This episode begins with a simple question: what actually happens when we say we are foreseeing the future?
Starting from this question, I speak about divination, astrology, visions, and family constellations – not as magical or predictive practices, but as different forms of interpreting time: ways in which the past and memory find language in the present, through the unconscious. From this perspective, “to foresee” does not mean to determine the future, but to recognize movements already in motion and to explore possibilities for change.
The narrative is also an explicit critique of Cartesian dualism, which separated mind and body, reason and vision, knowledge and imagination — relegating vision to superstition or pathology, and so-called “rational” knowledge to an exercise of control.
It is with the aim of contributing to the recomposition of this fracture that I speak of transformative hermeneutics: a method that does not seek absolute truths or reassuring predictions, but relations of meaning. To read a star, a card, a constellation, or a family story means to interpret what is asking to be transformed, not governed.
This approach lies at the core of my research as well as of my consultancy work — from explorations of family roots to engagements with the personal and collective imagination — in which I accompany people in reading their historical and existential experience as an open text: an interweaving of memories, symbols, and desires that should not be explained from the outside, but listened to, reread, and set in motion.
Previous episode: –> Episode 17: Bonfire of the Truths
Everything that needs to be said has already been said.
But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
(André Gide)
It is dawn over Fiesole, and Florence is still asleep, enclosed within its breath of stone and morning mist.
From the terrace of San Francesco, the city looks like a diagram of light: damp rooftops, the Arno like a silver vein, the first stars fading one by one, leaving behind an opalescent glow.
I sit on a low wall, a notebook on my knees, the wind playing through my hair.
In my hand I hold a card: the Star. A naked woman pours water from two jars — one into the river, one onto the earth. I look at it and think that all true knowledge is like that water: half gift, half return.
A voice suddenly speaks behind me:
“Be careful not to confuse the sky with its reflection. Even the gods, at times, believe they see themselves and drown in their own image.”
I turn around.
It is Hypatia.
I recognize her immediately, without ever having seen her: the philosopher and mathematician of Alexandria, teacher of astronomy in a world that wanted women silent, martyr of public knowledge, killed not for something she got wrong, but for having understood too many things too well.
She wears a white tunic, simple and elegant like a well-proven theorem. Her hair is gathered into two dark braids, and in her eyes there is the calm of one who has gazed at the celestial vault long enough to no longer fear the night.
In her hands she holds an astrolabe, which she slowly turns between her fingers — not like an instrument, but like a rosary of stars.
“You see,” she says, “truth is never vertical. It flows. Like the water you are watching.”
On a bench beside her sits Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France.
Wrapped in a dark cloak, the mother of the three kings with whom the Valois dynasty ended wears satin gloves and a black velvet dress. Before her, on a small iron table, she has laid out a deck of cards and a small leather-bound volume — Nostradamus’s Centuries.
She smiles with that lucid cunning that knows how to become political intelligence:
“Do not worry, I have not come to recant nor to impose, but to converse. I wish to understand whether the stars truly speak to us — or whether they merely pretend, like men.”
And a little farther on, leaning against the stone balustrade, stands Gananath Obeyesekere, Sri Lankan anthropologist, scholar of myths and dreams, the man who challenged the boundaries between what we call psychology and what we call religion. His book The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience is among the most beautiful, lucid, and profound works available on this subject.
He is dressed in light linen, his posture upright and relaxed like someone who has spent a lifetime building bridges between divided worlds. In his gaze I see an entire archipelago of stories — those he gathered among Polynesian shamans, modern Pythias, and spirits exiled within Western psychiatric institutions.
On his knees rests a worn notebook, its pages swollen with questions about what happens when the unconscious stops obeying the silence modernity has imposed upon it.
“Perhaps,” he says in a slow, measured voice, “the stars neither speak nor pretend. They merely reflect the mind that looks at them. Every vision of the future, in my view, is a return: a way in which the soul translates its own past into the language of the possible.”
He then closes his eyes for a moment, as one does when listening to something coming from very far away.
Hypatia nods:
“Like meteorology, then. One can glimpse what may happen on the basis of movements of forces we already know. Prediction, in other words, is memory becoming wind.”
Catherine interlaces her fingers, ironic and curious:
“And then astrologers, mistress — what use are they? Are they useless? I spent half my kingdom listening to men who looked upward and gambled human lives on ‘perhaps.’”
“They are there to remind you,” Hypatia replies with a light smile, “that even a sovereign needs guidance that does not command, but advises. The ultimate responsibility for your choices, Your Majesty, remains yours.”
The sun rises slowly in the sky, and the outline of Florence turns gold. Below us, the towers, loggias, and palaces of my city reflect the sunlight like a fragmented mirror.
