Bibliomancy: divination with books As a writer, I have often gone through periods of writer’s block. Some periods have been worse than other periods. Sometimes I all am able to do is a few lines – maybe an entire paragraph – in my daily journal. Sometimes it’s just jottings in the little notebook I carry with me everywhere I go. But sometimes I cannot produce anything at all. No poetry, no prose, no song, no dance. The merest email is like pulling teeth. Last month, I wrote about the I-Ching and the only reason I wrote about this subject was because, unable to come up with any ideas at all,…

The I-Ching Way back in 1985, I found a small paperback at a used book sale – perhaps I spent a whole quarter on it. It was I-Ching: The Book of Change, translated and edited by John Blofeld and I remember being really excited to get this book. This was before I even had a Tarot deck or knew much about numerology or anything, really. It was one of the first books of its kind I ever owned. It was originally published in Britain in 1965 and it was very scholarly in tone and attitude. In 1985, I wasn’t scholarly in any sense of the word, and I skipped over…

Divining by Playing Cards       As the sun gains strength moving toward Imbolc, the increased light shows all the dust and dirt that hid within the shadows of Yule’s darkness and it is time to clean.  Mercury’s retrograde provides perfect opportunity to reorganize our closets and our drawers, getting rid of what no longer services us and finding ways to recycle old things into new.  After a day of cleaning, quiet time with a cup of herbal tea and a fragrant candle can be productive while re-reading one’s Book of Shadows.  Mine started as a small notebook and is now divided into three giant loose-leaf notebooks.  Last night,…

Molybdomancy: The art of Divining with Metal and Water   I have to admit, this is a new one on me.  A half an hour before this very moment – as I sit here at my dining room desk, eating a Yuletide cookie and sipping a cup of Constant Comment Tea – I had never heard of Molybdomancy.  Not that I pretend to know everything about divination – I know very little, really.  I am just a novice in the subject.  Every day I learn something new.   I was thinking of end of the year rituals – the New Year’s resolutions that are common here in the States – customs…

Divining By Wish-Bone   In my kitchen, I have two baskets hanging over my stove with recipes jotted onto small pieces of paper & stuffed into them – Pâte Brisée and Pâte Sucré on one and Yummy Good Granola Bars on another – and on the smaller of the two baskets hang five wish-bones. Two from turkeys and three from chickens. The other day, my son was asking me about them. “Why don’t you break them and make a wish?” he inquired. “Isn’t it bad luck if you don’t use them?” I had never considered that. For years, I had done one turkey a year – at Thanksgiving – and…

Divining With Dice I have a small Crown Royal Bag that I carry with me everywhere I go. In it is a deck of Rider-Waite Tarot Cards, a white quartz crystal, a rosary and a set of dice. I have a folded piece of paper with seventeen divinatory meanings written on it – from two to eighteen – representing the various ways the dice can fall after being thrown. I copied these from Sasha Fenton’s The Fortune-Teller’s Workbook. Fenton calls this “The Simplest Method” and “the oldest method of reading dice.” (Fenton, 78) They follow along the basic lines of numerology – twos are partnership, fives are strife, tens are…

A Wonderful Book About divination For the past few months, I have been busy transcribing my diaries. I have the years 1978 to 1989 completely typed and saved electronically, and I am currently working on 1990. I also have 1996 and 1999 done, as well as parts of 1993. I plan to change the names and some of the pertinent details and make it into a novel, while keeping it in a diary form. The years 1987 and 1988 were the start of a spiritual journey. Being of a bookish nature, I searched through libraries and book stores to find all the books I could on women’s spirituality, astrology, the…

Itchy Palms: Money In, Money Out When I was nineteen years old, I got my first “real” job. I had worked, like all kids do, at babysitting and yard work, and I had done a little sales. But I had never worked a full-time job, Monday to Friday, forty hours a week. Just looking for work was almost a full-time job. The summer of 1979 was my punk rock summer – I had self-butched hair and wore too much black eye-liner and I looked like a fraud in office clothes. Eventually though, I landed a job at a coffee company. They must have been really desperate to find help, because…

Reading Tea Leaves   My grandmother, my mother’s mother, read tea leaves.  She was a devout Roman Catholic, but she knew all kinds of ways of telling the future, from tasseography to nature’s omens to playing cards.  Gramma was also a wealth of common-sense sayings. Tea-leaf reading was a kitchen event; a woman activity.  She would make a pot of tea, and pour out cups for each of us and tell us each to think of a question – something that we might have been praying for.  She explained that the tea leaves often told us what Jesus and Mary and the holy saints had in store for us.  She…

Divining the Weather: Will Winter This Year be Kind or Cruel?   There has been an ongoing argument among some of my Facebook friends about the Banded Wooly Caterpillar and if this animal really can predict the weather of the winter to come.  A Wooly Caterpillar is black with a middle band that is brown or tannish.  If the brown band is narrow, the coming winter will be harsh.  Naturally, if the band is wide, it will be a mild winter.  I have to admit I have never seen any of these caterpillars, so I cannot comment on whether these animals actually do predict the weather.  But having been watching…