Thoughts on Divination

    Popular among shamanists and pracitioners of the magickal arts divinations and oracles are being the most common of practices. Most readers associate with oracles the card decks of Tarot or the more abstract astrology as the prominent methods of achieving the unknowable. Both can be found almost everywhere. Yet one other system is slowly gaining ground: the runic oracle. Unfortunately enough, only very few people are knowing how to conduct a divinatory session correctly or what to do with the results. Some of them actually do not want to know anything about these things. Cards are laid and then the book is being consulted what these cards are telling them. Oracles are thrown for the most common things and slowly the responsibility for their own actions is delegated to the randomness of the cards. If your life is more and more determined by astrology or other divinatory techniques conducted unwisely you have started being addicted to your favorite divination system and you are not even realizing this - much less you would accept this fact by reading it here. Horrible enough: this addiction is a kind of money resource for many.

    Okay - shamans are conducting divinations all the time when asking the spirits or the forces of nature for advice and knowledge. To divine something is nothing else then receiving informations on topics in the future, present or past which cannot be achieved otherwise or only with great efforts in resources and time. It is near to impossible laying hands on informations regarding the future except with divinatory techniques. But it is just the future which is most appealing for throwing oracles. Also included in the thematic complex of predicting future events are prophecies made by medicine men, shamans or (pseudo)spiritistic seances. Looking at all the prophecies concerning the end of the world they all share one thing in common: until today the good old mother earth continually refuses to go to hell, despite all the prophecies. However we are living in interesting times I am pretty sure that the end of the world is quite some millenias in the future. But as you see I am writing this article and you are reading it. So the world still is living and nothing really devastating happened .... yet.

    It is quite difficult to reduce the broad field of divinatory techniques to an easy to survey lot. Many magical techniques are divinatory by nature: dowsing, some spiritistic seances, the use of the pendulum, the shamanic journey, remote viewing, the vision quest, divining with a crystal sphere, mirror magic etc. Most of these techniques establish a contact to a spiritual, non-corporeal being or the lower self (the unihipili) of the huna system and they all require quite a bit of training in order to be effective tools for divination. Please note that these techniques are by far more then only tools for divination, especially mirror magics or the shamanic journey. So I won't deal with them here in this article.

    In order to conduct a divination with a possibility to be efficient it is first necessary to have a good question. The question or problem which is to be divined is seconded in importance only by the person making the oracle. A precise formulated question is vital for the outcoming result of the divination. Sometimes the process of finding a good question answers the question itself so that an oracle is no longer needed - then the oracle is often nothing more then a confirmation to the already found answer. Try to avoid yes/no questions that can be answered by flipping a coin. An exception is the pendulum that can respond only with yes/no/neutral movements - here an intelligent strategy of questions usually open up the answers or you utilize some of the pendulum-charts, which are designed to bring faster results by mapping certain directions of the pendulums movements with specialized answers.

    The most important factor in conducting a succesfull oracle is the practitioner himself. The practitioner should know the method and "letters" of his chosen oracle-technique by heart. Unfortunately most of the time this is far from being reality. Too often the interpretation by the book is common-place. I am comparing this situation with a tourist in a foreign country, let's say china, who is trying to communicate on everydays routines with a chinese native one, having a dictionary in his hands and seeking the correct words and pronounciation: it is destined to end in a fiasco. A possible way of learning your favorite oracular technique is by doing a kind of exercise.

    For example you want to learn how to divine with the runes. Your alphabet of oracle is consisting of 24 runes (using the Elder Futhark). Now you are scheduling a 24 day period during which you are working on one rune each day. During that day you try to learn and know everything you can lay hands on regarding this one rune only. You are doing practical pathworkings and try to find this rune in your everydays life. At the evening you are summarizing your experiences and knowledge. Do this for all the remaining 23 runes. To internalize the runes at all it is practical to create a short ritual in which all 24 runes are somehow integrated and which you are celebrating during all the 24 days. After this period of time you definitely have a better and deeper understanding of the runes and your divinations are classes better then before.

    You can adapt this technique for all other systems you are favoring instead of the runes. The better you know your oracle the better are the results because the spirits can communicate better through deeply known systems. By the ways: it is totally unimportant which system you prefer. They all work this way. You can even create a totaly new system, based on your own personal ideas and symbols. The alphabet of desire by Austin Osman Spare is one example - although he used it mainly to induce magical effects.

    Sometimes I am using a kind of free-style oracle. There I am not using any kind of given symbol-systems like the tarot deck or the runes. I am using a collection of small items which I am throwing on a rectangular mesa. This method can be compared with a shamanic journey to the total image created by this throw on the mesa. Looking at it and meditating on the different items I am receiving efficient results - just as if I had used a regular oracle system. Similar in use are some techniques involving the crystal ball as a meditation focus.

