Divination

After over 25 years of experience practicing multiple forms of divination, I can say there's always something new for me to learn. Not just that the readings still surprise me (though that is true), but that there are always things for me to learn about different types of divination.

I stuck with only tarot cards for a long time. It used to not be as common as it is now. There are a lot of people who don't read cards but, upon finding out I do, will tell me there is someone close to them who does. A roommate, a sibling, a friend at work...someone. I remember when it was necessary to know somebody who knew somebody who could tell you where to buy a deck, and if it was okay to tell someone I could read cards it would almost guarantee they would ask for a reading. "I've never had my cards read. Do we need to do it at night or something?"

Oracle cards weren't one of my tools for a long time. In fact, I've only really started working with them frequently in the past few years. Some of this was divination elitism on my part. I saw oracle cards as being "simple" because they didn't have a system like tarot and many of the available decks seemed too "only good vibes" for me. I had spent years studying tarot, and more years learning how to communicate what the cards were actually saying to someone who didn't already understand them and thought The Devil card meant Satan was out to get them. But anyone could pick up an oracle deck that was all pictures of friendly angels and, five minutes later, start giving readings that were New Age pep talks.

Time passes, more decks became available, and I matured as a reader. I don't have as many oracle decks as I do tarot decks, but I find myself working with my favorite ones more often than tarot these days. I've developed a sense of when one is more appropriate than the other for a particular situation.

In between my first tarot deck and actually working with oracle cards, there's a lot. Runes, tea leaves, bones, playing cards, dice, Lenormand...a lot. Some of the the things I've learned aren't things I practice, but other things will sometimes get the reaction, "You can do that, too? I thought you only did tarot!"

Even so...well, charm casting? Sometimes it's called junk oracle, or magpie oracle. It's a lot like osteomancy or lithomancy, but the pieces are things like charms from jewelry and small items. I was making the same mistake I had once made about tarot cards versus oracle cards. I felt like it couldn't be a real divination tell if it was just something from a kitchen drawer or old jewelry box. I admit it's only been recently that I've started putting together my own set for this. I had to spend some time thinking about how divination worked before there was so much commercialization.

What does this have to do with Lovecraft or Yog-Sothothery? It's easy to mistake things in his stories as being what he believed. That's just a common thing that happens when readers don't know what a fiction author really believes. We have access to enough of the letters Lovecraft wrote to his friends who were also writers, though, to know he often thought it was funny when readers made inaccurate assumptions about him based on his stories. Still, I don't think Lovecraft was any better than most people at seeing how even things you don't believe can be connected to things you do believe.

I remember reading something one time about him not believing in any kind of divination. Not even things it was common for people to believe in, like astrology. He was a little disappointed when he'd find out someone who saw as well educated did believe in it, but not really surprised. But we also know a lot of his racist views do seem to have influenced how he described cultists in his stories, and one is more likely to find a description of osteomancy or some other form of divination that is not tarot or astrology being practiced by the cultists in those stories. His characters are too horrified by what they see to describe such things in anything other than vague terms. Yes, that may have been something he chose to do in order to create a certain mood in the stories. It doesn't mean he never knew the details of those things himself. What I'm looking at isn't so much how things were described, but which things it was his characters were so horrified by.

While Lovecraft didn't believe in divination, it's still possible that he had a little more respect for forms that were set systems that required specific tools and education. Charm casting - or similar practices that charm casting has evolved from, such as osteomancy - probably wouldn't even have been practiced by his characters who were well educated, came from influential families, and had been lured into the cults by promises of power. No, that would have been for the characters who fall into the category of "those people and their neighborhoods where people from decent backgrounds don't belong".

This is a form of divination that requires trusting one's own intuition. Depending on the practitioner, it may also involve communication with spirits. I started putting my charm set together because of work I'm doing in another area, but I think it will also go well with Yog-Sothothery. As much as I have intended to develop a system for astragalomancy that is specific to Yog-Sothothery, something keeps getting in the way or leading me to something else. Who knows...maybe Yog-Sothothery actually opened me up to charm casting.