Divination, by Yvonne Aburrow
It is traditional at Samhain or Hallowe'en to attempt divination, as it is believed to be a time when the Otherworld moves closer to our own. This has involved such traditional pastimes as throwing apple peel over the shoulder to see how it falls, or cutting an apple in half horizontally and counting the pips.
Divination is the process of seeing beneath or beyond everyday reality, the ability to perceive underlying patterns. These patterns of events are sometimes known as the Web of Wyrd, the web of causality which connects everything together. The concept of Wyrd is the ancient Anglo-Saxon concept of fate as a fluid thing, changing from moment to moment depending on the actions and decisions we take. When we perform a divination, therefore, we can ask what will happen if we take a particular decision, but not what will happen in general.
The word divination is not derived from the Latin for guessing, but from the word 'divine' - hence it means to consult the deities. A deity's perception is non-linear and non-temporal, and if we can partake of this consciousness ourselves, it is possible to step out of time, and perceive the underlying patterns of reality.
The symbols used in any divinatory system (Runes, Tarot, etc.) allow us access to this state of mind. The right hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with the perception of pattern and rhythm, is stimulated by symbolic input. The symbols used in divination derive from the collective unconscious, that part of the mind which responds to our common cultural heritage. It is in the collective unconscious that we find archetypes such as the World Tree and the World Mountain. The concepts in the Tarot and the Runes relate to archetypes.
Other forms of divination, such as scrying, involve distracting the left brain (which is associated with linear, logical functions) in order to free the right brain to become aware of the realm of archetypes.
Divination can be used to gain understanding of psychological and emotional situations.
Simple divinatory exercises
Use a set of stones or crystals of various colours to correspond to the astrological planets, and cast them on a cloth (having meditated on the question being asked). Interpret according to their proximity to each other.
Scrying: use a bowl of water darkened with black ink, and gaze at it until pictures begin to form in your mind. Alternatively, use a scrying mirror (a piece of convex glass with the back painted black).
Further reading:
"The Way of Wyrd", by Brian Bates (Arrow Books)
"The Leaves of Yggdrasil", by Freya Aswynn (Llewellyn Publications)
"Dowsing for beginners"
"The Complete Book of Tarot" by Juliet Sharman-Burke (Pan Books)
"It is a mistake to assume that events far apart in time are thereby separate. All things are connected as in the finest web of a spider. The slightest movement on any thread can be discerned from all points in the web...
Imagine you were to witness a raven swooping from the sky to peck out the eye of a warrior... You would say that the flight of the bird was connected directly with the wound. But if you had observed the flight of the same raven half a day before the attack, you would see no connection with the warrior's injury. Nevertheless the pattern of a raven's flight at noon is bound to the pattern of its flight at dusk, just as surely as the progression of day and night. One can read the pattern and see what the future has in store...
Omens frighten the ordinary person because they believe them to be predictions of events that are bound to happen: warnings from the realms of destiny. But this is to mistake the true nature of omens. A sorcerer can read omens as pattern-pointers, from which the weaving of wyrd can be admired, and from which connections between different parts of patterns can be assumed...
The pattern of wyrd is like the grain in wood, or the flow of a stream; it is never repeated in exactly the same way. But the threads of wyrd pass through all things and we can open ourselves to its pattern by observing the ripples as it passes by. When you see ripples in a pool, you know that something has dropped into the water."
from "The Way of Wyrd" by Brian Bates