Preparing to Tell the Story
Reading the tarot and reading the Petit Lenormand are similar activities. Create a question, select cards, lay them out, and make up a story. The details may differ, but that is always the basic outline of the procedure.
The questions most suited to divination are those that uncover meaning rather than data—that put together stories that relate to the readers rather than give them disconnected bits of information. So if a querent asks who stole their lunch at work, you as a reader should recognize first that this is a convergent question, one asking for a single datum, but that there is a story behind it. Most readers would simply lay out the cards and offer a description of the thief, which may or may not work if the querent does the hard work of creating meaning himself or herself. The diviner, however, might go a bit further and ask some questions designed to elicit meaning and revise the querent’s original question. First, the diviner should question the presupposition. “Why do you imagine someone stole the lunch rather than other possibilities?” While the querent explains, the diviner needs to watch for emotional connections and try to understand the network of meanings surrounding work. Let’s imagine this scenario:
Q: Who stole my lunch at work? Initial question seeking data.
D: Why do you think the lunch was stolen? Question encouraging querent to create context.
Q: I didn’t eat it, and it went missing. Still a data-based answer.
D: How often do people at work steal from other workers? Resisting the urge to question the querent’s interpretation of events, the diviner seeks context. The diviner frames the question in specific, meaning-constructing terms rather than as a yes/no question.
Q: All the time, with me! The diviner notices that the querent seems both angry and sad.
D: You seem angry and sad. Reflecting the querent’s apparent emotions helps the querent introspect and feel safe.
Q: I am. I mean, why does no one respect me at work? The querent has moved from a convergent question to a divergent one—from one that seeks a simple answer to one that creates meaning and has many potential answers.
D: I don’t know. Let’s ask the cards why it seems no one respects you at work. The diviner refines the question a bit to include the possibility that the querent is imagining the disrespect, but otherwise goes with the querent’s question.
A psychologist confronting the same question would approach it differently. But a diviner isn’t a psychologist and shouldn’t try to be one. (If you’re going to read for a living, it’s a good idea to make up some cards with emergency numbers on them, including professional psychologists and the like whom you can recommend.) The goal for the diviner is to help the querent arrive at the real question that matters.
During the mercifully short time that I gave readings for money, it always amazed me when people would go to the trouble of finding me (I didn’t advertise), scheduling a reading, and paying the fifty bucks, and then have no idea what they wanted to know. “Do you have a question?” I’d ask. “Um, I don’t know.”
I quickly learned that what they meant wasn’t that they had no question, but that they genuinely didn’t know how to formulate the question. First, they weren’t sure if I’d think their question was worthy; they were afraid that this dorky young man at his kitchen table was going to criticize their life choices. Second, they simply didn’t know what kind of questions the tarot could answer. Sometimes they’d say, “I have a question, but do I have to tell you?” I’d tell them that I could divine their answer but it would be easier and clearer if I knew the question, and even if they didn’t tell me, I’d find out the question during the process of divination. Often, they’d start with their question a secret, and halfway through the reading they’d reveal it themselves, usually by visibly steeling themselves for the imagined embarrassment to come, then blurting it out.
Other times, querents would come with questions and it would become obvious about a third of the way into the reading that they really wanted to know something else. Again, there were emotional barriers preventing them from admitting, perhaps even to themselves, what they wanted to know. But at other times, they simply wouldn’t know how to ask a question.
No question that drives someone to seek out a tarot card reading and pay a significant amount of money is inappropriate. But sometimes querents are not ready to own their questions, and sometimes don’t know themselves what their questions really are. Knowing how to ask a question is itself an art, even in mundane settings. Professionals such as lawyers, teachers, and psychologists spend long hours in training to learn to ask questions. However, each of them learns a different kind of question. Lawyers focus on convergent questions, or questions that have clear, specific, factual answers: “Where were you on March 3?” Teachers mingle convergent questions with divergent questions, those without clear, factual answers, such as “why did the Civil War start?” And psychologists often focus on introspective questions: “Why do you believe that no one loves you?” So the type of question is tailored to the purpose. Lawyers wish to make the facts of a case clear to a jury. Teachers wish students to think about complex events. And psychologists want patients to learn to think about themselves in a more nuanced way.
