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I was reading some “locutions” purportedly spoken by the Virgin Mary to a visionary in Medjugorje, Bosnia, when I noticed something interesting.

Not a single one of these “messages” sounded even remotely like something one would expect a 1^st century Palestinian Jewish woman to say.

“From today,” she supposedly told seer Yakov Colo, “I will not be appearing to you every day, but only on Christmas, the birthday of my son” (375).

Well, there's a 1 in 365 chance that the historical Jesus was born on December 25. I suppose that if anyone could tell you when he actually was born, it would be his mother.

Assuming, of course, that it really was her you were speaking with in the first place.

One of my great loves is to create spreads for Tarot. This one can be used with any oracle deck. I think it would be fun to try it with Lisa Hunt's gorgeous Winged Enchantment Oracle. I created this spread about nine years ago while living in Colorado.

Who wants to win a Mini Silver Boyer Charming Oracle? It comes in a sparkly snowflake bag and includes twenty silver charms (it was one of my beta sets I used to test our oracle).

You may have saw me mention our shiny charms and how they can be used for meditation, ritual, vision boards, altars, creative writing and divination. Now, you can have a chance to win a mini-set to see how this particular tool can work for you.

Here's another wonderful deck currently crowdfunding: The Earthbound Oracle Deck by Amy Swartz. I own her Majors-only Wooden Tarot, and it's gorgeous. She paints on wood, and those images are then turned into cards. 

You can support Amy's latest project on Kickstarter at this link (I did).

In his brilliant comic novel, The Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass), Lucius Apuleius (ca. 124-ca. 170 CE) spies on a witch getting ready for her evening jaunt. She schmeers herself with ointment, turns into an owl, and flies off. Apuleius thinks this looks like fun, and tries the ointment himself.

Silly cowan.

He's transformed (you can't say he didn't deserve it) into a jackass. In this form he is bought by some galli, the itinerant priests of the Syrian Goddess who, whenever they're not taking up collections or screwing as many guys as they can manage to wrap their legs around, tour the countryside going into trances and giving fake oracles.

Eventually the galli get tired of having to come up with new oracles all the time, so they hit on a solution: the foolproof answer to all questions.

Yoke the oxen, plow the land:

tall the golden grain will stand.

I'm always on the lookout for symbols, stringing them together like mystical pearls--or, perhaps, like magical mala beads inscribed with sacred prayers, spiritual insight and everyday wisdom--begging for me to decode and apply their particular meaning for my life. 

If you think about it, everything we tell ourselves is a story--including the way we decode symbols.