Getting in the Mood
and Getting Ready to Read
The key to divination is simply learning another way to listen. And just as when we listen to a friend talking, we have to listen to not just what’s in front of us—the literal words—but also the context and unconscious communications that friend offers.
For example, if you’re speaking with a friend who says “that’s a nice car,” you might decode the words literally: “I approve of an automobile that is nearby but not so close that I can touch it.” Then you might notice that your friend has quirked one side of his mouth downward, and nodded his head to the side. You look to the side where your friend has gestured and see a beat-up old Pinto. You know that Pintos, even in their heyday, were not regarded as “nice,” so you can modify your original interpretation to mean “look at that silly car; I can’t believe anyone is driving it.”
In this example, the literal meaning carried just the words “that’s a nice car,” and if that’s all we had listened to, we’d have the wrong message. The nonverbal message consisted of a facial expression indicating derision, and a gesture directing where to look. The context indicated the car itself and your previous knowledge of that make and model. Without being aware of all of this, you cannot understand the full content of the message. The whole process is complicated by noise in the environment, as well.
In divination, the literal meaning is held in the system of divination itself—the meanings of the tarot or Lenormand cards. The nonverbal meaning consists of your insights and intuitions about how those meanings relate to the question. And the context is the querent’s life situation, usually understood through the question but sometimes through conversation, as well as the cards that fall around the card you are reading. When any one of these channels of meaning is blocked, divination becomes more difficult. If a querent refuses to give you the question, a skilled reader knows that divination is still possible—but somewhat more difficult. Similarly, if you just read the meanings of the cards out of a book and do not employ intuition, you may end up with a somewhat satisfactory divination, but with much extraneous and useless material, and you may miss some of the more subtle connections. One might argue that psychic readers who just hold a querent’s hand and answer questions are foregoing the entire literal meaning laid out by the symbols on the cards, but I’ve known some reputable psychic readers and they admit that symbolic images arise in their minds, which they read much as one might read the cards.12 A reader might even build up a vocabulary of such things over time, knowing that a child with a ball, for example, indicates playfulness and not a literal child.
Noise is pollution of the channels with irrelevant messages, like when you’re trying to talk to a friend in a public place and keep overhearing snatches of other people’s conversation. Overall, noise can never be eliminated, just reduced. If reduced sufficiently, then communication can occur. In divination, reducing some kinds of noise is easy: make sure nothing influences the randomness of your divination system (cards aren’t stuck together, or missing) and define a careful question (which I will cover later). But we also sometimes have noise in our minds, which can interfere with our reading. Fortunately, eliminating this noise is also simple, but requires some meditational skills that most people rarely consciously learn.
The goal in meditation is not, contrary to what a lot of people say, to quiet the mind. A perfectly quiet mind would contain no messages at all. The goal is simply not to hold on to the mind as it runs around. If you’re trying to listen to a friend in a coffee shop where lots of people are talking, you don’t stand up and shout at everyone to shut up over and over. You learn to tune them out and let your friend’s voice be the thing you concentrate on. In the case of divinatory listening, the annoying guy on his cell phone, the screaming child, the giggling teenagers are your conscious, everyday thoughts. One easy way to learn to shut them out (if not up) is as follows:
1. Start with the fourfold breath (inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, repeat). If your body is tense or in pain, you will probably not be calm enough to hear your thoughts, and the first step to listening is hearing. If, as you relax, pain arises in your muscles, just allow it to arise. It’s probably the release of tension that you’re feeling, and if you just remain unafraid and allow yourself to notice the soreness of the tension that you hold throughout your day, it usually goes away. Don’t be afraid that your body will come apart if you relax it; on the contrary, it’ll fit together much better if you’re not trying to hold it in by grim determination and stress alone.
2. Once you are relaxed, turn your attention to your thoughts. Let them arise without trying to control their speed, content, or number. Just look at each in turn briefly and identify it as a thought.
3. Do not judge a thought, either good or bad. Just look at it briefly, acknowledge it, and return to concentrating on your breath.
4. Another thought will arise, and another. Keep doing this for as long as you can—most teachers recommend a half hour or hour, but even five minutes a day is good practice.
5. The breakthrough is when you realize that your breath is just as interesting, if not more so, than any thought you might have.
