Unless, perhaps, the future converges on the same events, whatever you do. There are many stories with this theme, of which the most famous is 'Appointment in Samara' (parodied in The Colour of Magic), when a man's efforts to escape Death only bring him to the very place where Death is waiting.
We entertain contradictory beliefs about the future. That's not such a surprise: we're not the most logically consistent of creatures. We tend to apply logic locally, within narrow limits, and when it suits us. We're very bad at applying it globally, setting one of our cherished beliefs up against another and looking for the inconsistencies. But we are especially inconsistent when it comes to dealing with the future.
Paradoxically, free will is the last thing you want if you're tribal. You're caught in the matrix of
'Everything that isn't mandatory is forbidden', and there is simply no room for free will. On the one hand, such an existence is very secure; but on the other, punishments and rewards are just as mandatory as everything else if your sins are found out. Your personal responsibility is only to obey the rules.
You can still tell yourself stories about the future, but they involve very narrow choices. 'Shall I attend the ritual meal tonight and leave early to say my evening prayers, or shall I stay for the communal prayers like everybody else?' Even in a tribal system, a lot of cheating goes on, because we're human. 'Well, now ... If I leave early, then I can drop by Fatima's tent, and my wives won't know about it ...'
Plenty of sins are possible, even in a tribal society, and in reality ones that survive allow a little flexibility. If, say, you forget to fast on the Holy Day and someone sees you eating, and you genuinely thought it was tomorrow, or an enemy told you that it was tomorrow, or you had been made to think it was tomorrow because an enemy had cast a curse upon you ... then some skilful pleading might mitigate your punishment.
The natural and attractive option is always to blame others; it is unbearable to know that you have brought the punishment upon yourself. If you can't see how anyone else can be blamed for material reasons, then blame them for cursing you. Blame Fatima for being attractive and willing, blame an enemy who lied to you. 'Luck' is not available as a concept in a tribal society, because Allah knows everything, Jehovah is omniscient: the natural response is fatalistic acceptance of whatever they throw your way.48 If you are to attain heaven, so be it; if your fate is to be flung into the everlasting fires, then that is the Will of God, to which you are subservient.
The best you can do, as a peasant-level tribesman, is to find out what is in store for you, what is Written in the Book.
Maybe you don't really want to know what's in the Book, but monkey curiosity overcomes fear, and in any case you can't change what's Written and it might just be nice. So you go to the old lady in the forest who can read tealeaves, or (today) to the iridologist or the spiritualist medium.
And all of these alleged ways to foresee the future have a very revealing common feature. They interpret the small-and-contingent into the large-and-important.
Just like the Roman general spilling the guts of a ram on to the ground before the battle, so that the small-and-complicated can mirror a forthcoming battle that will be large-and-complicated, tealeaves and hand-lines are small-and-complicated, and 'must' therefore encode your complicated future. The kind of magic that is being invoked here is an unexpressed homology, which on some level we all believe in because we use it all the time. The stories that we construct in our minds are small-and-complicated, and they really do mirror the large-andcomplicated things that happen to us. The Concise Lexicon of the Occult lists 93 methods of divination, from aeromancy (divination by the shapes of clouds) to xylomancy (divination by the shapes of twigs). All but four of them employ the small-and-complicated to predict the largeand- complicated; their materials include salt, barley, wind, wax, lead, onion sprouts (that one's called 'cromniomancy'), laughter, blood, fish guts, flames, pearls, and the noises made by mice
('myomancy'). The other four involve invoking spirits, calling up demons, or talking to gods.
To many tribal innocents, other people sometimes seem to have access to different little stories that they can make relevant to your life, like 'Your fate is written on your hand' or 'The dead communicate with me and they know all'. So people of that inclination can convince you, with a bit of flummery, that they know your future, and they can produce convincing large stories which you interpret as your fate.
There is a deep paradox in our attitude to personal free will. We want to know what the future will be in order to make a free choice that protects us against it. So we think of the future of everything outside us as being deterministic, which is why the gypsy or the medium or the dead can know what it is going to be. Nevertheless, we think of our own future as involving free choices. Our free will lets us choose to consult the gypsy, who then convinces us that we have no choice: for example, that the life-line on our palm determines when we will die. So our actions betray a deep-seated belief that the laws of the universe apply to everything except us.
The biggest wholesale business that preys on our convictions and confusions about free will in a powerful and often cruel universe, is astrology. Astrologers claim authority from Ancient Egypt, from Paracelsus and Dee, from Ancient Wisdom of all kinds including the Hindu Vedas and other Eastern literature. Let us review the appeal of astrology in the light of narrativium.
Astrologers have an immense following, and they have managed to pick up on both tribal and barbarian stories. They have the counter-scientific story for the civilised culture, able to attract both the tribal and barbarian aspects of our foolishness. They really do believe that the future, for each of us, is influenced by our time of birth.49 They time it to the second.
What seems to be important to them is against which starry background (the Zodiac) we view the planets in our own solar system. As we move from intra-uterine life to the hands of the midwife, doctor, partner, our lives are determined from then on by astral forces. This strange belief is supported by so many people, who turn to the 'Your Stars' pages first in their daily newspaper, that we should seek some explanation within our 'story' framework. What is the story of our futures that is implicit in the control of our lives by the positions of the stars? As opposed, say, to the medical staff who, at the time of our birth, probably had more gravitational influence upon us50 than the planet Jupiter was having?
Well, the stars are obviously very numinous, powerful. They're up there wheeling over us. At least, they were when we were shepherds, staying out all night, but most civilised folk now don't know why the Moon changes its shape, let alone why or where the pole star is. Yes, all right, you do, and it's not surprising. Others don't, and don't think what they don't know is worth knowing.
They have a vague feel for a few of the constellations, especially the Big Dipper (or Great Bear), but they don't know that those stars are not near to each other, but merely appear to be in that formation when viewed from Earth, and then only for a short time, astronomically speaking.
Most people don't entertain astronomical thoughts, so why are the stars so heavily involved in our most potent stories? Perhaps because, in our nursery stories, the celestial sphere gives a context, a primitive animistic one in which Moon and Sun take protagonist parts? We don't find that persuasive. Perhaps it is because the power of the stars entered our cultural stories back in the time when everyone could see the clear night sky, and has hung on. Or perhaps it is the jargon of the Zodiac-mongers, with their gypsy fortune-teller use of language to give received certainty to the most nebulous of prophecies. We've never heard anyone say, after reading the newspaper's astrology columns, 'Right, then, they're totally wrong today, no more astrology for me!'