will I ever love again? Did I ever love? Did I love enough? Does love mean anything?”
Yet it’s still a trivialization.
Creating, nurturing, and honoring that connection are among the reasons we divine in Hoodoo.
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Far be it from me to think white ice is colder, or that as the white man does I should do. I mean only to illustrate the stakes of predicting the future through a union of intuition and action.
Frank recounts Quigly’s memoir What Does Joan Say? noting she credits herself with Reagan’s whole presidency. She says she helped time presidential debates, even eased relations with international heads of state.
Ronald Reagan sought prediction, then made the world in his image. He ushered in an age of conservative religious power that extends to this day. That the occult and capitalist christianity exist side-by-side for Reagan comes as no surprise.
It’s no exaggeration to say that these three statements are the crux of why we divine. It’s not an exhaustive list, but contained within it is a perspective. It’s a call to strategy and an announcement of tactics.
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