    There are some pure shamanistic methods of receiving and making an oracle. The simplest way is to have a question, take your rattle with you and walking through the nature. You ask your spirits and animals to show you a place where you can get the answer. At this place you close your eyes and begin to rattle until your spirits are giving you the inclination to stop. Immediately after you stopped rattling - within 3 seconds - the first impression you are receiving is the answer (it may be optical, acustical, haptic or something different). After you received the reply to your question it may be necessary to understand the answer. You can make a shamanic journey or meditate on the results for deeper understanding.

    Another method is the stone-oracle (of the lacota nation). You are seeking a stone, asking your spirits to be led to a stone which wants to help you in your question. Look at the stone in order to find structures on its surface which resemble landscapes, animals, faces or persons or everything you can imagine. These images are talking to you in a shamanic journey afterwards and telling you the answer. Return the stone to its place where it belongs after your journeys and thank the spirits for their help. A really interesting and beautiful way is the vision quest, during which you are retreating a time period to remote places in the nature and try to receive visions by fastening and other trance techniques like staying awake longer times.

    During divination negative results or results which no one desires naturally happen to pop up. Sometimes I have read the ridiculous advice to simply ignore these results or turn the card (as in tarot). Well, in the case of a negative result the clients split up in two patterns of reaction: either they are victims and they accept their ill fate in the future with a shrug and some depressed answers or they are much more active in their personal profile and quickly want to know what to do about this bloody fate and how to change it here and now.

     The future is far away from being determined and if a bad event is predicted in a divinatory or a remote viewing session it is a reflection of what could happen if nothing is done to prevent it. A received result is wide open to active changes by the clients side or by magical interventions. Intervening the fate first requires a thorough analysis of the result - I am calling this mapping the results - after that I am actively altering the map by changing specific results by a little ritual. You can choose any convenient and succesful magic technique to achieve this. Most of the time it is sufficient for the client to rethink some of his deeds and habits to alter the future on a profound level.

    Throwing an oracle more then one time on the same question should be avoided. Sometimes it is even being recommended when the result is not desireable. Asking an oracle two or more times on the same topic shows a kind of disrespect against the instances which are actually answering the questions via the oracle in my opinion. A worsening of the results is therefore rather easy to predict if you are having this bad habit. If you do not have sufficient trust in your spirits and your divinatory art it is better when you first start to establish a sufficient trustworthy relationship with your instances before you are beginning to use oracles as divinatory technique. I assume that you as a reader are more inclined to shamanic techniques - at least you are reading through a shamanic website - so this advice is narrowing on the relationship to your spirit helpers, your poweranimals and your other spiritual helpers. You can ask them to intesify your own spiritual powers or to help you with the oracles. Most doubts on an oracle result from the rather materialistic education most people are being raised with. The only case where a repetition of an oracle may have some point is when you are refining your question in some rare cases. When I am using the runic oracle I actually get more detailed informations with this technique, as long as I accept the first throw and want to know further details on some aspects.

    The latest results of researching at the Technical Remote Viewing techniques and its protocol gave some new insights in the laws and system of predicting future events. To give you a small idea of what I am talking of I am describing the prophetic sessions on the World War III or the End of the World (in general). Despit all prophecies none of the two events happened, yet. Even technically versed Remote Viewers made this erroneous prophecies. Why this? It depends on the strictly limited abilities of predictions and the fantasy of the prophet. Let us asume that a shocking event is being seen within a divinatory work like a shamanic or a remote viewing session. Within the RV sessions floorplans are drawn with emphasizes on the emotional reality and not the actual sizes (there is a workaround for this: if you are talented just to draw these things you are going to be rather neutral and plain on this). A Stage III map looks like being drawn by children. Similar to this is a prediction of future events.

     Many seers and viewers predicted the outbreak of the third Wold War in 1998. Well, it did not happen, obviously. But: On the 1st. of December of 1998 a documentary was sent in a well-known TV channel which was titled "World War III". This documentary film reached millions of peoples at once and a outrage of emotions took place after that. It is rather seldom that a TV-documentary actually stirs up emotions to such a level. So the viewers actually were correct: It happened in the minds of millions of peoples at once! Even great prophets are making the same mistake again and again (the native american prophets, too). The vision received is being extrapolated by the personal fantasy into global extents. They may even be right: A local tidal wave actually means the end of the world but only of the local world, where this catastrophy actually takes place. The human brain needs 2.9 seconds to totally get the grip on any one scenery. But a shamanic or other vision actually takes much more time and gives much room for interpretations and overlays of the analytical mind - thus leading to exaggerated prophetic visions like the constantly repeated Armageddons. My hope is that sometimes even traditionalists may realize that there is a development in spiritual techniques happening, not only in more mundane fields of science.