Bits and Pieces

“What divination reveals, magic can resolve.” Ann Kessler Guinan

Humans will look for omens, wisdom, reassurance, guidance, and answers anywhere they think they can find them. They will “read” anything. Sheeps guts, the trajectory of a running rabbit, the flight of birds, the cracks in a burned turtle shell, stars, cards, lots, runes, coins, sticks, bones, the palm of the hand, the veins in they eye, coffee grounds, tea leaves, a hand full of little charms, reflections on the surface of water, the smoke rising from an extinguished candle. The list goes on. According to Pema Chodron, humans can live beautifully with uncertainty and change. I am sure that could be true if one has a deep Buddhist monastic practice. Buddhist or not, some people handle uncertainty better than others. I have made my career working with people, and in my experience, ambiguity tends to trigger a deep need to regain certainty and control for most humans. As sensory beings, we have a profound drive to make sense of our environment, and all things within, in all the ways we perceive them.

We are living in uncertain times. The uncertainty and ambiguity are so overwhelming that many of us have found ourselves in a state of prolonged stress response—an ongoing amygdala hijack. The world seems to be spinning out of control, and our country is transforming before our eyes. We feel powerless to stop it. We feel the need to understand what is happening now, know what will happen in the future, and have a firm grasp of what we should do to address it. Where do we go from here?

Enter divination. Early divination was often done in conjunction with ritual, either to determine what type of ritual must be done, or to make sense of the ritual after it had been conducted*. Today, most pagans use divination as a means of personal guidance. Gather your chosen divination tools, or go to your preferred practitioner, ask your question, and discern or receive the answer. The questions are personal, they concern things like personal growth, love, understanding a dream, seeking guidance and direction. Making sense of the subjective experience. I have had powerful divinitory readings that related directly to my own experience, accurate foretellings, and life-changing messages. I have done the same for others.

But what about seeing the bigger picture?

There are no seeresses or magi reading omens for the community at large anymore, at least not for my community. The mystical shared experience of a people, the shared belief and connection, I think, has been deeply fractured. Fractured by individualism, modernity, capitalism, separation, apathy, and cynicism. There are cultures where the communal bonds still exist and are strong, but there is disconnection for those of us who have been separated from our ancestral practices. No one passed the skill down to us or initiated us into the secret practices. We are trying to re-figure it out. It sincerely makes me ask, “What has the fracturing done to our ability to read the omens on a larger scale?” This is just a seed of a thought. A question sitting at the back of my mind that I am trying to articulate. I know I am probably missing something, and I hope that maybe we can talk about it.

I know there are many, myself included, who are working to rebuild connections and create community, but it is difficult and sometimes discouraging work. It’s hard to build community in these isolated and polarized times. There’s a certain magic in having a deep connection with the people around you, a reliance, an interdependence, the psychic amoeba. Those who can tap into that magic in service of the people have a special gift.

I would imagine that it takes a great deal of skill and discernment to divine for the intersubjective experience, I have never tried it. I have seen those who have, and the two things that I notice are that two practitioners will state opposite outcomes with complete confidence and certainty and neither outcome materializes, or several practitioners will come to the same conclusion but they are so spread out in different areas and on various platforms that they are just Cassandras crying in the wilderness, completely disconnected from each other (and the only way I ever know about them is because I have a friend who is particularly tuned in to internet patters and will usually clue me in to what she is seeing).

Charm casting has been around as a form of divination since people started picking up objects, tossing them, and making meaning out of the way the objects landed. I don’t have a start date. I have, however, made my own charm casting set. It is a small collection of found objects that hold meaning for me. Some were pieces of jewelry that I wore for many years, others little talismans I carried in my pocket, a few we interesting tidbits I found on the ground. Each bit has a special meaning, and they are cast onto a cloth with symbols. It is deeply personal, and it is quickly becoming my favorite means of divination. Can I use it to divine the actions of the current regime? Will it tell me what will happen on the global stage? Could I use it to foretell the fate of powerful men? I don’t know.

I probably won’t ask.

However, I will continue asking the small questions—the personal questions, the helpful questions, the questions with answers I can do something about, and the questions that magic can resolve.

As for the rest? I leave the rest to the Three, they see far, far more than me.

Happy to hear your thoughts on the matter. Leave a comment below.

* Annus, Amar ed. (2010). Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.