On Divination
This week’s prompt from Trace:
When you’re tossing things or pulling them out of a deck, what’s going on? Are you having a conversation, or otherwise interacting with someone? Multiple someones? What’s going on when when you’re doing your thing? When you work with tines, is it different from when you use decks?
Like with many, many things, the first way I’d respond to this is with “It depends.” My experience with divinatory methods really varies a lot based on what method I’m using, and this is a big part of how I divine with each one, and why I’d pick the one I do for a certain circumstance.
That being said, in all cases, I do view it as a conversation with some spirit. That’s probably not too surprising; animism is the starting point for so much of my work. But saying it’s a conversation is just the beginning of the distinction. After all, you can have very different sorts of conversations with different people even if you’re only thinking in terms of humans.
Some divinatory methods have very strong sprits of their own. Most of the runeworkers I’ve talked to have a very strong sense that each rune is a specific spirit, and while I’m not a strongly-practiced runeworker myself, that’s the same sense I get off them too. In a rune divination, each one might be saying something, some louder than others, and all in conversation.
I’ve found that most ‘word’ type divinations (like Ogham and my own Antler-Tines) feel this way to me at least somewhat. In fact, Ogham really only clicked strongly for me when I took the time to get to know each fid not just as a set of correspondences, but as a thing with a sense of itself. As soon as I asked this way, I started to get a sense of each one as sort of a separate object/being, with a lot more imagery flowing out of them that helped me understand them individually and together.
So, if these sorts of divination systems involve spirits, that still keeps the question open of ‘where do the answers come from’. My understanding of the Rune-spirits or Ogham-spirits or Tine-spirits is that they’re in some sense ‘made’ of the things they relate to. The Antler-tine of Anvil is work (at least in part) in the same way that the Player-with-Light is self-expression. And that means they have perception of, and access to, that part of reality, so they can speak as it. Them coming up in the reading shows that they’re nearby me, they’re salient to the question, though it’s still up to me as the reader to understand how that actually applies.
My answer is a little different for other divination systems like Tarot. I don’t feel as strong a sense that every different Tarot card is a spirit. In a theoretical animist sense they are the same way everything else is, but they don’t interact with me in the same way that others do. Instead, the collective spirit of the deck itself is more present for me. Maybe this is because each style of Tarot deck is a more distinctive work than different sets of runes or ogham. In my personal practice, I generally call these ‘scene’ divination methods, where you’re not looking at a single symbol, but rather an interlocking set of them that fits within the larger context of not just the reading but the deck itself.
In the case of Tarot and other decks, the ‘voice’ of the deck comes through, but to me it often feels like it’s speaking on behalf of something else. “The universe” is something that a lot of folks say, and this makes a certain amount of sense to me. Communing directly with the universe never seemed like something that was useful, its perspective is so broad as to be overwhelming. But when it’s refracted through a singular work like a Tarot deck, especially one selected to fit the reader, asker, or question, it seems like questions could be answered much more helpfully.
That also brings to mind a third answer to all this, which can apply equally to ‘word’ and ‘scene’ methods: Using a divination tool to talk to some specific other entity; a god, an ancestor, or something else harder to define like the Pack. This is pretty similar to how I described the Tarot above, but with a more particular ritual context (and choice of divination method, etc) so that whatever symbols I’m using are talking on behalf of the other. The Antler-Tines then are the communication method, not so different from a phone system or chat app (which of course are spirits themselves). The system affects how the messages come through, and again some are better than others for different purposes, but this has worked really well for me, and it feels distinctly different from when I’m talking more directly to the tines or the deck.