Divination comes in many forms; tarot, pendulum, runes, crystal balls, palm reading. The list is actually endless and includes some rather obscure forms such as reading cat behaviours or predicting how the weather will turn out from how a sandal lands when kicked in to the air. Many people are, understandably, quite sceptical when it comes to divination. This leads me to the important question; why should those who are sceptical open their minds and give it a go?
I’ve always been fairly superstitious. My earliest memory of understanding that people in the world really took part in magic and divination was walking by the sea in Cornwall with a friend late at night aged 12. I turned to her and said, “You know, real witches exist. Only they’re not like you see on TV.” Where I got that from I have no idea but she knew as well.
“I know, my dad found an altar out in the countryside here once. Leftover candles and things.”
It hasn’t changed my life but divination has given me a way of seeing things from a different angle. To me it isn’t about some supernatural, spiritual, magical thing (though it can be if you want it to be). It’s always just been a tool to access my subconscious.
Having not delved deeply enough into other types of divination to talk confidently about them I will use tarot as my example. Each card has an image. Each image represents a person, a situation, an “archetype”. It’s all about symbolism. Some symbols people mostly react the same to but many we don’t. A swastika instantly conjures up images of Nazi Germany (unless you’re from India) but…how does the image of a soldier in Afghanistan make you feel? Sad? Proud? Angry?
Psychologists in the past have actually used tarot cards much like ink blots because how we react to the imagery and how we relate that to our life is very similar to what we see in amongst smudges of ink. You can draw almost any damn card and you will see something that relates to some aspect of your life but this does not lessen what it can teach us about ourselves if we let it.
Not all forms of divination do this. Some are just for fun, others do require a bit more belief in the “supernatural” but many work similarly to tarot. They tell us things and how we react to those things can tell us things we never knew we knew. So, give it a go and see what you can learn. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Bex (“witchnymph”) has a blog dedicated to tarot, which you can find here, and from her personal tumblr, she gives readings for small donations of £1 upwards.
