The wonderful artist Tylluan Penry has had on her books has done a marvellous job for mine.
General
General postings on the blog.
Creating a divination system
As a result of a comment made during one of my Second Life classes a few months back, I have been busy ….
Due to this process being a deeply personal creative one it would be pointless for me to explain in detail the individual meanings for each divination stone. They have meaning for me. They may not have the same connection for you.
What I will detail here is the method that I used so that it should be possible for you to take the same journey.
My view with divination is that the physical method such as stones, tea leaves, tarot, skrying, etc all provide patterns that via a light meditative state the open receptive mind can reassemble into meaning.
Where these patterns originate are unimportant for the purpose of this article. That is something quite deep.
Taking the above view for this task I came to the conclusion that each stone required to have a deep subconscious meaning so that it can facilitate a smooth interpretation during the meditative state.
My approach to this was to make use of basic psychological techniques of word or image association.
First I drew up a list of words or concepts that I felt cover the areas that I would like to use for divination. Interestingly when I counted up the areas it came to 25 which is not far from traditional rune systems, even though some of my ideas have no direct equivalent. Was that number due to a subconscious feeling of the ‘right number’? Don’t know.
Next step was to associate images to these words. For that I decided that I needed to work quickly and take little time because if I dwelt too long I may blur the original idea.
Therefore I cut up some paper on which I wrote each of these ideas. Taking each one and a pen I read the idea and shut my eyes while I let my hand doodle with the pen. I allowed my thoughts and feelings for that particular idea come to the fore and once I had the image for a few seconds I then stopped and looked at what I had doodled.
Very surprising to find that each piece of paper I did this with some particular area of the doodles exhibited a few strokes of the pen that I felt were distinctive enough to be more than random movements.
I have to say that this process took no more than 30 min to accomplish and the length of time between each attempt although generally consistent I felt that some ideas were more of a struggle to associate images with. Quite possibly there are some psychological meaning to be explored there sometime!
Next I sought my stones. I used pebbles from the beach like my last set. These I painted my symbols on and job done.
That was in fact the easy bit. The hard bit was to come with use, although because I had symbols that would mean more to me than ones created by another person in another time, my hypothesis was that being so closely linked to my subconscious the reading should be easier.
My first attempt confirmed this magnificently, the understanding of what lay before me was the clearest I have ever had with any form of divination. That was my initial thoughts, I have since refined them in light of how the events they portrayed unfolded and the subtleties that I missed.
Even so the understanding I am still impressed with, and they fulfilled the original task that was to create a symbolic system that is not based on any existing ones and still have the same success. I still have to learn what they are saying, as I have not gained instant 100% success in divination!
The point you can take away with is that although there is nothing wrong with tradition but if a system does not work for you, you can invent and you don’t have to feel you are not being pagan because you are not using something everyone knows about.
Systems and methods have to come from somewhere at some point in the past. Why not you, and now?
Land
Sat on this train as I run through the Kent landscape brings the thought that in England there can’t be much land that has not felt the hand of man. And felt it for a very long time. Ok there are places where its not gone well. But we still live in a green and pleasant land. Long may it continue with the struggle to maintain balance of demand. We should be the inspiration for what can be done with limited land and growing population.
Making music
Productive morning. Finished protoype recorders, aimed for flute but there you go. Managed to get a few notes out too so most impressed
Learnt a lot so my next go will be much better!
K
An Inspiring Day
Now is the time of Ostara, the Spring Equinox, of equal day and equal night, a festival that I have never previously marked. However…
The past week or so has been most interesting. First event of note is a discussion with my friend Lilith and the subject of the symbols that appeared on my hands twenty years ago this year, although I have recently discovered some unlocked healing potential in them, she suggested that the two parts of the symbol being the Ankh within a circle, could represent the Sun and Moon aspects respectively.
I quickly identified the aspect of Thoth within those symbols, he has been a shadowy aspect to my path the last few years, and my Selket has been slowly introducing me to him through various tasks. The functions of the moon, wisdom and healing, Thoth’s spheres of interests were then quickly followd a few days later when I managed to find some time to watch a TV program I had recorded weeks previously on the fabled Book Of Thoth, the foundation to Herticism, something that had an early influence on my path.
Although most of the content was familiar the affect this alleged book had on the formation of the Tarot perked my interest. Since I began my path, except for one instance I have never been able to lay my hands on a pack of Tarot cards without experiencing heat and pain, thats if I’m even able to get close enough, most often ‘events’ occur to prevent me when desire to go shopping. Anyway, the upshot of the TV program was that although the Tarot was interpreted as being the source or descendant of the Book of Tarot, but the interpretation could be wrong, there may never have been a book and the Book of Thoth could be a description of the entire corpus of written work as it was traditional to attribute written works to him. This view I do in fact agree with, its not unusual for this kind of allusion with Egyptian literature, and I felt a niggling feeling this was in some way connected with all that I mention above. I will be watching this program again to gleam more from it.
Today, it hits me, the realisation at the time of equal sun and equal moon that the reason I can’t touch Tarot is that they would have been, and will be, a distraction from the real understanding of the wisdom of Thoth. The fact that all of these events and thoughts occur at such a connected time that symbolises Thoth is something I can’t ignore, I’ve had similar before and I know I should pay attention in the days, weeks, months that follow. I know more is to come.
