Zap Oracle Instructions and Credits::
Zap Oracle Instructions:
New Instructions for Version 3.2 released November 9, 2007
Thanks to Webmaster Mathael for creating this new version and his ongoing work on the oracle.
Create an account for yourself with a user name and password. Your information is kept private, but in the future we might create a function that would anonymously do a statistical analysis of all cards chosen by the entire oracle to look for deviations from chance. This information will not be associated with your name or account. In the user account field---filling in your name and/or email are optional. If you do fill in your name (first name is fine) then when you do a General Life Reading your name will appear in each card position in stead of "querent." With your email we may be able (in the future, the oracle is very much a work in progress) to mail you a lost password.
At the reading screen there is a notes field where you can add anything that may help you identify the reading or its context after you save it. For example, "Reading on the first day of my trip to Australia." Make sure you click "Save" before you draw the next card to save your note. (At the present moment if you enter text and don't hit save, your text ---but not your reading---get wiped. We should have that fixed soon, but for now just remember to hit "Save" at the start of the reading.) You won't have to click "Save"again, it will automatically save your reading. Clicking "List Readings" will take you to a screen where you can review all your saved readings. Click on "Themes Drawn" and you will see the first version of Theme Tracker™ which will show you a bar graph chart of the forty-six themes and which are the most prominent for you. As far as I know, no oracle has ever had such a capability.
In other words, the oracle will act as a kind of virtual psychoanalyst showing you which complexes or archetypes are most prominent in your psyche. Later theme tracker will have more functions, allowing you to specify the time range, to learn more about each theme, to see which themes are most prominent for all users (anonymously) for the day, week, year, etc. When you launch the oracle (gold orb on the site or the red, underlined zaporacle link) hit info at the opening screen to get updated instructions on using the new version of the oracle. These instructions will be updated based on user feedback and modifications of the beta versions so check back with them every so often. Theme tracker results may become more meaningful after it has more readings to analyze. The very first time I tried it (this morning) it was quite accurate for me. For the last couple of days dreaming has been very intense for me and I've been sleeping much longer than usual and having more dreams which have also haunted my waking hours. "Dreaming" was the most prominent of the 46 themes according to theme tracker. I've had an account for about a month and done 33 readings so far that it's been able to analyze, so you may have to wait for it to get a meaningful sample, or it may show you meaningful theme information from a single reading, give it a try and please give us feedback.
Version 3.3 coming very soon will allow you to explore the meaning of each theme.
For a limitied time only you can get a special Platinum Preferred Zap Oracle membership for just $29.95 a month! It works exactly the same as the free membership except that "Theme Tracker" is relabeled as "iTheme Tracker." Please take advantage of this special opportunity.
For more on Theme Tracker and the history and future of the oracle see "Zap Oracle History" below.
There are different options for each of the four spreads. At the General Life Reading screen you are asked, "What is your name?" Filling in this field substitutes your name for "querent" in the ten card positions of the General Life Reading. (if you already entered your name in account settings you won't need to do this) The relationship reading asks "Who is the other?" And there are similar questions for the other types of readings. If you fill in an answer to the question be sure to click "Save" before you draw the first card or your answer gets wiped.
Any questions, suggestions, anomalies about this beta version please email: jonathanzap@hotmail.com
Currently you have a choice of four spreads. Of course you don't have to use my spreads, you can also make up your own as you go along-----what is most holding you back, what is most helping you, what is approaching, what is fading away, what you need to work on, etc. You can choose one of the spreads and ignore what it says about the card positon substituing your own question. If you want to review your reading, don't use the back arrow on your browser, instead click on "view all." If you click on "Draw Card" in the screen you are in right now it will take you to the old version of the oracle. You will be able to draw any number of cards without any positions or structure but you will be interacting with many fewer cards than are in the new version so I don't reccomend this option.
Personally, I have found that I get the best results when I do use one of the predefined spreads.
