Predicting the Future is Like Guessing a Horse Race

Permission graciously granted. Deck used Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot. Card images are © Lo Scarabeo srl – Italy. All rights reserved

For the past few years my husband as gotten me hooked on watching the Kentucky Derby Race with him. Last year, for the first time, I had decided to make a prediction for the winner using the cards. It is an exception to my usual habit of not doing predictive readings. Last year my prediction was spot on.

This year, despite in-my-face clues to the winner's identity, I predicted incorrectly. 

In an ironic twist, I often tell my clients that predicting the future is a lot like predicting a horse race, there are so many variables that have nothing to do with our own free will, though certainly our own actions do contribute to how many of our own life situations play out.

But in the case of a horse race, the outcome has nothing to do with any of my own actions and frankly, guessing a horse race is well, just as unreliable as guessing on a horse race!

Of course I realized this before posting my prediction and I knew I only had a 1 in 20 chance of guessing right. In fact, I was pretty certain that my guess would not be correct. But in the spirit of fun I did it anyway and now, in retrospect, I see it was a very interesting learning process about the predictive nature of tarot.

For those of you who did not read my prediction when I posted it Saturday morning, you may read it here, but I will summarize in the account that follows.

The day prior to making my 'official' predictive Kentucky Derby reading, my daughter (also a tarot reader) and I decided to make a joint effort at predicting the outcome of the race. We pulled cards simultaneously and ironically got similar feeling cards like Death and the Tower for card 1, and we both pulled an 8 for the 2nd card. We interpreted this to mean that there would be an upset, or an unusual occurrence. We tried a 2nd time because we could not agree on which horse we thought it represented, and again we both pulled an 8, I again pulled Death (#13), and my daughter pulled the Six of Wands which in her particular deck was represented by a newspaper headline with a huge news event. This time we again felt there would be an upset because of the 2nd Death card that I pulled, that would cause breaking news because of her newspaper image, and we associated it with a horse named Suddenbreakingnews. But the eight that we both pulled both times made the situation very confusing. We thought about the card meanings into the next day, but had no real inclination for who would win. In fact, it occurred to me that this year, the outcome of the race would not be mine to know.

On the morning of the races I made my final prediction with three cards from the same deck that I had success with the year before. Those cards were: #13 Death, The #1 Ace of Coins, and again, the #8 card. In that deck the #8 card was represented by Strength, not Justice as it is represented by the cards used for this photo.

Now, Death #13 was the first card I pulled and I admit, I should have paid more attention to it since I had pulled it consistently two days in a row along with the 8. But again, I interpreted the cards to illustrate Death as a sudden upset, the Ace of Coins as the winner's circle, which all had something to do with the horse out of Gate #8. And so whatever horse was in Gate #8 was where I placed my prediction.

In a kick-in-the-teeth scenario, when we tuned into the race, we saw that in the race immediately before the Kentucky Derby race, the #8 horse won. During that race, two horses and their jockeys were felled, which was quite a bit of an unexpected upset.

I knew right then and there that two horses from Gate #8 were very unlikely to win two races in a row, and the odds of another upset were slim to none. But it seemed to be some consolation when we learned that Lani, the #8 horse in the Kentucky Derby race was a bit of a bad-ass horse, so bad that in fact, that he had to be separated from the other horses so that he would not upset them or distract them before the race. It was with this in mind that I rooted for Lani coming around the stretch, hoping beyond hope that he would be the shocking winner that would upset the projected winner's winning streak.

But alas, the #13 horse, Nyquist was the undisputed winner. There was no upset at all, Nyquist was the projected winner and the race was pretty much text book perfect.

Although the information was there all along in the cards, I did not interpret it the way it played out. The #13 horse pranced to the winner's circle #1 position while the #8 horse served no other purpose than to keep me humble. 

​Gotta love tarot.