Varg Vikernes had a good video, on his now-Shoahed channel, about “cosmic censorship”. Quoth Varg:

“We cannot find these things that way for a reason. That there is some sort of cosmic censorship preventing us from understanding, because we are not meant to, because it’s not that track we are supposed to follow, because it’s not going to help us in any way, even if we find out these things.”

I’ve been doing a lot of Tarot readings recently, as my life is desperate and I can see no way out. I’ve also briefly experimented with oracle cards but found them often useless. I believe this is because they are too obvious: whereas the Tarot will yield a suggestive image

an Oracle Card will tell you something like “consider your friendships” or “believe in yourself”. A sceptic might say that, with oracle cards, there is no room for the deluded to weave a justifying fantasy. Perhaps. But I have also occasionally had Tarot readings that simply made no sense – which is an answer of sorts; as it were invalidating the query.

The word rune comes from Old English run, meaning a secret or mystery. I believe there is a kind of existential censorship, which limits us to interpretation, speculation, uncertainty. Divination, at least in my experience, works very well but only within a speculative context; only insofar as everything is deniable (it is, in this sense, akin to a “Q proof”). When divination becomes too mechanistic, too obvious, it fails.

This suggests, to me, that we mortal beings are not intended to perceive face to face, but rather through a glass darkly. When I began my largely self-initiation, just over a decade ago, I experienced a number of omens, real-world events, visions, and assumed this was my new normal; instead, after a few weeks things returned (largely) to the banal. I noticed this with others – when they entered the Path, they experienced dazzling tokens of the divine, and then nothing. Some, naturally, lose faith and become apostate; hopping from faith to faith until they finally become secular materialists who wish there was a spiritual force to things, but cannot believe. They are, if not hollow men, at least destitute and forlorn:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

In Eliot’s poem, the speaker is placed between worlds, unable to devote himself to the merely material, unable to wholly believe. I would say, it is important to recall and rekindle the tokens of faith:

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

In our material exist, we require the patience and deep roots of the yew, the death tree.