I generally don’t ask oracles to predict future outcomes as that implies I don’t have free will which would affect the outcome. Something I have noticed in my interaction with all oracles is that there are zones of time when I will get more oblique, sometimes even irrelevant or random responses and there are other zones of time where I seem to be inwardly more ready for messages and everything I get is absolutely dead-on accurate and I usually do multiple readings or consultations when I am in such a zone. I would be glad to get any kind of feedback on your experience with the oracle as this is very much a work in progress.
Credits/Copyrights/Watermarks
Photographs
in the Zap Oracle are by me unless otherwise noted. These are all
copyrighted and have secret digital watermarks hidden in them so please
don’t copy without permission or the zaporacle.com security force
(which works closely with the FBI and Interpol) will hunt you down. I
have tried to credit other images as well as I can, but some of the
originals were scraps of paper, attachments people sent, etc. I
certainly don’t want to infringe on anyone else’s copyright or in
anyway disrespect the talented artists who created these images, so if
anyone notices an image that shouldn’t be posted, or that is improperly
or insufficiently credited, please let me know (jonathanzap@hotmail.com) so we can immediately edit or remove it.
Scroll to the bottom for a new entry about version 3.2
A Brief History of the Zap Oracle
Scroll to the bottom for a new entry about version 3.2
Although I have attached my last
name to the oracle I consider myself the co-creator of the oracle as a
variety of other forces (human and otherwise) have collaborated in its
inception and continuing growth and development. The Zap Oracle had a
very humble origin about thirty years ago. I grew up in New
York City where I frequently visited art museums and at some point
began to accumulate art post cards which I found at museums and various
stores. Eventually I put all these cards in an unused camera bag and
started a weekly ritual----- picking four cards from the bag and
putting them on the fridge with refrigerator magnets. I probably
didn’t have any oracular expectations; I just wanted a way to vary the
display on the fridge. I had already read Jung at this point, so I
already knew about synchronicity, but I don’t think I was expecting the
card choice to be synchronistic. At some point I began to notice
synchronicities between the card choices and what was going on in my
life during the week the cards were chosen. The card collection more
or less revealed its own identity as an oracle.
Crucial to the card collection beginning to function as an oracle was that the images I collected were ones that were “numinous” to me. (“Numin” means spirit, so something is numinous when it is imbued with the spirit and lights up in the mind of a perceiver as having an uncanny significance.) Intuitively, I had chosen images that were numinous and therefore mostly archetypal and dense with layers of meaning. Some images were uplifting and filled with light, others were dark and twisted. This was also crucial in the collection becoming an oracle because life is dark and light, yin and yang, and an oracle needs to be a symbolic microcosm of the macrocosm. If both principles are not represented then you get a pseudo oracle that is one-sided and inadequate. For this reason I find a New Age product like Angel Cards to be light weight and superficial because only “nice,” flattering things are represented. Obviously that oracle was created by someone ignorant of the history of angels and in denial of the both light and dark nature of this reality.
If you put together a collection of archetypal signifiers of some sort, and those signifiers represent light and dark and a wide variety of states, you are creating a symbolic microcosm, and that microcosm becomes a kind of brain or neural network that is “activated” by the presence of an open percipient. I put “activated” in quotes because I have to be careful of my verbs here as the principle of synchronicity implies an acausal relationship and most verbs imply a causal relationship. The observer, according to the wavicle paradox of quantum mechanics, is necessary to collapse the wave function, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the observer caused the photon to be a particle or a wave. It may be more likely that the microcosm of your psyche and the microcosm of the oracle form a kind of parallelism and an acausal correspondence comes into being.
( click here to read a page I wrote on synchronicity and the I Ching)
So I discovered, rather than intended, that this collection of postcards was acting like a kind of brain. Each card was like a neuron in this brain, and the power of those neurons came from the visionary artists who created the original images. The more cards/ neurons added to the oracle, the
more varied the states that it could represent in its interaction with me, and therefore the more intelligently interactive it seemed to be.
Eventually the oracle outgrew the camera bag and moved into a small back pack. By this time I was calling it the “image oracle,” a name that it retained during most of its life. In addition to consulting the oracle myself I also made it available to other people and sometimes did readings for them, often done in combination with I Ching readings. The cards had no captions, so I was typically the one to narrate the meaning of the cards and together we would explore relationships of meaning between the cards in the reading and what was going on in the life of the person getting the reading.