As I watch this spectacle of the cosmos, I think that perhaps true astrology is an hermeneutics of time: reading in the designs of stars or cards what the heart has already written.
The sun is now high above the hills, and the light over Fiesole seems to come from two directions: from the sky and from the stones.
Catherine has taken off her gloves and absentmindedly shuffles her cards; Hypatia adjusts a lens on the astrolabe; and I — notebook in hand — watch Gananath as he leans slightly forward, as if attuning himself to a rhythm only he can hear.
“You speak of constellations,” he says, “but before reading the stars, one must understand what a vision is.”
He pauses, lights his pipe, and lets the smoke rise like a small ribbon of secular incense.
“By visionary experience,” he continues, “I do not mean a poetic metaphor, but a phenomenon known to almost all human beings: the reception, within the sphere of consciousness, of sensory messages coming from the unconscious. These may take visual, auditory, textual, or even physical form. In such experiences, consciousness remains lucid, but becomes a spectator; body and mind are temporarily taken over by forces that appear external.”
Hypatia listens with her brow slightly furrowed, as if tracing an invisible diagram.
Catherine, by contrast, hints at a smile. “In short, an elegant possession.”
Gananath shakes his head gently.
“No, Your Majesty. We are not speaking of demons here. We are speaking of a dialogue between different parts of the soul. Of a way in which the mind speaks to itself when logic falls silent. Everyone passes through it, if only in dreams. But some — shamans, sibyls, the mad — remain there longer, and return with messages the rest of us do not understand. Modernity called them ill, and locked them away. Paganism, instead, called them seers or augurs; earlier Christianity called them mystics and saints.”
He sets the pipe down, and his tone grows more serious.
“The true trauma of the modern West is not the loss of faith, but the separation of rational thought from visionary thought. With Descartes, the ego became sovereign, the body a subject, and imagination an enemy.
Since then, we have pathologized everything we could not quantify: dream, myth, the sacred. We turned knowledge into administration.”
Catherine murmurs, with a flash of irony:
“In compensation, we invented bureaucracy. A form of immortality without a soul.”
I nod quietly, with a certain gravity.
Gananath resumes:
“Today neuroscience is finally acknowledging the mistake: Antonio Damasio called it Descartes’ Error. And yet in the academic world, as in the field of mental health care, this error remains a dogma. What does not produce profit or scores does not exist; and so vision, when it is not marketable, once again becomes madness.”
Hypatia interrupts him with a clear smile. “Then knowledge is made of the same substance as the universe: half light, half darkness.”
“Yes,” he replies. “And I believe wisdom consists precisely in allowing these two halves to speak to each other: reason and vision. When this dialogue breaks down, tragedy is born.”
We remain silent for a moment. Only the wind moves, caressing the warm stone and the Star card I have set down on the bench.
I think of the Church of the past, which recognized women’s knowledge as valid only when it came through visionary experience — one need only think of Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, Hildegard of Bingen — whereas today the opposite is true.
I reflect on whether it is possible to stitch this fracture back together; whether it is truly possible, in the world of today.
It is Hypatia who breaks the silence, her gaze fixed on the outline of Florence below, her fingers tracing invisible circles in the air.
“You are right, Gananath. Tragedy is born when the mind stops speaking with its own shadow. I used to call it the mathematics of the soul: the art of calculating the proportions between what is seen and what is felt. Human beings invented geometry to measure the world, but they forgot that every figure is also an act of faith. A triangle, a star, a spiral — they are formulas of light, but also prayers.”
She brushes the edge of the astrolabe, which reflects a ray of sunlight onto the table, like a sign.
“Plato,” she continues, “wanted to ascend to the Ideas, to the immutable. I always thought that was a mistake. There is no sky separate from its shadows: every star is already a translation of darkness into visible language. Even Aristotle — with all his order, his causes, his obsession with definition — was trying to name what cannot be possessed.”
She turns toward me, and for a moment her gaze seems to pass straight through me.
“You moderns have inherited that ancient fear: the fear that knowledge might be contaminated by imagination. But truth, Margherita, is not a formula. It is a relation. Every time we interpret a dream, a constellation, or a life, we are drawing an equation of meaning between the visible and the invisible.”
She picks up the Star card and looks at it as though it were a celestial map.
“This naked woman pouring water onto the earth and into the river… she does not represent hope alone. She is the very gesture of knowing: an act of balance between giving and receiving, between science and vision, between body and mind. When one of the two vessels runs dry, the universe fractures.”
She pauses, then smiles. “That is why I like your word, hermeneutics. Because it promises neither salvation nor certainty — only the possibility of interpretation. And interpretation, after all, is the most secular and human form of prayer.”
Her words linger in the air, light as sunlight on water.