The practice of this kind of meditation will inevitably make you calmer. You learn to see all your thoughts as contingent and largely unimportant. Or, at least, not worth clinging to. You may still have important thoughts—I like to think that once or twice a year I have a good one—but you no longer feel that every single notion is something you must cling to and judge. And freedom from judgment about your thoughts helps you see the truth of a situation. Instead of succumbing to fears or dwelling in unreasonable hope, you can experience both and still see that neither proves anything. Even without divination, this detachment can be useful.
The state of consciousness we achieve when we begin to divine is not rare or unusual. The Greeks called it ekstasis, “standing outside.” It reflected the belief that this kind of trance let us step out of our bodies and gain perspective on reality. This kind of ecstasy is not something unusual; it’s actually a common state of consciousness. Artists and creative people know it as “the zone” or a state of “flow,” where ideas come easily and fit together intuitively. Most artists and writers know, however, that the best way to induce this state is to begin the creative activity. A writer may write for twenty or thirty minutes before entering a state of flow, and therefore writers often begin writing even before they’re sure what they want to say.
Similarly, divination systems themselves help us to begin reading even before we achieve this necessary state of consciousness. We can help our minds get into the intuitive flow of consciousness by relaxing and letting go of our thoughts as described above. Eventually, you will be well-trained enough to fall into the state of divinatory consciousness just by shuffling the cards. It doesn’t hurt, however, to have some additional quick tricks.
Movement can be meditation. Rhythmic rocking or even trembling can induce trance and maintain it, as Jan Fries explains in his excellent book Seidways.13 Querents tend to be put off by rocking and trembling, unless they themselves practice magic. Still, when reading for yourself it’s sometimes helpful to block out external stimulus and focus on the cards. I prefer a relatively slow—not headbanging but fast enough to be effective—rock back and forth, much like the movements of traditional Jews during davening prayer. It insulates me from external influences and focuses me on the cards.
Don’t fear silence. This tip is an important one. Sometimes, especially when reading for a querent, we feel pressured to keep up a fluent stream of speech. Especially in American culture, we think that silence in social settings is a sign of a problem, and so we try to fill silence. However, divination is a kind of listening, and you cannot listen to someone while you talk nonstop to someone else. Don’t fear long silences and don’t try to fill the silence with speech just for the sake of saying something.
At the same time, don’t fear speaking. This tip has two corollaries. First, don’t be afraid to be wrong. If you see something and you’re pretty sure it’s there, tell the querent, and if they tell you are wrong, accept it (at least, outwardly—in my experience, querents do sometimes lie and then come back later and confess that I was right the first time). Also don’t be afraid to give bad news, if you can do so with tact. Make sure you offer alternative interpretations if those are available. Better, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Couching the bad news in the form of a question gives the querent more power and agency and emphasizes that divination is not destiny. The second corollary is that when reading for oneself, one should not be afraid to talk aloud. For years I couldn’t figure out why I could read so much better for strangers than myself, then I realized that the only real difference was that I was talking aloud to strangers and not to myself. If we mean to translate one set of symbols to another, it helps to do so aloud. Even when I take notes on a reading, I now talk to myself. I figure, I do it in elevators and in my office, why not while divining?
Ritual. Ritual can also connect us to the source of divinatory wisdom. I frequently run into misconceptions about ritual. Usually the misconception is that ritual is a crutch or a stopgap, or even inherently harmful or distracting from what is important. Sometimes people say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual” to mean “I don’t do rituals, but I still have spiritual beliefs.” In reality, everyone does rituals—countless rituals every single day. For example, the phrase “good morning” is a ritual. So is shaking hands, and at least part of your morning routine. Without ritual, living in society would be a challenge. Rituals reach out and link us to others. Pragmatically, the ritual phrase “how are you” means “I’m listening to you.”
Part of the problem is a second misconception many people have about ritual, and that is that it involves robes, candles, expensive items, long incantations, and so on—and it can. But rituals can also be simple. The only real requirement of a ritual is that it be a repeated symbolic action.
I’ve written elsewhere about the way that a magician approaches ritual, so I’ll just mention briefly that, while we might say, “Hello, how are you” or shake hands without giving it much thought, the magician approaches ritual mindfully. Even the simplest of rituals must be approached through all the senses. After all, as Giordano Bruno says in his treatise on mathematical magic:
The animal ascends by the soul to the senses, by the senses into composite things, by the composite things into the elements, by the elements into the heavens, by these into demons or angels, by these into God or divine grace.14
We begin, as animal or ensouled beings, to ascend with our rational souls, which engage the mixture of elements in the senses, and thus aspire to heaven.