What sorts of questions, then, are appropriate for divination? The main idea to keep in mind, and perhaps one of the most important ideas in this book, is this: Divination does not reveal data; it helps create meaning.
Data are the answers to convergent questions. A convergent question usually begins with “what,” “who,” or “where” or is a yes/no question, although not every yes/no question or question beginning with one of these words is convergent. All possible answers to a convergent question are data; a datum is a piece of information that can be observed to be factual or nonfactual. If you list out all possible answers to a convergent question, only one of them will be “right.” For example, “Who took my pudding?” I can make a list of everyone who might have taken my pudding:
John Smith took my pudding.
Susie Smith took my pudding.
John Jones took my pudding.
and so on. . . .
Ultimately, I would end up with a list of every single person on earth, and I could cross off people as I found out that they didn’t take my pudding. If my list was complete, I’d end up with a single name, the guilty party who took my pudding. Of course, no one answers convergent questions this way, but the principle is the same: of all items that could answer the question, only one is acceptable. These factual and exclusive answers are data.
Meaning is the way data fit together into a pattern. So I might ask “Why did John Jones take my pudding?” Now, there are multiple possible answers, and I would hard-pressed to provide a complete list of possibilities, let alone narrow it down to one observable and verifiable fact. The divergent questions that create meaning usually begin with “why” and “how,” although some yes/no questions also qualify, although those that do usually contain a “why” or a “how” within them. For example, “Am I ever going to make more than $40,000 a year?” This seems like a yes/no question, and thus is convergent, but in reality a querent asking you this really wants to know how to make that target income, and not whether or not he or she will. Answering this question, then, involves answering both the convergent part (yes) and also the unspoken divergent part (by doing such and such).
The trick is identifying what the querent is really asking, especially when the querent is asking a convergent question at first. A good reader will help the querent formulate a meaning-seeking rather than a data-seeking question. A meaning-seeking question may provide some data to the querent, but the important part, and the thing that divination excels at, is the creation of meaning. If a querent can come away saying “I understand” rather than “I know,” you have accomplished your job as a reader.
We don’t always have querents. Sometimes we read for ourselves, even though many readers (of tarot or of other methods of divination) find it difficult. First, there’s the issue of separating oneself from the desired outcome. It’s sometimes hard not to read our wishful thinking—or just as often, if not more so—our worries into the symbols of the divination system. Second, no one is there to force us to formulate the question clearly when we read for ourselves. It is essential to work on the question before you do the divination, to move it toward a more meaning-centered rather than data-centered question.
The single best way to do this is to write the question. Do you resist this suggestion? Is your resistance growing out of the same emotional resistance as a querent who does not want to say his or her question aloud? If so, why do you have that emotional resistance? Look at why you don’t wish to own this question: probably, it’s a perfectly acceptable question and you don’t wish to own it because you don’t wish to accept the implication of any question—namely, that you do not know the answer. Asking is an admission of ignorance.
Ignorance isn’t a vice. It’s the necessary condition for knowledge: ignorance mingled with curiosity creates learning. If we were never ignorant, we could never learn and without learning we could never grow. Growth frightens people, because it involves rejecting some part of ourselves or admitting that something we once did or was no longer will work. Insofar as divination helps us overcome that initial fear of admitting ignorance, it encourages growth and positive change. If divination addressed data rather than meaning, it would never engage such fears. Few people are fearful of data, unless they can place that data into a meaningful structure.