The image oracle had been in use for more than twenty years before my friend Daniel made a suggestion (3-4 years ago) that seems simple, obvious and amazing in that it had never occurred to me. He suggested I caption the images. Almost immediately I began to carry out that suggestion.
Two other changes in the oracle happened around the same time. Increasingly I was using my own photographs (I tend to photograph what I find numinous) as the new cards in the oracle. I was living in rural British Columbia at the time, so I wasn’t running into so many new art cards, but I had lots of photographs. I also became anxious about the physical vulnerability of the oracle as it was made out of paper and existed in one back pack. Many cards had been in use for twenty years or more and were getting scuffed and dog-eared. I decided to begin the laborious process of laminating the cards with self adhesive lamination sheets. This choice was a very mixed blessing----it prevented further scuffing of cards, but it was a poor solution compared to scanning the cards and preserving them in a digital format. When I later did start to scan them the lamination would adversely affect the image quality. (Some of this will be improved in the future when I find negatives and better sources of the images I can rescan.) While I was captioning and laminating I was also going through piles of my own photographs and adding them to the oracle which had now out grown the back pack and molted into a large gym duffle bag.
In May of 2005 I was brain storming with Drew Stricker (Vaxination Designs) about the design of a new website he was going to build for me. Drew is a young digital artist and computer wizard who lives in Arkansas. Thinking about what functions I wanted on this website, it occurred to me that it would be great to have the image oracle available on line. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that this would be a central part of the site, and when it came to choose a domain name I decided on zaporacle.com. During the summer Drew built the infrastructure of the site and many of the graphical elements. Also during the summer I discussed the structure of the oracle function with another friend, David Thomas, who is a talented software engineer known for his ability to create quick and effective solutions to complex problems. At the time David was too busy with his job at IBM to do more than make a few suggestions. Mid-October of 2005 I called David and found that he had a block of free time available and he immediately set to work on writing the code for the oracle.
David found a random number generator algorithm (if it is an algorithm) called the “Mersenne Twister” designed by a Japanese mathematician to have “a far higher order of equidistribution than any other implemented generators” and “623-dimensional equidistribution property is assured.” As far as I can figure out, this has something to do with math and sounds really cool. My initial readings were extremely synchronistic and relevant so it seemed to be working.
Over the next few days David made amazing progress in coding a working prototype. Halloween of 2005, was a day of synchronicities with a lot of thematic coherence. It was an emotionally charged day because my mom was entering Mt. Sinai hospital for procedures preliminary to open heart surgery on November 1st. A long I Ching consultation that morning pointed in multiple ways to work on the website as my main focus. Synchronicities immediately seemed to support that with emails (the first of this sort in weeks) coming in from people who found the website and wanted DVDs and readings. Later in the day I found myself doing other livelihood work which I experienced as extremely counter enthusiastic that evening. Almost the moment that work ended I got a call from David and he set up a three way call with Drew. Most of this conversation was rapid fire dialogue between D&D in computerese I could only follow in broad outline, but I was delighted being mostly a bystander in this conversation. I felt like a kid looking in at the elves workshop as these two computer wizards talked about future designs and at the same time, working online together, modified a prototype David had built for the Zap Oracle. To my amazement and delight, while we were on the phone, they uploaded it onto the website and made a number of modifications and enhancements. I was out on my bicycle when the phone call started, by the time I got home and turned on my laptop the Zap Oracle had been born, coming on line at the time of the year most associated with magic and the crossing over of living and dead, conscious and unconscious----All Hallow’s Eve---also known as Halloween.
Some astrologers do charts not just on people, but on projects, political movements etc. and they base their charts on the time and place of inception. Without anyone having the conscious intention, the conference call and birth of the Zap Oracle happened to occur on Halloween Evening which was also the eve of a huge medical transition for my immediate family and the eve of a day in which there had been so many indications to focus on the website. The place of inception would have to be cyberspace, otherwise we would have to triangulate some intermediary point in the USA as all three of us on the design team were at least a thousand miles from the next nearest person. Come to think of it, both time and space were somewhat indeterminate as we are all in a different time zone. That also seems propitious, as an oracle (like the unconscious, like the dreamtime) needs to exist somewhat outside of space/time. Also propitious was that every phase of my mom's recovery from heart valve replacement surgery (which happened the following morning) happened ahead of schedule.
