Paper short abstract:

Bucharest professionals use self-divination as a tool to make sense of personal events and thoughts. Learning from experts and online resources, people use imagistic, metaphorical and epistemically-detached interpretations as a form of therapeutic and exculpatory self-understanding.

Paper long abstract:

Urban Romanians increasingly appeal to divination for answers related to love, family, money or health. After seeking experts who read astral charts or tarot cards, some decided to take matters into their own hands. This paper explores the practices and representations documented in participant observation and interviews with middle-class Bucharest individuals who became self-diviners using online resources, especially during the pandemic.

For Boyer (2020), divination provides a coordination tool for socially-difficult decisions yet his model cannot account for practices which only involve solitary individuals. However, this paper argues that epistemic detachment explains the use of apparently-random signs to create relevant and self-empowering interpretations of personal facts. Thus, self-divination became an alternative form of therapy to make sense of difficult personal decisions or troubling events yet without the social stigma and internal discomfort associated with mental problems.

The imagistic aspect of stars, cards and other divination materials offers an intuitive framework for those finding the analytical psychological lexicon too limited or too threatening to describe their life or sentiments. Cognitively opaque but hermeneutically-promising metaphors create a narrative in which things happen for a reason but without assigning guilt to themselves or others. The open-ended character of astrological or tarot symbols provided a starting point for personal reflection yet also helped people avoid self-criticism and deflect blame towards mystical spheres. However, self-divination explanations belong to a growing pattern of radical individualism and self-indulgence when they serve to disconnect from social accountability for choices which harmed others or themselves.