Data in a meaningful structure is understanding. Once we understand something, we have gained some power over it. The word “comprehend,” a synonym of understanding, implies such overcoming in its etymology. It comes from roots meaning “to grasp or seize completely.” That doesn’t mean that understanding banishes fear. No one is afraid of mere data: the height of Kilimanjaro doesn’t matter to most people, one way or another, other than as a fact. However, if you have to climb it, suddenly that number might instill some apprehension. Interestingly, “comprehend” and “apprehend” both come from the same root: to seize something. When we seize the fact and place it into a meaningful structure, we comprehend it. When the meaningful structure seizes us, we are apprehensive.
Divination therefore doesn’t banish fear or cure all ills. It merely helps us make meaning from fact. This “merely” is large enough, though, to make divination worthwhile.
To say “divination is good at meaning, and not at uncovering data” might be seen as disingenuous. After all, it neatly answers the skeptic’s sneer that, if one can divine the future, why not simply divine the future lottery numbers and become rich. Or, more seriously, why not determine the timing of great national tragedies and disasters, and warn the applicable people. First, while it’s possible to divine such facts as lottery numbers, it’s possible only when those facts have been placed into a meaningful structure. For most people, winning the lottery isn’t real; it’s at best a dream or fantasy. Second, and more importantly, psychics do sometimes try to warn people of coming disasters. They’re rarely listened to.
Let me give you two instances. The first was during the Persian Gulf War of 1990. I was in high school at the time, and I was experimenting with divination in dreams. I also had family members involved in the war. One night in August shortly after the war started, I received a startling dream in which my mother shouted upstairs that my cousin, currently fighting in the Gulf, would be home on a particular day in March. At this point, most people expected the war to take some time, and when I mentioned to other people with family in the Gulf that the war would be over by March, they mostly did not believe me. I had to be easy to dismiss. I was a strange little kid, as you might well imagine.
My cousin earned my everlasting annoyance by missing his flight home and coming home on the day after I predicted. I still count this as a successful divination of fact, but the fact mattered to me. It wasn’t merely a date (and I forget the date, although I suppose I could dig it out of my magical diary of the time, if I could wade through the tedious teenage angst). It was a date placed into a system of knowledge.
The second is a date anyone should have been able to predict. But on September 10, 2001, all I knew is that I was having a bad day. Ten minutes before a class, my pants split. Right up the seat. I had to cancel class and go home to change. I only hoped that people would forget my humiliation.
The next day, a Tuesday, was a day off for me. I lazed around the house for the afternoon, then decided to walk down to the record shop and buy a new CD. I browsed for a good long while, half-listening to something that sounded like some experimental performance art, a fake news report of some kind. Finally, as I was checking out (and I still remember which CD I bought, as well as that I listened to it obsessively for weeks afterwards in a sort of fugue state), I asked the bearded guy behind the counter if that was real news, because the phrase “crashed an airplane into the Pentagon” had finally filtered through my oblivious consciousness.
I first heard of the 9/11 attacks from an aged hippy at a record store while buying a Butthole Surfers’ CD.
Now, why didn’t that fact appear in my dreams? Surely it would mean something to me, as it did to every American. Why didn’t I dream about that disaster? Perhaps because I was distracted by my bad day, or maybe for other reasons.
And yet, because of this event, I will never forget my trivial embarrassment, which otherwise probably would have faded into the past like every other silly thing I have no doubt done but since forgotten. I do remember that day because it has become anchored to an event of greater meaning. Similarly, as a man who likes music, I have bought many, many CDs. The only one I remember buying in all its detail is the one I bought that day. It is anchored, for better or worse, in that day of monumental and traumatic change.
I don’t tell the story above because it is amusing. I also am not making light, by any means, of what happened on September 11, 2001. People of the generation before mine used to say, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” And they remembered, because of that anchoring.
That’s the point: precognition works a bit like memory. Those things with anchors, with meaning, no matter how trivial they may seem to others, stay with us in our memory. Similarly, those things with anchors in the future are more likely to cast shadows back. September 11 has cast a long shadow over my and many other people’s memories. Why did it not cast a shadow back into the past?
