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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in divination

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Oracle of Water: Dew

Keywords: Clarity, Refreshment, Newness, Renewal, Fleeting Opportunity

Dew is a very fleeting form of water. While the morning heralds a new day and fresh opportunities, the dew declares that these opportunities are fleeting. Dew is frost’s warmer sister; when temperatures are low enough dew freezes to become frost. But on cool, misty mornings the dew is scattered like tiny diamonds across delicate spider webs and thin rose petals. It is nature’s tears of joy for another golden opportunity to begin again.

Dew represents a gentle rejuvenation of the body, like the refreshed feeling you have after a great night’s sleep. What could be better to wake up to than beautiful nature bedazzled by countless watery jewels? Just as dew is a gentle strength renewing the earth, embrace a renewed focus on your physical well-being. This might involve simple daily rituals to improve your overall health and vitality. Early morning could be the best time for you to have an invigorating walk to start your day right. Dew reminds that small, consistent efforts can lead to significant physical changes.

When it comes to the emotions, dew suggests a tender, peaceful renewal of the heart. Allow the drops of a clear, new day to cleanse and revitalize your heavy feelings. This is a time to release negative, burdensome feelings in order to refresh your relationships and personal perspective and well-being. Perhaps certain feelings have been muddled and confused, but now will be made clear in the pale morning light. There may also be current or approaching relationships and connections that are as brief as the morning dew, but they are no less profound.

Dew whispers of the quiet insights that come with a peaceful mind. Every new days starts us with a clean slate where we can choose to think better and more helpful thoughts. The water in our bodies is affected by the frequencies of our thoughts and words, so make sure you are kind and gentle with yourself as well as with others. Dew seeks to refresh and enlighten your thoughts and mental pursuits. Not only is a calm mind more clear and productive, but more able to embrace the happiness of starting over and dew reminds us that we get to start over every single day.

Spiritually, dew brings renewal and clear understanding just as it does to all the realms of our being. As dew forms through the union of air and earth, the seeker is encouraged to explore the subtle but powerful interplay between the material and spiritual aspects of existence. So many spiritual and magical experiences are very fleeting and brief, and this lends all the more importance to them.

Dew invites you to stillness and contemplation, and to purification. It also invites you to find the magic of spirit in small and unexpected places and things. The most profound spiritual insights and evolutions often come as quietly and go as swiftly as the dew. Be aware of the discreet, finer things that are all around you and can connect you to nature and your higher self. There may be much that you are overlooking and that is leading to beliefs that do not serve you.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Eye Scry

Did you know that your cornea – the transparent front part of the eye that covers the iris, pupil and anterior chamber – is about 78% water? That means we are constantly looking through a very thin layer of, essentially, water. If water is all one, and holds and remembers everything like a record, that means this record sits right over our eyes at all times.

I have seen very strange and interesting things when I close my eyes, and I don’t mean visualizing them in my mind. I mean what looks like completely real, moving 3D images right in front of my eyes, like a hallucination, in glowing greens against a smoky black background. It looked only what I can describe as trippy.

For a long time now I have been playing with the strange and intriguing idea of “eye scrying”, which is just what it sounds like. No tools, no mirrors, no bowl of water, just your own closed eyes, intuition and all the strange shapes and colors that unfold there behind your eyelids.


You see things like the typical floaters, you see what is probably a tiny pulsing blood vessel. But if you focus, yet also at the same time sort of unfocus, if you set the intention and just look at the backs of your eyelids. It sounds strange, but I think there is a lot that can be seen and learned when scrying into the darkness and the water of your own eyes. If we scry into pools and bowls of water and the like, why not scry into our own eyes? There is no magic that can be worked with tools and bells and whistles that can’t be worked with the human body.

Imagine the liquid and the delicate, glassy cornea being encoded with the same visions and experiences of your ancestors. Their memories are in your DNA and their vision is now your vision. You’re really looking beyond the watery cornea, beyond the backs of your eyelids. The eye or the cornea create a kind of portal into quite literally seeing very differently, potentially into other dimensions.

We shouldn’t underestimate our own abilities and bodies and parts that are actually very mystical if you think about it, such as eyes. Eyes are an amazing organ and the amount of water that makes them up is intriguing to me. Doing this exercise in a watery environment enhances the experience. The more water, the more there is to be heard, felt and seen, I have found. It is also best to cover the eyes or otherwise block out as much light as possible.

Give it a try, see what you see. Have you ever done this or experienced anything similar? Have you now tried it and had any results?

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Conchomagia: Sea Shell Magic

Shells have been casting spells of fascination and enthrallment for arguably all of human history. The earliest known example of jewelry is a set of thirty-three sea snail shell beads uncovered in a cave in Morocco, dating back around 150,000 years. That’s quite a tenure for conchophilia, or the love of shells. Within that time, in different cultures around the globe, shells were valued for many uses, even currency.

