Minor Axiom XII – The Indissoluble

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If astrology worked, all astrologers would be rich

This minor axiom seems to pick on astrology, but that is only because, in America and the rest of the wester world, astrology is the most popular of occult beliefs. A recent Gallup survey showed that 32 million American adults believed in astrology while at least that many more are occasional readers of newspaper and magazine horoscopes. Other occult disciplines such as witchcraft and the Tarot claim fewer adherents, but Minor Axiom XII is addressed to them as much as to the stargazers.

The thought offered for your consideration is this. If you are attracted by astrology or some other mystical or supernatural doctrine, by all means enter into its substance and spirit as deeply as pleases you. Play with it, make it a part of your life – do what you wish with it. But before you try to use it to help you make money, do yourself a favor. Look around at the practitioners of this doctrine – and particularly at those who profess to be its teachers, priests and gurus – and ask one question : are they rich?

If they are no richer than any other random group of men and women, then you have learned a useful fact. No matter what this occult doctrine might do for you, in terms of inner peace and all that, one thing it won’t do is fatten your bank account.

As you will discover, astrologers and astrology believers are no richer as a group than anybody else. Nor are believers in Tarot cards, psychic powers, or any other mystical pseudoscientific, or religious system. When it comes to money, they must all stumble around in the dark the way everybody else must. Some are rich. Some are poor. Most are somewhere in between. Nearly all would like to be richer. In other words, they are no different from any group of men and women gathered at random anywhere.

Like most of the ministers, priests, and rabbis of the major religions, some occult gurus will tell you that they aren’t in business to help you get rich. This is often a copout, but when it is genuinely meant, it is to their credit. Many gurus do promise help with money, however. So do most of the horoscopes you read in newspapers and magazines like McCall’s “Pisces: the period June 3-10 will be an auspicious time for investing ….”

If you ask the advocates of these mystical doctrines to show evidence that money can be made in this way, they will usually be able to do so. This is what makes the doctrines dangerously alluring. Like the prophets whom we studied under the Fourth Axiom, every occult practitioner can come up with at least one good story about a lucky hit. Some of the stories are astonishing indeed. If you have a friend or neighbor who is an occult believer, you may get an earful of this ‘evidence’, and you may start to think maybe, just maybe …. But hold tight to your skepticism and your money. The stories you will hear are all like Jesse Livermore’s amazing adventure with Union Pacific. They don’t prove that the given mystical approach is a great moneymaker. All they prove is that anybody who speculates long enough will sooner or later score a bull’s eye under seemingly weird circumstances.

I’ve had such experiences myself. The weirdest involves Tarot cards.

I became interested in the Tarot many years ago when a magazine asked me to write an article on the history of card games. It turned out that our modern fifty-two-card bridge and poker deck is a direct descendant of the seventy-eight-card Tarot deck. The Tarot was designed specifically for divination of the future, not for games, but something about it caught my attention. I became superficially proficient in giving Tarot readings. It was a good way to liven a dull party.

In the course of this research, inevitably, I heard money stories. The Tarot lends itself well to such stories, because many of its divinations deal directly with questions of wealth and poverty. One engaging story was told to me by officers of Godnick & Son, a leading Wall Street broker-dealer in puts and calls.

In case you aren’t familiar with these wonderfully risky instruments, a call is a piece of paper that gives you the right to buy a stock at a fixed price over a future timespan. You buy a call when you believe a stock will rise in price. If it does, you make vastly more money by having a call on it than by owing the stock itself. If the price falls, on the other hand, you stand to lose your entire investment in a hurry. (A put, which doesn’t directly concern us here, is the opposite: it gives you the right to sell a stock at a fixed price over a future timespan.)

A shabbily dressed man walked in Godnick’s Beverly Hills office one day and said he wanted to buy some calls on Control Data. He had with him a check for slightly less than $5,000, drawn on a local savings bank and made out to himself. He had evidently just closed out a savings account. Godnick’s California manager, Marty Tressler, deduced from various clues that this amount was virtually the man’s entire net wealth. In view of that, Tressler asked some worried question of the strange customer.

Was he sure he wanted to risk the whole amount? Tressler wanted to know. The man said yes, he was sure. Al of it on stock? Yep. But why Control Data, for Pete’s sake? Control Data at the time was not attracting much attention around Wall Street. The company was felt to have a lot of bad problems that would take years to straighten out. The shares were trading around $30 when they traded at all, which wasn’t often. The typical speculator’s reaction to Control Data was to give it a quick glance and say, “Well, yeah, could be interesting one day. Maybe I’ll look at it again next year.”

But Marty Tressler’s customer was perfectly sure Control Data was the vehicle he wanted. Tressler went on asking why. The man finally mumbled something about the Tarot.

He had received a hot tip from the cards. At the risk of driving him away, Tressler argued with him. But the man would not be shaken. He insisted on putting his entire wad into calls on Control Data. Tressler reluctantly took his $5,000 and wished him luck.

