Divination¶

Overview¶

Divination -- the art of seeking knowledge of the future or the hidden through supernatural means -- has been a central practice of the craft for as long as the craft has existed. The village wise woman was consulted as much for her ability to see as for her ability to heal. The cunning folk of England and Wales listed fortune-telling, finding lost property, and identifying thieves among their core services.

Divination is not passive. It is an act of will: the practitioner deliberately opens a channel to the unseen, using a tool or technique as a focal point. The tool is not magic in itself -- the magic is in the practitioner's ability to enter a receptive state and interpret what comes through.

Forms of Divination¶

Scrying¶

Scrying is the practice of gazing into a reflective or translucent surface to receive visions. The most familiar image is the crystal ball, but historically the medium could be almost anything: a bowl of water (hydromancy), a mirror (catoptromancy), a candle flame (pyromancy), or a polished stone.

The technique is essentially the same regardless of medium. The practitioner relaxes their gaze, allows the eyes to unfocus, and enters a light trance state in which images, impressions, or visions arise. The surface provides a blank field on which the unconscious mind can project meaning.

Scrying has deep roots. The Egyptians used bowls of ink. The Greeks used pools of water. John Dee, the Elizabethan magician and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, used a polished obsidian mirror (now in the British Museum) and a crystal ball to communicate with what he believed were angelic beings. His scryer, Edward Kelley, did the actual gazing while Dee recorded what was reported.

Mirror scrying was traditionally associated with Samhain: young women would gaze into a mirror by candlelight on Halloween night to see the face of their future husband -- or, if they were to die before marrying, a skull.

Tarot¶

The tarot is probably the most widely practised form of divination in modern Western occultism. A standard tarot deck contains seventy-eight cards divided into the Major Arcana (twenty-two cards depicting archetypal figures and experiences) and the Minor Arcana (fifty-six cards in four suits).

The tarot's origins as a divination tool are debated. The cards first appeared in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game (tarocchi), and the earliest clear evidence of their use for fortune-telling dates to the eighteenth century. The esoteric associations that modern practitioners take for granted -- the linking of the Major Arcana to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the association of suits with the four elements -- were largely developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by occultists including Éliphas Lévi, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and Arthur Edward Waite.

None of this diminishes the tarot's power as a divination tool. The cards work -- in the sense that they consistently produce readings that feel meaningful to the querent -- because their imagery is archetypal. The Fool, the Tower, the Death card, the Lovers: these are images that speak to universal human experiences. The reader's skill lies in interpreting the cards in the context of the question asked.

The Death card (Major Arcana XIII) is worth noting in the context of this wiki. It does not mean literal death. It means transformation, endings, the clearing away of the old to make way for the new -- the same understanding of death that runs through the Wheel of the Year and the Wiccan concept of the Summerland.

Pendulum Dowsing¶

A pendulum -- a weight suspended on a chain or cord -- is one of the simplest divination tools. The practitioner holds the chain still, asks a question, and interprets the pendulum's movement: clockwise for yes, counterclockwise for no (or whatever convention has been established). More complex uses include holding the pendulum over a map to locate something, or over the body to identify areas of energetic imbalance.

The mechanism is understood differently depending on who you ask. Sceptics attribute it to ideomotor effect -- tiny unconscious muscle movements that cause the pendulum to swing. Practitioners would not necessarily disagree; they might simply argue that the unconscious movements are themselves a channel for intuitive knowledge.

Runes¶

The runes are the letters of the old Germanic alphabets -- most commonly the Elder Futhark (twenty-four characters) -- used both as a writing system and as a tool for divination and magic. In Norse mythology, Odin hung himself on Yggdrasil for nine days and nights to gain knowledge of the runes, making them literally the product of a death-and-rebirth experience.

Each rune has a name, a meaning, and a set of associations. In divination, runes are typically carved or painted on stones or wooden staves, drawn from a bag, and laid out in a pattern (a "cast" or "spread"). The reader interprets the runes that appear in relation to each other and to the question.

Rune divination is less codified than tarot. There are no universally agreed spreads or interpretations, and the practice leans heavily on the reader's personal relationship with the symbols. This is part of its appeal: it feels older, rougher, and less mediated than tarot.

Ogham¶

The Ogham alphabet is an early medieval Irish script, traditionally associated with the god Ogma. Like runes, the letters have been adopted for divination. Each of the twenty original Ogham letters is associated with a tree (Birch, Rowan, Alder, etc.), and the system is sometimes called the "Celtic Tree Alphabet," though this name is modern rather than historical.

Ogham staves are used similarly to runes: inscribed on sticks or stones, drawn from a bag, and interpreted in the context of a question. The tree associations add a layer of meaning that connects the practice to the natural world and to the herbalist tradition of the village wise woman.

Samhain Divination Games¶

Many traditional Halloween customs are survivals of Samhain divination practices. These are often playful in form but serious in origin:

Apple divination was common: bobbing for apples, peeling an apple in one continuous strip and throwing the peel over your shoulder to see what letter it formed (your future spouse's initial), or cutting an apple in half to count the seeds. Apples were sacred in Celtic tradition -- the Isle of Avalon (Afallon) means "isle of apples" -- and their association with knowledge, death, and the otherworld made them natural divination tools.

Nut divination involved placing two nuts (often hazelnuts) in the fire, each representing a person in a potential couple. If they burned steadily together, the match was good; if one cracked or flew away, it was not.

Mirror gazing, as mentioned above, was a Samhain specialty. The thinning of the veil made the mirror a window to the future or to the world of the dead.

The dumb supper -- eating in complete silence with a place set for the dead -- was both an act of ancestor veneration and a form of divination. The dead, invited to the table, might communicate through signs or impressions during the meal.

Divination and the Craft¶

In Wiccan practice, divination is not fortune-telling in the fairground sense. It is a form of communion with the unseen -- with the self, with the divine, with the dead. The best practitioners describe it not as seeing the future but as seeing more clearly the forces and patterns that are already at work.

The full moon is traditionally the most potent time for divination, and many practitioners read tarot, scry, or cast runes as part of their esbat practice. Samhain is the other peak: the thinning of the veil makes all forms of divination more accessible.

Connections¶

See Samhain & the Thinning Veil -- the most powerful time for divination
See Lunar Cycles in Nature & Ritual -- the full moon as peak divination time
See The Village Wise Woman -- divination as a core service of the cunning folk
See Moon Lore -- Harley discusses lunar divination extensively
See Psychopomps in Pagan Traditions -- Odin's sacrifice for the runes