Some other notes on the oracle:
Quite a few of the Zap Oracle cards are self portraits and there are three reasons I can think of. The most obvious is that like most baby boomers I'm a narcissistic personality type. The second reason is that I have a lot of self portraits, not because I am photogenic, but because I am the one person always around when I take pictures. Third is that it feels easier to assign a meaning to a self portrait and doing that for pictures of friends and strangers can sometimes seem more like an imposition.
When you choose cards from the oracle, you also become part of its history or morphic field. That field is continuing to develop, and has now become part of that global brain called the internet which will likely mutate it into even more unexpected directions. End users are welcome to participate in the growth of the oracle by emailing me proposed images to add to the oracle (but please don’t tantalize me with images that would be copyright infringement to post on the web!). The oracle is in a beta phase now so please send feedback on your interaction with it. The Zap Oracle presently has about three hundred and sixty cards, but I expect to add another few hundred in the next couple of years, and will be continuing to add, edit and modify it while I am still alive. Thanks for taking to time to read this and for interacting with the Zap Oracle.
Version 3 of the Zap Oracle was coded by computer wizard Mathael (the name he was born with) who is also the new webmaster of zaporacle.com. It launched in the summer of 2007 and brought many improvements in layout, new user features such as an ability to magnify cards, and many, many new administrative functions for building and editing cards.
Version 3.2 (a beta version) launched on November 9, 2007. This new version allows users to save their readings, plus any notes they add, and also individualizes each card position based on information entered by the user. This version also includes the first prototype of Theme Tracker™ a program that analyzes all the user's saved readings to show which of 46 archetypal themes are most (or least) prominent. As far as I know, no oracle has ever had such a capability. With Theme Tracker™ the Zap Oracle is now able to act as a virtual psychoanalyst showing the user at a glance which complexes or archetypal themes are most prominent in their psyche. The very first time I tried Theme Tracker™ it was quite accurate for me. I was in the midst of several days where dreaming was particularly intense for me and I'd been sleeping much longer than usual and having more dreams which were also haunted my waking hours. "Dreaming" was the most prominent of the 46 themes according to Theme Tracker™.
The online version of the Zap Oracle was launched on Halloween of 2005, though no one consciously intended this to happen on such a significant day. This new version, the first occurrence of Theme Tracker™, also unintentionally launched on an astrologically significant day. On November 9th a friend showed me an article in the Mountain Astrologer about November 9th, a Scorpio New Moon. The New Moon is the ideal time in the lunar cycle to begin something and Scorpio is all about delving into mysteries, the unconscious, etc. Neither I nor Mathael had any awareness of this when the new version launched. All of this reinforces the sense I have, which others have had about the I Ching or the Tarot, that the oracle is its own entity.
Crucial to the card collection beginning to function as an oracle was that the images I collected were ones that were “numinous” to me. (“Numin” means spirit, so something is numinous when it is imbued with the spirit and lights up in the mind of a perceiver as having an uncanny significance.) Intuitively, I had chosen images that were numinous and therefore mostly archetypal and dense with layers of meaning. Some images were uplifting and filled with light, others were dark and twisted. This was also crucial in the collection becoming an oracle because life is dark and light, yin and yang, and an oracle needs to be a symbolic microcosm of the macrocosm. If both principles are not represented then you get a pseudo oracle that is one-sided and inadequate. For this reason I find a New Age product like Angel Cards to be light weight and superficial because only “nice,” flattering things are represented. Obviously that oracle was created by someone ignorant of the history of angels and in denial of the both light and dark nature of this reality.