Meanwhile, the sun has dissolved the last traces of mist; Florence below us appears like an inverted constellation, a sky inhabited by the living.
_____________________________________________
Catherine listens for a long time without interrupting.
She has the gaze of someone who weighs words like gems to be set into a diadem. When she speaks, her voice is velvety yet firm, with the irony of one who knows both the vanity of knowledge and the necessity of power.
“Ah, the stars…” she says, setting down Nostradamus’s book. “Men look at them to understand the sky, women to understand men, and rulers to understand the future. And yet none of us has ever truly succeeded.
In my time, divination was a courtly profession: prophets, astronomers, necromancers, healers of the soul — all merchants of future and smoke. Not out of malice, but out of fear. Those who rule always fear what they cannot foresee. And so we pay those who promise to bend destiny like hot iron.
But I learned that the future cannot be bent. It must be listened to, as one listens to the wind. One observes the currents, the clouds, the tides of history — and then decides how to step outside. Just as a farmer does when he sows, or a sailor when he sets sail: they know how to read the sky, but they are not foolish enough to believe they can command it.”
Gananath looks at her with genuine admiration.
“That is the difference between forecasting and prediction,” he says. “The former is born of memory; the latter of the illusion of control. The future is like the weather: it can be estimated, not determined. Stars, after all, are archives, not oracles.”
Catherine nods, curving one corner of her smile.
“Exactly. And yet everyone — popes, bankers, academics, ordinary people — still wants their astrologers. The names change: today you call them consultants, experts, algorithms. But the need is the same: to turn uncertainty into a vertigo of power, an illusion of control.”
Hypatia sighs, as though her words had come too late to be heeded.
“Perhaps,” she murmurs, “the only true prophecy is the one that liberates, not the one that reassures.”
I remain silent, watching the sky clear into an absolute blue.
I think of how fragile our idea of knowledge is, of how much we long to bend time to our will — and how time, like the wind, keeps pushing us toward what we cannot know.
The Star card is still there beside me on the marble bench, illuminated by the sun.
Two vessels, two currents: memory and possibility.
Perhaps what we call divination, I think, is nothing more than this — learning to read the winds of the past in order to navigate the present, knowing that the future is not written, but interpreted.
I remain silent as the wind turns the last pages of the notebook.
The spirits around me have vanished, but the discourse on the stars carries me back, like a long wave, to the South of the world.
To the nights when I listened to the sangoma, Zulu-trained shamans — women who read the ancestors the way one reads constellations.
I remember their hands, the way they traced signs in the sand or cast the shells — a language of gesture, breath, and memory.
For them, the universe is not distant: it is a speaking body, and every spirit is a star that returns to cast light within the community.
When I once explained that in Europe there existed a method called family constellations, one of them looked at me seriously and said:
“Yes, our constellations. Only they took away the ancestors and left us the chairs.”
It was the first time I truly understood what cultural appropriation means: taking a living, collective, embodied knowledge and rendering it sterile so that it can be sold. Stripping it of its spirit, removing its accent, and calling it “science” so long as it bears a white name.
Bert Hellinger, the man who created family constellations, had been a missionary in South Africa.
He had witnessed the rites of the sangoma, studied them, and then reworked them into a European form — removing the singing, the dancing, the trance, and above all the idea that healing belongs to the group rather than the individual. He brought them back to Germany, as statues were once taken from temples.
I myself, when I tried to speak about my experience, was met with affectionate skepticism: “Leave the Zulu aside, study Hellinger — he’s more serious.”
More serious meant whiter.
More orderly.
More marketable on a CV.
This is why the stars, today, must be read with caution. There is no innocent knowledge if it forgets where it comes from. Every method, every vision, every light has an origin.
I look again at the Star card: the naked woman pouring water from two vessels.
One is clear, the other dark. If you empty only one, the world remains incomplete. Knowledge, I think, is like that water: it must return to the soil from which it was born, or it evaporates into ideology.
I lift my gaze toward Florence, and for a moment it seems to me that above its towers there is a constellation I had never noticed before: not of gods, nor of saints, but of women who have given voice back to stolen worlds.
Hypatia, Catherine, the sangoma, and all the others who still teach us how to read the sky not in order to dominate it, but to remember it — praying together.
O ancient stars,
who have seen trees rise and fall,
voices fade in fields and seas,
names stolen and rewritten on foreign gravestones —
listen to us now.
Let the sky once again have many languages,
and let none be erased by the noise of masters.
Give voice back to stolen worlds,
to seeds burned in deserts,
to bones left without song.
Let every light find its shadow again,
let the water return to its source,
let knowledge no longer be possession, but communion.
Let your light not be forgiveness, but justice,
not judgment, but return.
And let every star, finding its place again,
illuminate the path of stolen worlds —
so that they may finally speak again.
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