Frankly, I don’t know. I suspect because I didn’t ask the right question. If my daily divination was “what will tomorrow hold for me?” I might see a day off, some shopping, and some sadness. I might wonder what the sadness was, but never find out that it was actually something much greater than my personal sadness, because I would never think to ask, “What will tomorrow hold for America?” Moreover, I have never been to New York. I had no anchors already in place until that attack occurred. But none of these explanations satisfy me, and probably don’t satisfy you. Still, perhaps we can keep thinking about it and maybe find a theory that fits eventually.
I venture that most of my readers do not remember the height of Kilimanjaro, even though almost everyone has probably, at one time or another, seen or heard of it. However, if any of them have climbed Kilimanjaro, or are mountain climbers, or interested in geography or geology, that number may roll out of their mind as easily as their phone number. I can recite lots of poetry from memory, not because of any innate talent or ability, but because I read a lot of it and it matters a great deal to me. It would be easy for a skeptic to say, “Sure, divination only works with stuff that matters, rather than easily verifiable data. That’s convenient.” But few skeptics say the same about memory. Surely memory would be easier to study if people would conveniently memorize numbers, but they don’t. They memorize what those numbers mean to them.
This link between memory and foreknowledge also helps explain the appeal of the tarot and Lenormand. Both decks feature images similar to those used in memory systems, especially medieval memory systems, in which one memorizes a series of images or ideas by rote, and then uses those as anchors for other, new ideas one wishes to learn. These anchor images were called loci. Perhaps the cards are the loci for the memory of the Anima Mundi.
In reading for yourself, you need to do the same thing as we did with the querent at the beginning of this chapter, but alone. Write out your question and work out what meaning you are seeking before even touching a divination system. For one thing, you may find you don’t really need to do a divination at all. But more importantly, you’ll find the real question that matters for you. Introspection is a bit harder than examining a querent in front of you, so I recommend a method called focusing, which isn’t a divination system itself, but is useful in divining.16
A full account of focusing would fill this book and then some, but in its simplest form, it’s asking your body to respond to ideas. For example, if you have a problem that requires divination, you can focus on the physical or quasiphysical sensations caused by contemplating that problem, and use them as a compass to point you to the question to divine on.
The process is simple:
1. Relax in a comfortable position, either sitting or lying down. There should be no particular strain on any part of your body, and you should loosen any tight clothing.
2. Hold the problem you wish to divine about in your mind. At this point, do not think of it as a question. Instead, let your mind scan your body until you find a bodily sensation that seems to correspond to the problem. This is easier to do than to describe.
3. Focus your attention on that bodily sensation. It may intensify at first. Ask it, “What are you?” Let answers arise and test each one by comparing the feeling to your description. If the feeling lessens or changes, you’ve hit on it. The descriptions may not make much conscious sense. It could be as simple as “are you anger?” or as complex as “are you the feeling of being abandoned in a dangerous place by people you trusted?” Be patient. There might an urge to find the “right” label early, but keep testing until you feel a definite and notable change in the feeling. That’s the right label.
4. Still focusing on the sensation, ask, “What sort of question would enlighten me on this problem?” Wait until a question arises and test it against the feeling. Again, if the feeling lessens or changes, you know you’ve hit upon a good question. If not, then keep trying.
5. It can help to write questions down and see them objectively; it can intensify that feeling of “rightness” or “fit” that comes.
