Around 2012, when I began transforming what was originally called The Vigeland Poems into The Vigeland Oracle, I hoped that devising my own system of divination might offer insight into the phenomenon of synchronicity. At the time, I was reading Carl Jung and beginning to take seriously his theories of the unconscious, archetypes, and the synchronistic alignment of inner and outer events. As I assembled the bones of this system, I discovered that poetically engaging with the Vigeland statues as archetypal expressions of human experience often produced synchronistic pairings between a query and a statue-poem through randomized selection.
As many who have used the book can attest, these pairings can at times be astonishing, arriving with a precision and unambiguous directness that beggars belief. I have seen people moved to tears as a statue-poem speaks to them with a specificity that seems to flaunt the laws of chance. (For the curious: the likelihood of receiving any given answer within the system is 0.56%.) Such moments can be cathartic and, based on many self-reports, can help fulfill the book’s stated aims of fostering self-knowledge and encouraging virtuous conduct.
But just as often, I’ve seen people scratch their heads in puzzlement over a reading. Most eventually manage to make sense of what the unconscious seems to be pointing toward, but these answers lack the immediacy of a synchronistic “hit.” The relevance is not immediately obvious, and one must lean heavily on symbolic association to arrive at a narrative that satisfactorily addresses the query. I’ve experienced this “non-hitting” phenomenon many times myself, and its stark contrast with moments of synchronistic perfection has occasionally led me to wonder what I did to so “irritate” the unconscious that it responds with something difficult or apparently nonsensical. So what is going on here?
The short answer is that I don’t know. Despite working with this system for over a decade, I’m no closer to understanding why one reading arrives as a synchronistic hit while another requires wrestling with images and language before a resonant meaning emerges. There appears to be no discernible pattern, and the situation is further complicated by the fact that this is not a simple binary. The phenomenon seems graded: a reading can be more or less synchronistic.
Bearing in mind that we are dealing with subjective, anecdotal experience, I’d like to offer some tentative reflections on the matter over the coming weeks. (For a more rigorous—if ultimately inconclusive—treatment, see Jung and Pauli’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.) I make no claim to expertise; I’m a poet who decided to dabble in the so-called “occult” arts. Still, I’ve done a fair amount of homework, and I have a few faint intuitions about what might be happening. My hope is that readers of the book and this blog will contribute their own observations so that, together, we might begin to trace the outlines of a framework for understanding these strange and fleeting configurations of reality.