Applying ancient divination to modern intuition

Peter Struck

TarotTED
Applying ancient divination to modern intuition

Applying ancient divination to modern intuition

by Peter Struck

TEDxPenn201513 min

Most ancient people were in the habit of imagining that messages from their gods were built into the world around them: in the oracles they consulted, in their dreams, and in the animals they sacrificed. They drew on them to sort out their thinking on knotty issues they faced in their lives, seeing more deeply into the past, present, or future. This talk explores the similarities between these ancient habits of mind and our own modern fascination, attested to in the discoveries of the cognitive sciences that lay behind books like Malcolm Gladwell's. Peter Struck is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research engages with the history of the construction of meaning, in divination and in ancient notions of the organism. In 2004, he won Penn's Lindback Award, the university's highest award for teaching. Currently, he is writing about the applications of Greek and Roman divination in "Divine Signs and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Divination in Antiquity".

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Tarot Mapping

The Hierophant

The Hierophant

The Hierophant acts as a bridge between the divine and the human, representing established traditions, spiritual teachings, and the structures of belief. He signifies the importance of learning from history and finding meaning within a community or system.

traditionspiritual guidanceconformityeducationinstitutionsbelief systemsmentor

Why This Mapping?

The Hierophant is a strong home for this talk because the talk isn’t really “about magic.” It’s about how cultures build legitimate ways to handle the unknown...and how those ways get transmitted, practiced, and interpreted across generations. Struck is treating divination like a social technology: a codified practice with roles, settings, rules, and interpretive norms. That’s pure Hierophant energy.

READ MORE ABOUT WHY THIS MAPPING...
Struck is working with inherited systems (oracles, signs, traditions) and arguing they weren’t just “superstition,” but culturally and philosophically meaningful frameworks. That’s Hierophant: tradition as a container for wisdom. A Hierophant reading is also about initiation into a way of reading the world. The oracle isn’t valuable because it spits out “answers”; it’s valuable because it teaches a community how to make meaning when certainty is impossible. In the talk’s frame, divination becomes a disciplined interpretive act: you consult signs, you hold ambiguity, you test resonance, you translate symbol into guidance. That’s the Hierophant as interpreter...the one who helps turn mystery into something you can live by. It also matters who is delivering the message. Struck stands in a modern analog of the Hierophant role...the scholar/teacher who legitimizes an old practice by locating it in its historical context and showing the audience the “grammar” of how it worked. The vibe is: you don’t have to be naïve to take this seriously; you just have to understand what kind of seriousness it is. That’s Hierophant: not “believe blindly,” but “learn the tradition’s operating system.” And finally, the Hierophant is the card of shared containers: rituals, institutions, cultural memory...structures that hold people steady when life gets weird. This talk lands right there: when modern rationality hits its limit, humans don’t stop needing guidance; we reach for frameworks that can hold uncertainty without collapsing. Struck is basically reintroducing divination as one of humanity’s longstanding “containers” for that moment.

Reflection Questions

  • What traditions or beliefs am I following out of habit rather than conviction?
  • How can I seek guidance or mentorship for my current situation?
  • Where do I need to challenge the status quo and find my own truth?