If you put together a collection of archetypal signifiers of some sort, and those signifiers represent light and dark and a wide variety of states, you are creating a symbolic microcosm, and that microcosm becomes a kind of brain or neural network that is “activated” by the presence of an open percipient. I put “activated” in quotes because I have to be careful of my verbs here as the principle of synchronicity implies an acausal relationship and most verbs imply a causal relationship. The observer, according to the wavicle paradox of quantum mechanics, is necessary to collapse the wave function, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the observer caused the photon to be a particle or a wave. It may be more likely that the microcosm of your psyche and the microcosm of the oracle form a kind of parallelism and an acausal correspondence comes into being.
( click here to read a page I wrote on synchronicity and the I Ching)
So I discovered, rather than intended, that this collection of postcards was acting like a kind of brain. Each card was like a neuron in this brain, and the power of those neurons came from the visionary artists who created the original images. The more cards/ neurons added to the oracle, the
more varied the states that it could represent in its interaction with me, and therefore the more intelligently interactive it seemed to be.
Eventually the oracle outgrew the camera bag and moved into a small back pack. By this time I was calling it the “image oracle,” a name that it retained during most of its life. In addition to consulting the oracle myself I also made it available to other people and sometimes did readings for them, often done in combination with I Ching readings. The cards had no captions, so I was typically the one to narrate the meaning of the cards and together we would explore relationships of meaning between the cards in the reading and what was going on in the life of the person getting the reading.
The image oracle had been in use for more than twenty years before my friend Daniel made a suggestion (3-4 years ago) that seems simple, obvious and amazing in that it had never occurred to me. He suggested I caption the images. Almost immediately I began to carry out that suggestion.
Two other changes in the oracle happened around the same time. Increasingly I was using my own photographs (I tend to photograph what I find numinous) as the new cards in the oracle. I was living in rural British Columbia at the time, so I wasn’t running into so many new art cards, but I had lots of photographs. I also became anxious about the physical vulnerability of the oracle as it was made out of paper and existed in one back pack. Many cards had been in use for twenty years or more and were getting scuffed and dog-eared. I decided to begin the laborious process of laminating the cards with self adhesive lamination sheets. This choice was a very mixed blessing----it prevented further scuffing of cards, but it was a poor solution compared to scanning the cards and preserving them in a digital format. When I later did start to scan them the lamination would adversely affect the image quality. (Some of this will be improved in the future when I find negatives and better sources of the images I can rescan.) While I was captioning and laminating I was also going through piles of my own photographs and adding them to the oracle which had now out grown the back pack and molted into a large gym duffle bag.
In May of 2005 I was brain storming with Drew Stricker (Vaxination Designs) about the design of a new website he was going to build for me. Drew is a young digital artist and computer wizard who lives in Arkansas. Thinking about what functions I wanted on this website, it occurred to me that it would be great to have the image oracle available on line. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that this would be a central part of the site, and when it came to choose a domain name I decided on zaporacle.com. During the summer Drew built the infrastructure of the site and many of the graphical elements. Also during the summer I discussed the structure of the oracle function with another friend, David Thomas, who is a talented software engineer known for his ability to create quick and effective solutions to complex problems. At the time David was too busy with his job at IBM to do more than make a few suggestions. Mid-October of 2005 I called David and found that he had a block of free time available and he immediately set to work on writing the code for the oracle.
David found a random number generator algorithm (if it is an algorithm) called the “Mersenne Twister” designed by a Japanese mathematician to have “a far higher order of equidistribution than any other implemented generators” and “623-dimensional equidistribution property is assured.” As far as I can figure out, this has something to do with math and sounds really cool. My initial readings were extremely synchronistic and relevant so it seemed to be working.
Over the next few days David made amazing progress in coding a working prototype. Halloween of 2005, was a day of synchronicities with a lot of thematic coherence. It was an emotionally charged day because my mom was entering Mt. Sinai hospital for procedures preliminary to open heart surgery on November 1st. A long I Ching consultation that morning pointed in multiple ways to work on the website as my main focus. Synchronicities immediately seemed to support that with emails (the first of this sort in weeks) coming in from people who found the website and wanted DVDs and readings. Later in the day I found myself doing other livelihood work which I experienced as extremely counter enthusiastic that evening. Almost the moment that work ended I got a call from David and he set up a three way call with Drew. Most of this conversation was rapid fire dialogue between D&D in computerese I could only follow in broad outline, but I was delighted being mostly a bystander in this conversation. I felt like a kid looking in at the elves workshop as these two computer wizards talked about future designs and at the same time, working online together, modified a prototype David had built for the Zap Oracle. To my amazement and delight, while we were on the phone, they uploaded it onto the website and made a number of modifications and enhancements. I was out on my bicycle when the phone call started, by the time I got home and turned on my laptop the Zap Oracle had been born, coming on line at the time of the year most associated with magic and the crossing over of living and dead, conscious and unconscious----All Hallow’s Eve---also known as Halloween.