Let’s imagine I wish to gain information about my financial situation. Perhaps I’m worried about it. First, I relax in my comfy chair, the unsung magical tool of all true wizards. Then I think about money and pay attention to my body. Perhaps I feel a sort of fluttering in my stomach. I focus on this and it intensifies a bit. “Are you fear?” I ask, and it does nothing as I hold it gently in my attention. “Are you anger, maybe that I’m not making enough money?” It does not react. “Are you excitement?” Suddenly, the fluttering sensation increases and darts upwards a bit toward my heart. I’m on the right track. “Are you excitement at the possibilities of using my money for something?” Again, the fluttering changes, this time to a comfortable warm feeling. I’ve found it. Now I ask, “What kind of question would best enlighten me in regards to my financial situation?” I make a few notes on a pad of paper while keeping my attention on the warm feeling. “Where can I find a source of new income?” Nothing. “Should I ask for a raise?” Nothing. “How can I best invest my savings to optimize their value?” Suddenly, the warm feeling spreads throughout my chest and face. I know I’ve hit on it. I always like to end a focusing session by thanking my body for being willing to communicate. Then I get up and prepare the divination.
Focusing ensures that you find questions that matter, because a good question matters both to your mind and your body. We have intellectual notions about what sorts of questions to ask, but in reality it’s the question that affects you—all of you—that has the best chance of being answered accurately. And perhaps I’d get the lottery numbers from my divination, but probably, just because of the nature of the financial world, I’d get other more useful advice. If I had sat down right away and asked either a vague question—“What am I going to do about my financial situation?”—or a specific but meaningless data question—“Will I be able to afford a new garage door?”—I’d probably not end up with as useful an answer as if I sought a truly meaningful question. After all, once I determine how to invest my savings, I can easily see what I’m going to do about my financial situation and if I can afford a new garage door.
Many diviners offer suggestions about appropriate questions, such as avoiding “should” questions, that are all good advice. But I think you’ll find that you naturally follow such advice by keeping in mind the principle that a question must be meaningful to both your mind and body. A “should” question usually arises from fear. Similarly, gossipy questions, which most readers won’t answer, really have at their root an uncertainty about the querent’s place in his or her social networks. Getting at these root questions is the true foundational skill of a good diviner, even more so than being able to read the symbols of his or her divination system.
Take out either your Lenormand deck or your tarot deck and shuffle it, asking, “What do I need to know in my exploration of the tarot and Lenormand?” Lay out the cards in a single row of three cards. Look carefully at what you’ve laid out: what card leaps out to you, without your necessarily realizing why? That card is salient. Push it up a little higher above the line of the other two cards. You’ve created a new pattern: a triangle, if it was the middle card, or a slope if it was one of the other two cards. What does that shape suggest to you in regards to your story about the cards? How do the other two cards fit into that story? Don’t even think about what the cards are supposed to mean: just try to link them into a story that relates to your experiences with the tarot and Lenormand.
In making this story, you are reading the cards. You are listening to what the Anima Mundi is telling you.
The real skill of any divination system isn’t manipulating cards. The real skill is to listen. And this listening occurs, as I’ve written before, in the divinatory state of consciousness, a relaxed state of calm and alertness similar to hypnosis or the “alpha state.” But what are we listening for? Two things: salience and story.
Salience is simply what sticks out. If you’re reading an astrological chart, it might be tempting just to cut and paste the paragraphs describing the various relationships between the planets, signs, and houses. I had such a computer program once. It’d calculate the chart and write up a seven- or eight-page report on the chart that was, essentially, gibberish. Where it wasn’t full of Barnum statements (statements that are true for nearly everyone, like “although you enjoy people, sometimes you would prefer to be alone”) it was full of downright contradictions. It’s no wonder then that skeptics scoff especially hard at astrology.
What the computer lacked was the ability to intuit salience. The skill of intuiting salience is universal throughout humanity, though. We do it every time we notice something out of place. If you’ve ever invited someone over, then glanced around and noticed how messy your house is, then you’ve made the empty pop cans, the papers, and dust salient. We do something similar with divination, but instead of inviting a coworker over for coffee, we notice salience because we’ve invited the Anima Mundi over to talk.