Many diviners begin with prayer, either to one god or a particular deity of the divination. Israel Regardie suggests beginning tarot divinations with:
I invoke thee, IAO, that thou wilt send HRU, the great angel that is set over the operations of this Secret Wisdom, to lay his hand invisibly upon these consecrated cards of art, that thereby we may obtain true knowledge of hidden things, to the glory of thine ineffable Name. Amen.15
Others prefer a more freeform prayer to the god of their choice. But ultimately, the prayer serves the purpose of announcing the diviner’s desire to communicate. It is the “hello, how are you” of divination. The word “invoke” comes ultimately from the Latin verb vocare, meaning “to call.” Beginning with an invocation of this nature calls out not only our intention to communicate, but also establishes as an act of faith that there is something to communicate with.
Ritual also includes actions, usually involving the medium of divination itself. There are enough rituals surrounding the tarot that you can take your pick. Some of those rituals are useful, such as the tradition of not allowing others to borrow the cards. It’s important to maintain a sense of ownership. On the other hand, other rituals can hinder the effective use of the tarot, such as the superstition that one should never buy one’s own tarot deck. The best rituals connect us with our method of divination, not separate us from it or throw up barriers between us and it.
The ritual I use for the tarot is a simple one. I mutter a prayer and then go through the cards one at a time, spending just a portion of a second on each. I make sure, however, to look at each and every card long enough to see its imagery. Ritual involves the senses, and so I activate each of the senses in turn. This procedure also has the benefit of giving me a chance to turn each card right-side-up if it isn’t already. It also tunes me to the set of images that make up the symbol system of the tarot.
A longer, more elaborate ritual may be worthwhile at times, especially when you need to make an effort to get into a state of divinatory consciousness, perhaps because you have a lot of personal investment in the outcome of the question. Some readers set up special areas or tables, face certain directions, and so on—all worthwhile if you can afford the space.
For hints on creating rituals to connect us to the Anima Mundi, we can look back to the past.
One of the earliest forms of documented divination was haruspicy, the reading of an animal’s internal organs. There is evidence that haruspicy began among the Babylonians, spread to the Etruscans, and then to the Romans. In all cases, although the symbol systems differed to some degree, the ritual remained similar: a priest cut open a sacrificial animal and examined its liver. It’s easy to suppose that this was part of a simple quality control, first, and then later designed to communicate with the gods. However, it’s also easy to imagine making the step between offering food to the gods—and sharing in it—in a ritual fashion, and speaking to the gods. In other words, haruspicy bridges communion and communication.
In this case, the ritual involved a traditional Roman sacrifice: the animal had to come to the altar willingly, was often sprinkled with wine or mead, and—after prayers—was killed quickly and relatively humanely. The haruspex (priest) then examined the entrails, both to determine if the sacrifice was acceptable and to check for signs of disease. The animal was roasted and then shared in a sort of large communal barbecue. Some of us may be a bit squeamish about this, but the typical Roman ate mostly meat sanctified in this manner.
Nearly every other form of divination, from observation of birds to the incubation of dreams, practiced by ancient Romans and Greeks involved a sacrifice and a prayer. In light of this ritual outline, we can create a ritual of any complexity we desire: first, the offering establishes mutual obligation between human and divine intelligence. Then, the human offers an act of communication. The sense of mutual obligation created by the gift assures a response. We don’t need to slaughter animals to achieve this same dynamic system. For one thing, it’ll get our cards all messy. But we can put on a bit of incense, pour out a small offering, or light a candle—rituals of sacrifice that anyone of any religious persuasion can do without making the living room an abattoir.
A ritual can be simple, but picking up a system of divination—even just listening to your body—isn’t taking out the trash. It’s an act that deserves full attention. In fact, it is an act of attention: attention to the patterns that make up our lives. Ritual can help us listen to those patterns more carefully.
No matter what means we use, it’s important to begin by becoming ready to listen—by silencing the noise in our minds and in our environment, and attending to the subtler messages of the cards.
12. This does not imply that this is the only legitimate way that such readers can read a person. I’m not making the claim that I have any idea how such things work, and since fakes widely outnumber legitimate readers, figuring it out is well beyond my limited patience.
13. Jan Fries, Seidways: Shaking, Swaying, and Serpent Mysteries (Oxford: Mandrake, 2009).
14. Giordano Bruno, De Magia Mathematica, http://www.esotericarchives.com/bruno/magiamat.htm (accessed August 13, 2010). Digital edition copyright 1999 by Joseph Peterson. My translation.
15. Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1989), 566-567.