Theme for April 30 - Soothsayer or Quack Purveyor?
Apr 25th, 2009 by Selma
Dear fellow Night Visioners:
Inspired by Ieda’s quest for identity, I started asking myself : “How do we define who we are, beyond our cultural heritage and the work we do?”
Some of us look for answers in books on psychology, philosophy, cosmology, etc. Some people use the horoscope to help them figure out who they are and where they might be headed. In some cultures, it is extremely important to define your cosmic coordinates — to provide information on the place and the date of your birth at least — when looking for a partner or applying for a job. Are you a Tiger or a Monkey? Are you Aries or Pisces?
In some cases, people go a step further. Recently, a company in Japan was put on the spot for its practice of asking prospective hires what blood type they were! Are you blood type A or B, or AB perhaps?
Have *you* ever surreptitiously glanced over someone’s shoulder as they were reading the day’s horoscope, just to check out your own? Have you ever, after inserting “in bed” at the end of a fortune cookie’s prediction and laughing it off with your friends, secretly thought about the possibility that it might be real?
Are these just fun ways to pass time or attempts to answer that hovering question “Who are we really?” Are they just (more primitive?) variants of genetic determinism? And what about the people who promote such predictions and answers to *your* universe and everything: soothsayers or quack purveyors of bunk? Please tell me what you think.
I look forward to receiving your introductions and interesting anecdotes related to the theme.
Yours truly,
Selma