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Divination

Divination is the art of asking a good question of something that cannot answer in words, and then paying very close attention. It is not fortune-telling. The future is not written down somewhere, waiting to be read. But the present holds far more than we usually notice, and the cards, the runes and the dark water are ways of noticing it.

What it is for

Witches divine for insight more than for prediction: to see a situation from its other side, to bring up what we already half know, to choose a time, to test a working before we do it, to ask the gods or the ancestors what they make of things. At the Hearth we read at every Samhain for the year ahead, and most of us keep a deck or a bag of runes for the ordinary days when a decision will not settle.

How it works is one of the long arguments. Some of us believe the gods speak through the fall of the cards. Some think divination is a way of hearing the deep mind, which knows more than it tells. Some think it simply hands you a fresh set of images to think with, and that this is enough. All three camps read, and all three find it useful.

The ways we use

Tarot

Seventy-eight cards: twenty-two trumps, the Major Arcana, from the Fool to the World, and fifty-six suit cards in wands, cups, swords and pentacles. Tarot began as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy and was only taken up for divination in the 1780s, by French occultists who were certain it encoded the wisdom of ancient Egypt, which it does not. The deck most people learn on was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for A. E. Waite in 1909, and her pictures for every card, not only the trumps, are the reason tarot is so readable today. Learn one card a day and keep notes. Within a year the deck will talk to you.

Runes

The twenty-four letters of the Elder Futhark, the oldest runic alphabet, each with its name and its meaning: fehu, cattle and wealth; uruz, the wild ox and its strength; and so on to othala, the ancestral home. The Roman historian Tacitus describes the Germanic peoples cutting lots from the branch of a fruit tree, scattering them on a white cloth and reading three, and many people still draw three. Most of the meanings in modern books are modern, and Heathen rune-workers can be refreshingly blunt about it. Make your own set from a fallen branch; it is the best way to learn them.

Ogham

The early Irish alphabet of twenty letters, cut as notches along the edge of standing stones. Medieval Irish scholars linked many of the letters to trees, and the poet Robert Graves linked a great many more in The White Goddess, so a modern ogham reading is part old learning and part twentieth-century poetry. Our Celtic-minded members cut theirs on hazel sticks.

Scrying

Gazing into something until it shows you something: still water, a black mirror, a crystal, smoke, a candle flame. It is the oldest form of divination and the hardest to learn, because there is nothing to look up. See below.

The pendulum

A weight on a thread, held still above a palm or a chart, that swings one way for yes and another for no. It is very good at telling you what you already want, for reasons we explain on Speaking with the Dead. Use it for small questions and hold its answers lightly.

The old folk ways

An apple peeled in one long strip at Samhain and thrown over the shoulder, to land in the shape of a sweetheart's initial. Two hazelnuts set side by side in the fire, named for two lovers, to see whether they burn quietly together or jump apart. A book opened at random and a finger put down blind. The flight of birds, the shape of clouds, the first animal you meet on a journey. These are divination too, and some of them are the oldest we have.

A simple scrying

Scrying is best learned in the dark half of the year, near the dark of the moon, when the world outside is quiet. This is the way we teach it at Kitchen Table.

1. Prepare. Choose your question and write it down. Make it an open one: "What do I need to understand about my work?" will serve you better than "Will I get the job?"
2. Set the place. A darkened room; one candle, placed so that its flame is not reflected in your glass; and a bowl of water darkened with a few drops of ink, or a black mirror. If you are scrying with fire, the candle itself is your glass; a purple one is traditional.
3. Ground and centre. See Grounding and Centering. Cast a circle if it is your practice; many of us do for scrying.
4. Ask. Say the question aloud, once.
5. Look. Soften your eyes. Breathe slowly. Let your thoughts drift past without following them. Look into the water, not at it. It may be ten minutes before anything happens, and the first few times it may be nothing at all. That is normal.
6. Notice. Images, when they come, are seldom pictures on the surface. More often they are pictures in the mind that seem to rise up out of the dark: a shape, a colour, a face, a word, a memory. Do not judge them yet.
7. Write it all down at once, before you interpret anything, with the date and the phase of the moon. The meaning often comes days later, and you will want the record.
8. Close. Thank whatever you feel should be thanked, open the circle, eat something, and put the lights on.

Do this once a week for three moons before you decide whether you can scry. Almost everyone can. Almost nobody can the first time.

Making a black mirror

Buy a cheap picture frame with a glass front. Take out the glass, clean it, and paint one side with three thin coats of matt black paint. Put it back in the frame painted side inwards, so that you gaze through clear glass into black. Some witches wash the finished mirror with an infusion of mugwort and leave it out under a full moon before its first use; we do. Keep it wrapped in dark cloth when it is not in use, partly from tradition and partly because it is a misery to dust.

Mugwort and dreams

Mugwort is the witch's herb for seeing. A pinch is burned as incense for divination, a weak tea of it is drunk before sleep for vivid dreams, its leaves are rubbed on mirrors and crystal balls, and it is sewn into dream pillows. It grows along every roadside in our part of the world and is easy to gather in late summer. Avoid it entirely if you are or may be pregnant, and take care if you react to ragweed, which is its cousin. Its full entry, with the rest of the plants we use, is in Herbs of the Hearth.

The ethics of reading

Divination is a kind of power, and the Rede applies to it as much as to any spell.

• Read for the person in front of you. Do not read about people who have not asked: whether a friend's husband is faithful, whether a colleague is about to be sacked. That is spying with extra steps.
• Do not predict death or illness. If a reading seems to point that way, you are very probably wrong, and even if you were right it would help no one. Say what you see in other words, or say nothing.
• Do not read for someone in crisis instead of getting them help. If a person is in danger, the cards can wait.
• Do not let the cards make choices that are yours to make. A reading is counsel, not command.
• Keep honest records. Write your readings down and look back at them. You will find that you remember the hits and forget the misses, as everyone does. A Book of Shadows that keeps both is how a reader gets good.

Some of us read professionally, and do it well. Our covenant asks that it be done honestly and outside the circle. Inside it, we read for each other for nothing.