Rose Ariadne's Chitchcraft Blog

Dear Friends,

In this post, I’m going to be rather ambitious and try to spell out exactly why and how divination works. Keep in mind that these are just my personal observations and understandings from the experiences that I have had in my life. You may, as always, form your own opinions. But hopefully this will help guide your experience and your understanding of divination.

Divination is a powerful tool in anyone’s life, whether they choose to be Pagan or not. It’s an ancient practice that takes many forms. It used to have a much more prominent role in society, but was replaced over time by the constructs of religion and science. These days, people are waking up to the subtle forces that guide the world and divination is again becoming something that people can rely on to help them guide their future.

If you at all doubt the power of divination, you need to only look through history for examples of it’s power. Battles have been stopped, cities have been formed and the lives of thousands of people have been changed just because of a divining tool.

Although many people associated tarot cards and crystal balls with divination, there are literally hundreds of methods to divination. You can divine from eggs whites broken in a bowl, a feather blowing in the wind, a glass of water, the smoke from incense….the list goes on and on. I once had a particularly insightful divination session by closing my eyes and point at a successive list of words in the newspaper. Insight can come from everywhere.

Divination works, in my opinion, because we are in tune with the many threads and paths that cross our lives. There is no book of fate written somewhere that says that anything I or anyone else interprets is the way things should be and will be. When you practice divination, you are tapping into the possibilities of what may be. You are looking across a great flat space and seeing all of the paths at once, then choosing the most likely at this point in time. Predicting the future, in my eyes, is predicting a future and not predicting the future….do you see the difference?

Hopefully this will help relieve you of any fear and trepidation related to the art of divination. If you see something in the cards, or the water or the plants that makes you nervous or represents something that you don’t want to happen, you can do something now to prevent it from happening, or at least brace yourself for it.

Think about it this way – you receive a message in the mail that you’re going to be hit with a bill in six weeks for $100. With this fair warning, you can plan to pay off the bill. You could save a little bit of money each week and then be ready to pay the bill. You could also contact the company who is sending you the bill and prove it’s an error, totally removing your need to pay it. Compare that to receiving the bill with no warning at all…just opening your mailbox and it being there.

This is the difference between living with divination and living without divination. When you use divination, in any form, you’re preparing yourself for the future and, in some cases, effecting it so that it will change.

Changing the future is a lot easier that in sounds. When you use a divination tool and discover something coming up that you’d like to avoid, you can take steps to prevent and change it. You can use the divination tool to further discover how to prevent the occurrence. Take this example from one of my recent tarot readings for a client of mine.

She was concerned about the next six months of her life. When I drew the cards, I saw a lot of money problems coming in her future. There were some cards that I associated with shortages in her short term forecast. I told her “It looks like there may be some money troubles coming up. Let’s take a look at what we can do to prevent this.” Notice my wording to her….I said there “may” be this coming up. I never say that this will be this way or it will be that way. It’s always in the realm of possibility.

The next step in our reading was to ask what the solution was to the problem. We asked yes or no questions of the cards with specific courses of action. After a few of these draws, the solution became clear. Last I heard, she was able to avoid most of her financial troubles and those upsets that did come her way were handled rather easily.

Divination is a helpful guide. Whether you’re interested in knowing the intricacies, or are just focused on getting some guidance for the future, it’s a good idea to make some sort of divination a part of your practice. In the next lesson, we’ll go over some of the less common forms of divination and how you can use them to guide your future.

Brightest Blessings,

Rose Ariadne
Your Warm And Caring “Resident Witch In Charge”