Liberal no. 43/1999
Dear Mina,
I can’t go around TV channels with the remote control without running into fortune-tellers, astrologers and tarot card readers. At all hours of the day and night this irrationalism is poured upon us. Obviously there is a wide audience for these forms that I don’t know how to define. I do not know whether it is a weakness or whether it is an innate attitude in man. The fact of the matter is that I don’t like this whole trend, and I would like to be comforted by your opinion on the matter.
Erica M., Trento
Dear Erica,
said Ambrose Bierce, an American writer of the last century, that “magic is the art of converting superstition into hard currency.” If through resorting to the occult the neighbor rediscovered the smile and kindness of greeting when meeting her on the stairs and looked at us with a little more serenity, it would perhaps be a good investment, a good medicine to lift us out of the stresses and pisses that brood in the most serpentine depths of the human soul. If a tarot card smash would help the same neighbor figure out whether it is best to avoid scrambling her heart at the thought of the appetizing new mailman who passes by her house every day, or whether it is worth making a fool of herself and asking how much a postage bill to Italy costs, it might also be a form of self-talk. A kind of placebo effect of the psyche.
But the fact is that all this is not free. And that around the corner of the cards and tarot cards is the heavy shadow of deception. If it were all true, if the glass ball were a mirror of the truth of our future, there would be nothing to do but learn a kind of do-it-yourself paranormal … you buy yourself a deck of tarot cards, learn the rules, and off you go.
But the reality is quite different. A recent study by Confesercenti has told us some impressive figures: between seers, mediums, fortune tellers, astroccultists, astrocartomancers, tarot experts, magicians and radio aestheticians, with the addition of those who claim to be descendants of some Egyptian pharaohs, the turnover reaches one trillion a year. There is a real fee schedule, ranging from fifty thousand lira for a palm reading up to eight million for a hex or a counterfeit. If we then add to all this beautiful scenery of pointy-hatted “fantasists” the sects, the new religions, the New or Next Age, the money spin is even more impressive.
Occultism or simply gullibility then comes through the declination of credit card data. If you want to keep the nefarious effect of evil spirits out of your door, you can turn to ethnic boutiques and take home an authentic blanket handmade by Cheyenne Indians, complete with a certificate of guarantee. If you are stressed, you fill your house with colored stones with thaumaturgic effects sold in New Age crystal therapy stores, and the relaxation effect is assured.
I won’t deny it: all this new opium of the people annoys me slightly. It seems to me that it is a kind of neo-religion tailored to the Western “homo consumans.” The belief in the unbearable lightness of tarot, the deification of the magician Otelma or the mix of Zen and pins are the manifestation of a postmodern spiritualism, without rules and dogmas, for a happiness that is bought and consumed quickly. A miracle market that is actually the miracle of the market, making happy especially those who had the prescience to recognize the business.
It is also true that all this stems from a deeply human need, as you write in your letter to me. History is full of temples, Pythias, sorcerers or priests to whom men have entrusted the innermost needs of their souls. Perhaps “magician Max” will be right, who, in slightly Gaddian style, confides that “against the phony certainties of science, against the unanswered questions, people turn to us because we can meet the needs, take away the anguish of living.” Perhaps it is true that, in these moonlight conditions, it is better to rely on the harmless Pendolino predicting the future, rather than the risky Pendolino crossing the tracks of Italy. But in all this gruel of spiritualistic and paranormal sauce, two protagonists seem to me to have disappeared: God and reason. The former, too absolute and totalitarian for the relativistic tastes of modern man. The second, on the other hand, disappointed by a happiness always promised and never realized, relies on the first “consoler” on duty.
But perhaps this is an inevitable drift, as Leopardi had already prophesied in 1823: “Superstition, both speculative and practical, is the daughter of society and is unsurpassed by it society as civilized as one wishes, as all histories show. Indeed it seems that it, unlike so many other inconveniences and barbarities of primitive society, grows in proportion to civilization.”
As in, more evolved and therefore more superstitious. Or, more likely, more in need of an attention, a consolation, a good word that makes us endure what we have outside and inside us. And, in order to get some consideration, some attention, a pat on the back, a smile, we are willing to pay. We are really in a bad way.
