Occult author Jason Miller has said that if he had to keep a single thing from his esoteric practice, while giving up everything else, he would keep meditation. While I appreciate meditation and have seen notable benefits from it, if posed the same question the one practice I would keep would instead be divination. What is divination, and why do I consider it so foundational?
Divination is the use of occult methods to gain insight on a particular question or topic. The word derives from the Latin divinare – to predict, prophecy, foresee, or foretell.1 It uses a variety of methods: omens, astrology, skrying, or the reading of cards, runes, bones, or other symbols. At its core, divination is an exercise in meaning-making; it arises from the interplay between chaotic chance and human interpretation, rather than from any power innate in the divination system itself. The runes or cards don’t have some implicit magic allowing them to foretell the future.2 With practice, one can draw equally insightful answers from any divination method, even one entirely made up: augury with the insides of smashed pumpkins, or sortilege by the casting of tiddlywinks.
Before going further, it’s worth drawing a distinction between divination and fortune-telling. Fortune-telling assumes there is one future path, fixed and fated, and predicts that path. If something is foretold by the fortune-teller it must come to pass – a frequent trope in dramatic tragedies where attempting to avert a prophecy is the very thing that ultimately leads it to be fulfilled. The interplay of fate and free will deserves its own post, but suffice it to say I would never have become a magician if I believed that every outcome in my life was fated in advance.
In contrast to fortune-telling, divination is about reading probabilities. While it can indicate likely future outcomes based on your current trajectory, nothing is set in stone. A good divination gives you enough information to avoid undesirable outcomes or reorient yourself towards favorable ones. If you had no agency to control your own path, what would be the point?
And this is part of why I find divination to be so valuable. It provides a map that can help you navigate unfamiliar territory. Perhaps not the whole picture, but at least some notes in the blank areas indicating “here there be dragons.” Think about it in terms of superpowers: if you got to choose a single superpower for yourself, prescience would be pretty hard to top.
Sam Block (a.k.a. Polyphanes of the Digital Ambler) has a wonderful analogy on magic and divination.3 He likens life to standing in a river, with things floating down the river toward you – sometimes treasures and sometimes trash. Magic gives you a pole you can use to try to influence the path of things coming downstream – fending off the trash or scooping the treasures a little closer to where you stand. In contrast, divination gives you a better understanding of the river’s currents so you can position yourself such that things float directly to (or away from) you.
I began working with divination from the moment I started studying magic seriously. Divination is one of the three foundational pillars of practice proposed by John Michael Greer, and his book Learning Ritual Magic provides a variety of exercises for becoming fluent with the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot.4 I quickly discovered a whole range of benefits to studying divination.
The most immediate benefit I found was that divination works. As someone still trying to figure out if I believed in magic, and whether I wanted to invest time into it, divination was a very concrete way of reinforcing the idea that there was something real to be explored. Anyone who has spent any amount of time working with divination will have had experiences that are hard to dismiss as random chance: readings that are borne out exactly by real-world events or cards that turn up again and again in similar positions. Divination is spooky, in the best possible way.
The second major benefit of divination is that it helps guide the synthesis of a personal esoteric practice. Magic is a field that most of modern society is quick to dismiss, so it attracts many people who are happy to believe in all sorts of things. There is a tremendous amount of bad information mixed in with the good. Even among the good, we live in an era of information overload. There are myriad resources on different paths, traditions, grimoires, and entities. With all this information to work with, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Where does one start? Which path is best for you? What would happen if you combined prayer A and ritual B? What about using the procedure from one grimoire to conjure a being from another? Divination can help answer all of these questions, and serve as a guide when navigating a complex and uncertain landscape.
And that guidance is by no means limited to the occult. Divination is also an excellent tool for navigating life more broadly. It can help answer questions about the root causes of current situations and identify the underlying core which may not have been obvious from surface observation. It can help foresee likely future outcomes based on a particular course of action, flagging potential benefits or pitfalls arising from a given choice. It can help with wayfinding – laying out steps or actions to navigate from the current reality to some desired future state.
Finally, divination can function as an occult telephone. I mentioned previously that I don’t have much natural psychic sensitivity; I’m not prone to visions, have difficulty with skrying, and can struggle to communicate with spiritual entities. Rather than asking general questions of fate or the universe, divination can be directed towards specific spirits or deities you’ve invoked, giving them a more concrete method to communicate with the magician. Even for practitioners who are more open to organic spirit communication, information gained through personal gnosis can be confirmed or refined with divination.
Given the incredible versatility of divination, it is one of the esoteric tools I find myself returning to over and over again. If someone is looking to begin their journey into the realm of magic, learning and becoming comfortable with a good divination system is one of the very first steps I recommend.
- Harper, D. (Ed.). (n.d.). Divine (adj.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved October 9, 2024, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/divine#etymonline_v_11549 ↩︎
- At least insofar as divination is concerned. They are sophisticated and thoroughly-explored symbolic alphabets, which gives them power when integrated into magical practice, but that is not required for effective divination. ↩︎
- Eth, A. (Host). (2019, April 14). #047 – Geomancy, Grimoires & Goals with Sam Block [Audio podcast episode]. In Glitch Bottle. https://www.glitchbottle.com/podcast/2019/4/24/047-geomancy-grimoires-amp-goals-with-sam-block-glitch-bottle ↩︎
- Greer’s other two foundational pillars of practice being meditation and ritual. He posits that any magical curriculum that involves regular engagement with all three pillars will result in effective magical development. ↩︎
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