A tarot card reader has a lot of flexibility. For example, a reader using the Rider-Waite deck might draw the Moon when asked about a relationship. The obvious book-definition is “you’re being deceived,” which is nice and succinct and fair. But look for a moment at the card, and let your eye fall wherever it may. In that case, my eye falls on the rocks near the path. And I think of rocks as symbolic of obstacles, but the path goes on. Now, I can give more insight: “Deception is a real problem at this stage in your relationship, but it’s not too late to work through it.” Your eye might fall elsewhere on the card, leading to a different meaning.
In seeking salience in your readings, trust is paramount. Let your eye roam over the card or the spread until it “sticks,” and then trust that this sticking place is relevant to the reading. Work it in to your interpretation or ask the querent about it, but do not ignore it. Sometimes, these images will evoke other, related images in your mind. In that case, add those to the reading as well, using the overt meanings of the cards as guides but trusting the salience of what arises in your mind as you read.
The second element to effective divination, story, is the ability to link symbols together into narrative. Narrative is the way that we understand our experiences. We place them into a life story and give them meaning in context of the whole story. For example, certain restaurants are not just where I ate dinner a few times: they’re connected with the person I love and our story together. Similarly, the symbols on the tarot cards or the Lenormand cards are all parts of a story. Some are setting, some are plot, and some are characters. Telling which is which isn’t as difficult as it might seem.
Symbols of setting tell us where things are occurring. Sometimes you can simply assume that, and sometimes it’s determined by the place a card falls in a spread, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter. A lot of wands in a tarot reading or the presence of 14–Fox in the Lenormand probably mean that the setting is at work. A lot of cups or 4–House, at home. Pentacles often indicate places of business, education, and commerce (as does 19–House), or familial estates. Swords can be any unpleasant place, including any of the above.
Symbols of plot tell us conflicts and strategies for overcoming them. Swords are a natural for depicting conflicts and obstacles, but every card—even the “good” ones—can. After all, the Nine of Cups is a pretty positive card, but someone suddenly getting his or her heart’s desire is the plot of many a story—and it rarely ends well.
Finally, characters are those who act things out. Traditionally, the court cards depict characters involved in your story, but any card can in practice. The Magician might indicate someone skilled whom you consulted to help you out. The Seven of Swords might indicate someone who is too clever for his or her own good, and so on. In the Lenormand, those cards containing king and queen insets can also stand for people, as explained earlier.
All of this holds true for other divination systems as well, and keeping an intuitive eye out for characters, setting, and plot—or just trying to link the symbols together into a story—is really all that’s asked of a reader. Once you begin to link symbols across cards and find relationships in context, suddenly meanings multiply and you have a full language. Unlike natural languages, this symbolic language is the language of the unconscious, and the native tongue of the Anima Mundi and the individual Genius.
Magic and magical practices are real, and therefore have real effects. I believe that magic is beneficial and divination can help improve lives, but at the same time there are real dangers to any magical practice. These dangers rarely take the form of ravening demons or secret evil cults, which might be a disappointment to those of us who are fans of contemporary fantasy novels. But that doesn’t make them unreal.
The first and greatest danger is deception. Any magical operation designed to gather information can also be used to hide information or dissemble. A quick glance at the yellow pages will find pages of psychics in most large cities, and while some are legitimate, many have no particular interest in helping people. These psychics are the ones who will play to a querent’s desire to feel special, telling them that they are important in some cosmic sense and—inevitably—the target of some powerful evil that, fortunately, the psychic can avert. The psychic will charge grossly inflated prices for ordinary supplies, which have been “specially blessed.” Or, in one variation of the scam, the psychic will tell the querent that his or her money is cursed and must be cleansed in a complex ritual. The confidence artist instructs the querent to withdraw his or her money from the bank in cash, wrap it in a special cloth, and bury it or perform some other ritual that takes it out of sight for enough time for the artist to leave town. Through simple sleight of hand, the confidence artist has swapped the bundle of money for an identical one of cut newspaper. When the querent opens the bundle, he or she discovers that, indeed, the money was not so cursed that the confidence artist wouldn’t take it.