A step beyond the love of shells, conchylomania is the madness for collecting sea shells. And deeper still are the mystic and esoteric uses of shells – conchomancy, or divination with shells, and a new term I have coined: conchomagia, or shell magic. Not that the use of shells in magic and ritual is new, simply this specific name that fits in nicely with the other Latin-root terms and uses.

Crystals are wildly popular across spiritual practices and more mainstream than ever, but their cousins, seashells, don’t get quite the attention in this context they deserve. As discussed previously in “Conchomancy: Messages From the Sea”,

Just like the myriad spectral crystals that grow deep in Mother Earth’s flesh and bring us healing vibrations and messages, so too do the similarly composed shells that grow in her blood, the oceans…

Calcium carbonate, the primary compound in seashells and pearls, is also found in its more stable form, calcite, in rocks and crystals…

This scientific fact alone interestingly mirrors the nature and energies of these two different Earth treasures – the broader, original compound comprising the shells that
 move within the moving element, and its most stable polymorph making up the grounded, much-less-moving crystals.”

Essentially, seashells can be used in the all the same ways as crystals. But seashells have another element to them that crystals don’t; the fact that they are made and grown, almost magically, by living creatures. They have powerful life energy in this respect. I have been experimenting with shells in multiple ritualistic applications for some time and so far it seems that, like kyanite and citrine crystals, they are self-cleansing. In the case of shells, I attribute this to their inherent connection to water. Though literally rinsing them in water, more than smudging, is the best way to cleanse them if needed. This is one of many methods and practices that can be determined intuitively by the individual practitioner and might vary from person to person.


Read the full article here 

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Tarot Cards, Oracle Decks and Lenormand – What’s the Difference?

When pagans want to learn divination, especially cartomancy (cards), they are faced with hundreds (if not thousands) of choices.

It can be overwhelming, I know! Here’s a broad overview to help get you started.

Tarot consists of 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana, 40 Minor Arcana and 16 Court Cards. It’s become a complex, esoteric system of cartomancy. The Major Arcana contains familiar images like The Fool, The Lovers, The Wheel of Fortune and The Sun. They are considered by most to be the “big picture” cards spanning universal archetypes.

The most recognized Tarot deck is the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS). Rider refers to the publisher (Rider & Son). Occultist Arthur Edward Waite commissioned the deck that Pamela Colman Smith illustrated. The Tarot de Marseilles (TdM) style decks feature static Minor Arcana cards (i.e. 4 of Cups shows four actual cups, 10 of 

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 “All other things being equal, consult divination.”

—Stefanos Elafeos

Pagans take divination seriously.

Some people's gods speak to them through the medium of holy books, but we are not a people of the book. For us, divination is one of the important ways in which the gods speak to us. Therefore it behooves us to think long and hard about the ethics of divining.

In our day, no one has done this as well or as thoroughly as Elisheva Nesher (1949-2023), late shofet (chieftain) of AMHA, the Primitive Hebrew Assembly. If you practice any form of divination, the discussion of ethics in her 2015 book Lot Casting: Divination of the Hebrew Tribes will richly repay your study.

Here follows a bare-bones selection of some of the points that she makes, in much abbreviated form. (I leave out some points specific to AMHA.) For a fuller discussion, please refer to the original.

Always remember that divination is by nature interpretative rather than predictive. For the ancestors, the purpose of divination was never to know what will happen, but rather to know the will of the god consulted pertaining to any given issue.

 

The Ethics of Divination

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Scrying Mirrors and Crystal Balls

Scrying is the art of divining by looking into an appropriate surface. It could be water, a mirror on the wall, a crystal ball, or a slap of rock. For that matter, some people are quite talented at seeing visions in the flames of fire or in the bottom of a teacup. Smooth, natural surfaces are much better and less distracting, however. 

I like to think that a chunk of shiny black obsidian was the first scrying mirror. We know the ancients had special prophets and priestesses who engaged in foretelling the future, and they were making and using tools of their trade from various crystals at hand. No doubt they would be delighted to know we are still using crystal balls made from translucent quartz and mysterious volcanic obsidian! I cleanse mine before and after each use with rainwater that has set through at least one day of sun and one night of moonlight, but rituals can get as elaborate as you want! 

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Palamedes, knucklebones and virtual dice rollers | Original D&D Discussion

A True Story

 

The priests of a certain sanctuary wished to build a shrine on a particular piece of land. Accordingly, they summoned a diviner to take omens for the project.

“Build elsewhere,” said the omens. “Build here, and in five years' time, there will be no shrine.”

Now, the priest-kind misliked this divination, for the site was indeed a choice one. They brought in a second diviner who, as you will not be surprised to hear, soon found omens more to their liking.

Without even offering sacrifices of propitiation, as one might expect, the priests soon oversaw the building of a fine shrine in the chosen location.

Five years later, this shrine was destroyed by a flood.

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I remember reading that the Romans were known for rejecting omens they didn't agree with. And making terrible mistakes when they d

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