Soothsayer say something.
Anything.
Believing in predictions and fortune cookies and so on is for me, and possibly for you, really difficult, no matter how much I want to. And I do want to, very badly. But more often than not I find myself unable to give in and fully accept these things, but I do often find myself wanting to acquiesce and not be cynical or seek some logical explanation for things. Because what harm can come from accepting them? Does a cold approach really benefit me? Nonetheless, I am a sucker for indulging them.
Earlier this week I was talking to a friend about AI. He’d been experimenting with ChatGPT and been impressed by it. And it’s not that I’m not super impressed by these machines’s capabilities, it’s more so that I approach them (in their current state) from the angle of how I approach mediums or clairvoyants; that is, if you go in wanting to talk to the dead, then you’re probably going to talk to the dead.1
This same friend is also a big fan of the I Ching, which is something I’ve never experimented with but plan to, since he told me that literally everything it’s ever predicted for him came true.
This same friend brought me an Oracle answer book because we’d seen it on an episode of Come Dine With Me. I had a go with it on the ferry to Orkney earlier this year and while it didn’t divine me anything special, nor did any of its predictions come true, it was great fun all the same. It seems like it would be a good tool for making decisions you know you need to make but just need nudging to do so. Just learn how to ask it the right questions and outsource the plaster-tearing.
This same friend brought over some fortune cookies on Burns Night and my fortune, though it wasn’t a prediction, was so eerily accurate to my personal moral code that the three of us were stunned silent by it.
This same friend is one of the most intelligent people I know. He’s informed many of my own opinions and forced me to rethink even more. His approach to divinations renders my own cold and cynical approach feel just that, cold and cynical—no matter how much it hides behind a veil of logic. A veil he makes me wish I could tear away, for there is great magic in the world, and giving in to it can lead to magical things. Hard as it is sometimes.
Sometimes words help, etymologies, expanded meanings. Within the roots of language many things reveal themselves and provide you with new understandings, not just of the words but of the world, yourself. Soothsayer, for example. From the Middle English sọ̄th-seier (e n. Also sothsaier, -seggere, sothesigger, soeth-; pl. sothseieres, etc. & sothsiggeres, (K) zothziggeres.) Combined of the Old English sọ̄th and the Middle English seier. Sọ̄th meaning truth, justice, righteousness, rectitude, reality, and/or certainty; and seier meaning to utter, inform, speak, tell, relate.
Some contemporary defintions of soothsayer are:
One who claims or pretends to the power of foretelling future events; a predictor, prognosticator - Oxford English Dictionary
A person who predicts the future by magical, intuitive, or more rational means - Merriam Webster
Both of these, the second especially, seems to strike a good balance between the rational and the magical that I want to better embrace. And the archaic, or, as the OED calls it, obsolete, definition, provides, for me at least, a way of reaching that embrace:
One who speaks the truth; a truthful or veracious person - Oxford English Dictionary
One who tells the truth; a candid adviser - Middle English Compendium
Veracious can be defined as truth, but also accurate. So the soothsayer doesn’t need to look into the future to see the truth, they can intuit things through reason. Or they can simply give you candid advice. They can tell you the truth. Perhaps a truth you already know but haven’t accepted, or a truth that although isn’t the future, can inform your future. I like these defintions and their implications. That truth in the moment is as revelatory as seeing into the future, that good advice is as revelatory as both—that in honesty lies magic.
We seek predictions, or put stock in them, for the most part, I would guess, to provide a sense of stability in the chaos. Chaos being something I’ve spoken about a lot on Fantasyland, be it my own engagement with it or attempts to seek stability within its instability. But chaos is also one of the most stable things there is, in the sense that it’s guaranteed. This stability that predictions provide clashes with the attempt at stability that logic provides, for me, at least. And though the journey to find a greater balance between them will no doubt be a long one, it’s one I feel better prepared to make with these new understandings provided me through language.
The world’s a weird place, life is incredibly hard to understand and you can apply your own meanings to things, coincidence is mindblowing and synchronicity is powerful—sometimes the soothsayer says something.
One thing these AIs have over a lot of mediums and clairvoyants, however, is that they don’t exploit the mourning.