Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?

I think it is analogous to a some high quality product brand name that has started selling some pure crap under the same brand name, while still also selling quality products.

When people trust the brand name, they believe it guarantees the quality. For me, the "product strategy" of selling crap under the quality brand name is form of lying. These people are both selling crap and lying about the quality. To me that is worse than just selling crap and not lying about it. And if you buy one crap product, you will lose the trust to the whole brand name very quickly, as has happened with "the science".

I see Tarot etc. are more like hand-made products on some stereotypical African market. Nobody guarantees anything. Many people try to cheat you. But you might also find good quality products from one seller. Perhaps later you find out the quiet guy who produced these solid products, one who has craftmanship. And little by little you start trusting him as you see what he has done. To me that might produce more healthy attitude than blind trust in a market that is incentiviced to produce crap.

The etymology section on Occult Wikipedia page says 'as opposed to "knowledge of the measurable", usually referred to as science.' I think one needs to be very clear about this distinction. Randi's "trick" was to imply that everything is measurable. But not everything is measurable. Quality, for instance, ultimately cannot be measured. Quality can be experienced, and most people can agree on quality when they see it. But still, nobody can define objective measures about quality.

I am sure Randi exposed lots of charlatans, and my point is not to defend them. There are certainly lots of charlatans in those fields. There are charlatans everywhere, even in science.

My point was that no sensible person would take on Randi's offer, because ultimately you need to claim that something that cannot be measured can be measured. And that is not possible, because not everything can be measured. And those things that can be measured, would not be "paranormal" by Randi's standards.

I never said that there are no measurements for certain aspects of quality. If you care to look, you can see measurements even for certain aspects of things Randi would call paranormal. For example, there have been found measurable neurological changes in people who engage in certain kinds of meditation for extended periods.

But those aspects are consequences of the thing, they are not the thing itself. I don't see it very useful to argue about this. If you do not see that there are things that cannot be measured, we will not get much further in this discussion. And we we are already way too much on a tangent here anyway. Thanks for the discussion.

But I think the question of experimentation risks obscuring an important point you touched on, namely the distinction between facts and meaning. They're certainly not the same thing, I think of them as three-dimensional and four dimensional analyses of the same dataset. If divination is worth anything it's because it deals with meaning, but the relation of that to the facts of the situation being examined is ambiguous.

> Do you feel Paganism or tarot makes a significant impact on your personal life?

It absolutely does. I live it daily. It's not a practice once a week, or on the 8 parts of the year. And I use my honed abilities on a daily basis.

For example, I've learned how to hear some animals talk, or at least impressions of words, thoughts, and feelings. They've taught me some things, like how catnip is called "happy dry". For me, its opening up conversations that normally we just don't have.

Ive also been told by 1 of our cats that before we adopted her, that she was with a "bad family". And the "mean woman" would try to step on her tail.

(I was able to teach myself this by starting with meditation. Took a while, but I could hear thought-words and pictures that didn't make sense. I realized that they were from living beings around me. And talking and meditating, I could hear them clearly.)

There's naturally a lot more, but this is something that is more concrete as an example.. And it definitely makes my life better being able to cross these normally-uncrossable boundaries.

> What can you achieve with tarot other than helping or reading others?

I usually reserve tarot and other divination when a problem is ill defined or there's lots of stuff missing, and you need to an action (nothing is an action). Most problems like this are rather easily solved with pro/con lists and that sort of thing to talk it out. However, sometimes, a problem is too convoluted or too hidden to make sense. That's where I tend to reach for divination.

I'm decently versed in tarot, I Ching, and a few lesser arts. All of them can provide the answers in some form or another, or guidance thereof.

Now, for people starting off, the bigger issue is that some get into what I call "divinatory paralysis", where they do a reading for everything, no matter how small or obvious. It's one of the traps inherent in magick like this. And it can be hard to get out of.

But for most cases, and most questions, tarot is just likely not needed. I tend to use it on the weird issues.

Now, another thing to remember, is that tarot decks, oracle decks, yarrow sticks, are all just instruments. The power to do this is with the human, not the tool.

I had someone who I knew for years, and dated a few times. Didn't work out, but we both recognized it. I had a flash in my mind that the next date she was going to have would lead to her death.

I did a 3rd party reading. I called her to warn her that I got this portent. (She was also an occultist.) And the description of the guy matched exactly.

Ethically, I wasn't fishing around, and received a message that likely saved her life. That's kind of how I look at these gifts - to help make the world and those around me a better place.

I've also done public readings. However I received explicit permission from the querent, who was also present.