Six months later, because of factors that could not have been foreseen by any rational means, Control Data was one of the hottest stocks in creation. It was trading over $100. Tressler’s odd customer came in and said he wanted to cash out of his call position. Tressler handed him a check for somewhat more than $60,000. The man had better than triple-quadrupled his money in half a year. He walked out into the street, and Godnick & Son never saw him again.

Amazing, right? But the story continues. Enter myself.

The story as I’ve told it thus far was related to me by Bert Godnick, the ‘& Son’ of the firm, over dinner one night at a Wall Street watering spot. I listened with a special personal interest, for it happened I owned a few hundred shares of Control Data myself.

I hadn’t been as prescient as Marty Tressler’s Tarot-reading customer. I hadn’t bought in at $30. Instead I’d come aboard at around $60, when excitement was building up about the company and I had a hunch it might build up higher. The hunch had proved correct. The price had continued to rise dramatically. On the day of my meeting with Godnick, it had leaped several points and landed just shy of my preplanned ending position, $120.

We talked about the Tarot and about Control Data. Godnick was not enthusiastic when I told him I planned to sell when the price hit $120. As a seasoned speculator he understood all about ending positions, but he believed this was a time when I should think about making an exception. His hunch was that the excitement could continue to build for several more months. Control Data could go a lot higher, he thought. We discussed this. He finally suggested jokingly that if I wasn’t sure what to do, I ought to consult my Tarot deck.

For fun, I did just that the next day.

There are several ways to get ‘guidance’ from a Tarot deck. One is to ask a specific question: “What should I do about such-and-such?” or “What are the prospects for this-and-that?” You then shuffle and lay out the cards in a prescribed way, and you study them. Information about your question is supposedly contained in the order in which various picture and suit cards turn up, and in whether they are right side up. (Unlike the cards in a modern playing deck, Tarot picture cards all have a top and a bottom.)

I went through the drill with my question about Control Data’s prospects. Tarot answers are usually equivocal, with a lot of “maybe ….. but on the other hand ……” To my surprise, the answer I got this time had no maybe about it. It stood there flatfooted and said Control Data hat a perfectly glorious future. I had never seen a Tarot layout so sure of what it wanted to say.

Frank Henry would have been ashamed of me. Never before in my life had I been swayed in financial affairs by a religion or occult persuasion. And only a very few times before or since have I ever reneged on a self-promise to get out of a game on reaching an ending position. But the Tarot had me hooked. The stock price reached $120, and instead of selling out I sat sat and watched.

In my own defense I will say I didn’t lean on the Tarot’s prediction to the extent of getting lulled to sleep. I maintained a healthily worries state, ready to bail out at the first sign of trouble. But for weeks no such sign appeared. That crazy stock climbed straight uphill to $155.

By now I was really worried. When you pass an ending position without getting out, you feel as though there are giant rubber bands trying to pull you back. The farther away you run, the more taut they get. When the stock hit $155, I read the Tarot again.

This time the reading was appallingly bad. Violent change and ghastly misfortune lay ahead, the cards said. I immediately did what I’d wanted to do all along: sold out.

The stock struggled to $160, then plunged. For those still in the investment, it was a catastrophe. Wave after wave of sell orders pounded the price down, each wave triggering the one below it. When the panic ended about nine months later, the price was $28.

The Tarot had saved me!

But had it? I came to my senses eventually. There was no evidence whatever, in fact, that my good fortune had been brought about by any magical properties in the cards. All that had happened was that I had a couple of strokes of good luck.

To depend on the same kind of luck under similar circumstances in the future – even to hope for it – would be foolhardy indeed. It could lead straight to my financial doom. Understanding this, I quickly backed away from the occult illusion of order that had almost had me in its soothing clutch. I put that Tarot deck away with a vow never to play with it against except for entertainment at parties. I kept the vow. In time even that casual use lost its appeal. My interest in the Tarot faded, and today I don’t even know where the troublesome deck is.

If astrology worked, the minor axiom says, all astrologers would be rich. And so it is with Tarot devotees. Anybody can have a lucky hit or two, but the true test of any touted moneymaking approach is whether it works consistently. If I had any doubts that I was right to reject occult help after that Control Data adventure, those doubts were laid to rest once and for all a short time later.

I had lunch in New York one day with a self-styled Tarot master. The lunch was at his invitation. He was in the business of giving Tarot readings, and he also sold cards and an instruction book. Learning that I was thinking of writing more articles on the topic, he saw a chance to get some publicity. This was okay by me. He was an interesting fellow. He had assured me that the Tarot was one of the world’s best way to achieve one’s financial goals.

After lunch the waiter came around with the check. The Tarot master acted as though he hadn’t noticed it. I finally picked it up. He grinned and said, “We might as well put it on your expense account, right?” As a matter of fact I was not then operating under an expense authorization from anybody, but I let it go.

On the sidewalk outside, things got still more amusing. Explaining that he was having a “temporary cash-flow problem”, the Tarot master bummed a fiver off me for cab fare.

I never saw him or my fiver again. But I didn’t grieve for the money. I looked on it as an educational expense.