Some astrologers do charts not just on people, but on projects, political movements etc. and they base their charts on the time and place of inception. Without anyone having the conscious intention, the conference call and birth of the Zap Oracle happened to occur on Halloween Evening which was also the eve of a huge medical transition for my immediate family and the eve of a day in which there had been so many indications to focus on the website. The place of inception would have to be cyberspace, otherwise we would have to triangulate some intermediary point in the USA as all three of us on the design team were at least a thousand miles from the next nearest person. Come to think of it, both time and space were somewhat indeterminate as we are all in a different time zone. That also seems propitious, as an oracle (like the unconscious, like the dreamtime) needs to exist somewhat outside of space/time. Also propitious was that every phase of my mom's recovery from heart valve replacement surgery (which happened the following morning) happened ahead of schedule.
Some other notes on the oracle:
Quite a few of the Zap Oracle cards are self portraits and there are three reasons I can think of. The most obvious is that like most baby boomers I'm a narcissistic personality type. The second reason is that I have a lot of self portraits, not because I am photogenic, but because I am the one person always around when I take pictures. Third is that it feels easier to assign a meaning to a self portrait and doing that for pictures of friends and strangers can sometimes seem more like an imposition.
When you choose cards from the oracle, you also become part of its history or morphic field. That field is continuing to develop, and has now become part of that global brain called the internet which will likely mutate it into even more unexpected directions. End users are welcome to participate in the growth of the oracle by emailing me proposed images to add to the oracle (but please don’t tantalize me with images that would be copyright infringement to post on the web!). The oracle is in a beta phase now so please send feedback on your interaction with it. The Zap Oracle presently has about three hundred and sixty cards, but I expect to add another few hundred in the next couple of years, and will be continuing to add, edit and modify it while I am still alive. Thanks for taking to time to read this and for interacting with the Zap Oracle.
Version 3 of the Zap Oracle was coded by computer wizard Mathael (the name he was born with) who is also the new webmaster of zaporacle.com. It launched in the summer of 2007 and brought many improvements in layout, new user features such as an ability to magnify cards, and many, many new administrative functions for building and editing cards.
Version 3.2 (a beta version) launched on November 9, 2007. This new version allows users to save their readings, plus any notes they add, and also individualizes each card position based on information entered by the user. This version also includes the first prototype of Theme Tracker™ a program that analyzes all the user's saved readings to show which of 46 archetypal themes are most (or least) prominent. As far as I know, no oracle has ever had such a capability. With Theme Tracker™ the Zap Oracle is now able to act as a virtual psychoanalyst showing the user at a glance which complexes or archetypal themes are most prominent in their psyche. The very first time I tried Theme Tracker™ it was quite accurate for me. I was in the midst of several days where dreaming was particularly intense for me and I'd been sleeping much longer than usual and having more dreams which were also haunted my waking hours. "Dreaming" was the most prominent of the 46 themes according to Theme Tracker™.
The online version of the Zap Oracle was launched on Halloween of 2005, though no one consciously intended this to happen on such a significant day. This new version, the first occurrence of Theme Tracker™, also unintentionally launched on an astrologically significant day. On November 9th a friend showed me an article in the Mountain Astrologer about November 9th, a Scorpio New Moon. The New Moon is the ideal time in the lunar cycle to begin something and Scorpio is all about delving into mysteries, the unconscious, etc. Neither I nor Mathael had any awareness of this when the new version launched. All of this reinforces the sense I have, which others have had about the I Ching or the Tarot, that the oracle is its own entity.
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