Cold reading, the practice of many fake psychics, is simple enough to learn and to avoid. It consists of making a large number of shotgun predictions, and elaborating on those that get a response. Since people have a tendency not to notice errors and to exaggerate the effectiveness of hits, a credulous querent can be taken in by a cold reading. Many television psychics, especially those claiming to speak to dead relatives, are actually practicing cold reading, made easier by their ability to edit out the misses and keep in the hits. One of the cues you are dealing with a cold reader is their ability to find facts that are essentially meaningless. Ironically, those readers who deal in easily identifiable data are more likely to be fake than real. After all, as I mentioned earlier, divination is better at creating meaning than finding specific, disconnected facts. Anyone who is finding those specific data about one’s life, especially the impressive trivial things that TV psychics specialize in, is probably finding them through other, more mundane, fraudulent means.
There’s also the moral danger of doing readings for others. It’s easy to fall into the trap of telling querents what they want to hear, just for the warm glow of approval. Giving good news feels good, even if it’s not true. On the flip side, you can always justify brutal honesty as a commitment to the truth, when it’s really just a streak of sadism. If you are going to learn to read for others, develop tact. It’s also important to be certain of your divination before you offer advice. And never offer medical or legal advice—American laws jealously protect those fields from encroachment.
The other danger of deception is that of self-deception. If it’s easy to tell a querent what he or she wants to hear, it’s even easier to tell yourself what you want to hear. And it’s also easy to be sadistic toward yourself, and confirm fears and worries over and over again. Both of these forms of self-deception arise when we use divination as a means of reassurance rather than information-gathering. Reassurance doesn’t sound so bad, but in reality it can be pernicious. Seeking reassurance, from the cards or even just from others, can actually reinforce worries and encourage procrastination. In divination, it runs counter to the entire purpose: to gain true answers.
You are using divination for reassurance if you ask the same question over and over again. Also, if you notice yourself rejecting or disliking a particular reading because it doesn’t match what you want it to say, you’re in danger of training your mind away from finding the truth. Similarly, if you find that all of your readings are gloomy and depressing, you may well need to put aside the divination system for a while and work on your own mind. Eventually, if you keep this up, you’ll train the Anima Mundi not to tell you the truth, and then the true value of the system of divination will be corrupted. Ultimately, divination requires integrity.
The other danger, obsession, relates to reassurance, but is more fundamental. Obsession involves consulting a divination system before making even ordinary decisions. Some diviners do a short divination for each day. An obsessive, however, will divine for every single decision of that day. “Shall I go to the store and buy milk? Should I go to that party tonight?” The motivation here is the same as above: worry. After all, going to the store is inconsequential, unless you suspect that there’s some danger. And if you feel like going to a party, you should go. These aren’t hard choices unless behind them are questions like “if I go to the store and buy milk, will I get hit by a bus on the way?” and “if I go to that party, will I be humiliated in public?” The desire to plan out an entire life in advance is not conducive to living a good one, and if magic is about anything, it’s about living a good life.
It’s easy to tell if you’re obsessing. If you begin a lot of your divinatory questions with “should,” you may be expressing unstated worries. Also, you may find that you’re having trouble reading the response to your query, because it’s really addressing the underlying concern. Some divination systems will even tell you when you’re being obsessive or asking the wrong question. The key here is to address the underlying worry, either through therapy, mindfulness, or acceptance.
It’s not all grim and gloomy. If you trust a con artist, you’ll lose money; that’s obvious and has nothing much to do with magic. If you use divination systems to tell you what you want to hear, eventually you won’t be able to use them to get real information. But even that isn’t a permanent state. Eventually, you can train yourself out of your obsession or need for reassurance. The benefits of divination outweigh the possible dangers.
16. This is a technique originally developed for therapists by Eugene Gendlin, a professor at the University of Chicago. There are several good introductions on focusing readily available. One of my favorites is Ann Weiser Cornell, The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1996).