Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?

Indeed. What I was trying to say was that police and criminal investigations have a reasonable amount of science to ascertain guilt. (Aside some of the junk science used: blood spatter analysis, lie detectors, etc).

Tarot can be mechanistic or intuitive. It's my belief that we don't yet have the science understand to explain how it does and doesn't work.

And NOBODY should be making public accusations based on a tarot reading. That's just ethically wrong to begin with, aside legal and civil damages caused.

Ah indeed. It was my intent to compare tarot and esoterism to that of evidentiary science in a criminal setting. DNA evidence is a reproducible fact of being present at a scene. And other crime scene investigators can prove it in a scientific setting. But alas, I was tired last night and didn't come across the way ai had intended.

> Regarding symbology, for both intuitive and mechanistic readings, isn't there a lot that can be interpreted - in many different ways - from even a single symbol, let alone a string of symbols?

Well in a mechanistic reading, I would expect the readings to mostly coincide, as long as the readers were using the same decks. Different decks have different symbology, and those readings can have very different results.... But again, for the same decks, would expect a similar reading.

It's the intuitive readings that will throw a major curve ball. In those readings (I do both, btw) I will receive mental pictures, smells, sensations, and more of a reading I do for others. The card symbolism starts me to see those hidden senses (occult as occluded from sight). This tiktoker may have gotten her image intuitively... But how would you know it wasn't a student in her class, or someone was targeting her for being in gender studies, or she pulled it from someone else who happened to be thinking about this prof? And many times, an intuitive reading won't make sense until something else happens. That's happened to me a few times, with a eureka moment days or weeks later.

And with intuitive readings, I have gotten pictures of people, smells of perfume and cologne, maps of areas, and other hidden things. I approach them as 'features of interest'.. certainly not as some presumption of guilt!

I'm certainly not expecting anyone else to believe me. And I have no way to prove it, other than anecdotes by me and those whom I've done readings before. This is just my anecdote of someone who's been in the occult for 15+ years, and seen more than my fair share of craziness.

But this whole debacle of a TikTok reader making public accusations is just sickening.... And falls in line with the types that call themselves "baby witches". For example, it is considered gross form to do 3rd party readings, which this was. It's also in terrible form to make accusations, even if 100% legal and no civil action.

Frankly, I sincerely hope this tiktoker loses their shirt in the lawsuit. It is abhorrent and unconscionable to do what they did. And I hope the prof is able to restore and maintain their status as a professional they are.

I mentioned science in the frame of evidence in a criminal investigation. It didnt come across as such. I fell asleep not too long after that comment.

> I do not think they are constantly told this.

I definitely have been told this. Major practices are called religion, whereas minor practices are just 'cult' and weird. The existing larger religons' congregants are the worst to demean me and my practices, all the whole doing it themselves. But no matter.

I didn't get into tarot until after I became a pagan. I had a whole string of 'strangely coincidential' things that happened to me and people around me that have no relation to how they would in science. And that includes doing private rituals, and 2 people who don't know each other, directly asking about them in detail. They both admitted they could see what I did.

Again, I recognize the extreme personal nature, and no proof. (In a way, it's similar to a ZKP where recording it and showing it after the fact gives no proof.)

> I wrote my comment with the hope that I can learn their scientific approach to tarot.

The mechanistic reading is the boring one. Basically you just read the book and apply the straightforward answer to the question based on the book descriptions.

An intuitive reading is when you get pictures in your mind, and feel senses that others can't. The only equipment I know can do this is an fMRI. I certainly cannot construct one, nor find someone who'd do occult/divinatory research. I'd be willing though.

As for my other backgrounds, I'm a cloud/systems engineer by profession, so I'm well aware of the scientific method, and how my pagan practices are mostly irreconcilable with my scientific and engineering upbringing. I would love to connect the 2 realms together, but given what I do, and the research lab and equipment required, is highly unlikely I ever will do that.