Divining as Tuning May 14, 2008
Posted by Ian in Community, Divination, Education, Modern Polytheism, Religion and Faith.trackback
So, I’ve been seeing, talking, and reading about divination a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about what I thought divination was when I first started playing around with things like tarot cards and runes and comparing that to how I think of divination now. A lot has changed for me.
I, like many I suspect, approached divination with a mixture of two approaches. I thought about divination as, on the one hand, a psychological exercise to help me think through an issue and, on the other hand, as having (in a “maybe, not sure” way) some potential to illuminate the future. When I did readings, I kept the book of meanings close to hand and did my best to “add” together all the meanings of a spread. More often than not, I ended up with a little insight (enough that I found the process worthy of repetition) amidst a headache of meanings I couldn’t ‘hold together.’
It’s quite a bit different for me now. I like to have the book ready to hand, for a quick refresher or a clarification, but I much prefer to ‘listen’ to the divination itself. At my very best, when I’m in the zone, the meaning of an element of the reading is less important than the opening it makes possible.
More precisely, I reach for the meaning and bring it to mind as something akin to a mantra. Like a mantra, it seems ‘tuned’ to a spiritual state and if I can hold it in my mind, it helps me shift myself toward that spiritual state. In that place, the reading usually acquires a new clarity, almost as if I’m ‘listening’ to a radio broadcast (though I don’t hear voices or anything so dramatic; there’s just this ’sense’ of how things are related).
I’m thinking about this partially in response to those folks who see divination as a ‘lower’ spiritual activity, the sort of thing you get involved with if you aren’t properly focused on the sacred and devotional dimensions of faith. Quite the opposite of that, when practiced spiritually, divination seems like one of the more spiritual practices available to us, a vehicle through which spirit is brought closer to everyday life, through which we can better adjust our daily life to spirit.
Divination ends up being a two-sided process. First, it’s tuning into the spiritual dimension of things. Second, it’s using the results of that to help tune the material world so that it becomes a better channel for spirit. The act of divining is a microcosm of that–listening to spirit and then expressing that ’spiritual voice’ in material terms like speech and writing.
these days my divination question is likely to be,
What energies should I be accessing now?
I’ve been working my way though the Faery oracle, placing a card on my altar and taking a day or two to soak in some of its meaning before going on to the next. also, concurrently, I’ve been working with Glassman’s Vodou deck— primarily by blessing the deck, sitting with it, asking questions like the above. I do still think divination can be used to extend our vision of what’s going to happen if things stay their course, but it’s funny that we’ve both been on this more (?) devotional use lately.
I’m willing to say, too, that the devotional element enhances the predictive, making it easier to transform the reading from the merely predictive to the prescriptive, from description to diagnosis, if you will. Which, I think, is a lot of what goes on with questions like “what energies should I be accessing now.”
I quite like Glassman’s deck–it was my first ‘real’ tarot deck and has remained a real touchstone for a lot of divination.
Okay, well dig this: I just pulled a card about how I should proceed with this grad school shit, and I got Deluge, reversed. I’m still not intimate enough with the deck to really get what that might mean right now, but I’m curious to see what soaks in.
I don’t really use reversals (though maybe I should start–there are some interesting possibilities there), but the first thing that comes to my mind (so take with the appropriate grain of salt, this ain’t gospel, and all that rot):
The Deluge is about the loss of the material trappings but the survival of the spirit. Reversed, it suggests clinging to the material trappings, possibly at the expense of spirit. It feels a little like “the spirit has moved on, but you still cling to the body.”
As an object of contemplaton, it seems to be asking, “where is the spirit now?”