Casting staves.
Reading tarot.
Drawing up your chart.
Divination and fortune telling is a tricky thing, really. As a woman of science and as a fervent believer in free will, most think I would have no interest in such things.
Well, they are wrong. Boy are they wrong!
Divination Is Rational
I’m not going to go too deeply into this as there is a ton of really good, and peer-reviewed, information available on the psychology of certain types of divination methods -- especially the tarot. Carl Jung was very interested in using the tarot archetypes in his work, so a lot of study had been done over the years.
It boils down to one thing, the archetypes in tarot, combined with the symbology, allow us insight into our own psyche so that we can examine and dissect issues via a different lens compared to the one we normally default to. Of course, this isn’t limited to tarot, it can be applied to everything from reading tea leaves to studying bird flight patterns.
For me, it’s simple. My mind defaults to the logical. I can totally disassociate myself from the emotional side of any situation if I need to, which is great when I’m solving problems in a lab but not so great when I’m trying to navigate a touchy subject with one of my kids. It’s not that I don’t have empathy, it’s actually the opposite -- I have so much empathy that I can’t deal with issues if I don’t go all Vulcan with the logic.
Thus, divination. Divination and using the symbols of the cards or the meanings behind the staves provides me with a bridge for my empath side to work with my Vulcan side to solve issues, whether it is for myself or for someone else.
How I Divine
Ogham is my preferred method, due to familiarity and simplicity. I learned ogham for the first time over 20 years ago. Ogham is an ancient Celtic script that was likely first developed to hide information from those that could read Latin -- like Roman and Christian invaders. It’s been tied to all sorts of pagan woo over the years, some accurate and some not so accurate. That’s all okay, though, since the psychology of any divination method is stronger than any imaginative woo used to develop it.
My other preferred method is tarot. I have a few decks I enjoy using. I began by learning the “official” symbolism of the most commonly used deck, known as the Rider-Waite-Smith or RWS. From there I meditated on each card of each deck so I could intuitively draw meaning from the images on it. By using empathy about the querent or question in conjunction with the logic of the symbols and my own intuition, I can make a confident reading.
Some Caveats
I do not think we can truly foretell the future, but we can get a pretty good idea of what is going to happen by examining how emotional and rational reactions can impact the likely outcomes of any situation. When this happens, it can eerily seem like prescience, but really it is the natural outcome of combining empathy and logic into a single tool for good. Once you become skilled at using a divination tool to combine your empathy and logic, you may find yourself making accurate assessments more often than not.
No matter what, though, it’s important to know that there is no superpower that lets anyone foretell the future. Why? Free will is why. Every decision you make, as well as the decisions of those that enter your sphere, can affect the outcome. So while you can make accurate predictions for a moment in time, they will be constantly evolving. For this reason, the longer out in time a reading goes, the less accurate it may be. So readings for events that will unfold over the next few days or weeks are many times more useful and accurate compared to those about events months or years in the future.
So divine away, friends. When people scoff at you, you can just smile and continue on your way. After all, you know that you are practicing a psychological skill that is firmly grounded within the rational realm!
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