Tag: divination

Beneath the official pantheon, including the likes of Enlil, the Assyrian sky god, and Ea, the god of wisdom, was a layer of demons, such as Lamashtu, who threatened pregnant women, and Namtaru, the plague-demon, who needed to be mollified. Natural phenomena such as floods and lightning, or epidemic diseases, were not scientifically understood despite Mesopotamian advances, and so people at all levels of society preferred supernatural explanations. Disasters were believed to be caused by mamitu (curses) laid by witches, by victims committing offenses (sometimes unknowingly) against the gods, or through unintentionally ignoring divine signs. Kings guarded against these occurrences by consulting temple priests, in particular ashipu (exorcists), who performed magical rituals, and baru, who interpreted omens. Palace archives were stocked with collections of clay cuneiform tablets containing spells, incantations, and omens. Huge numbers have been recovered from the palace library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Ordinary people also called on the services of ashipu to cast protective spells, and used amulets and enchanted figurines to dispel evil spirits.

— A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult, Chapter 2

Divination can’t “tell your future.” For one things, there are too many variables involved. And to repeat the wisdom of Isaac Bonewits yet again “fuzzy targets yield fuzzy results.” Ask a vague question and you’re going to get a vague answer. But I see three main things divination can do for us.

Divination will tell you where you’re going. If you keep walking down a path you’re going to end up somewhere. Divination won’t give you the coordinates of where that is, but it will tell you what things will look and feel like when you get there. Does that look and feel good to you? If so, keep going. If not, you probably should make some changes. I strongly believe the future is not fixed, but at some point your accumulated choices start to look like destiny.

Remember any question about where you’re going can never be answered with finality. You’re going to keep moving throughout your life until you die…and even then you’ll move on to whatever comes after death. So if the answer to “where am I going?” seems incomplete, that’s because you’re only seeing one part of a longer journey.

The older we get, and the more difficult the world becomes, the harder it gets to extract yourself from a bad situation and get moving toward what you really want and need. Divination will help you make course corrections sooner and avoid major backtracking.

Divination will help you see what you’re not seeing. Divination isn’t a very good map, but it’s an excellent set of headlights. It won’t tell you how long something will take (or at least, it won’t tell me—I have zero luck with divining time frames. “Time runs differently in the Otherworld”…), but it will show you the major obstacles you’ll encounter on your way. The warnings are likely to be less specific than you’d like—your job is to be on the lookout for something that fits the general description.

Your job is also to take action that is both appropriate and realistic. If a reading says you’re going to get run over by a beer truck, you probably can’t stop the truck from going out of control. You can, however, be somewhere else when that happens, or steer out of its path because you saw it coming a split second earlier than you would have otherwise….

Divination allows you to ask questions of the Gods and spirits. While there is certainly a psychological aspect to divination (particularly when you’re reading for yourself) the word itself points us toward its source: divination comes from the divine. There is no substitute for ecstatic, mystical, and worshipful experiences of the Gods. But sometimes you just need an answer. “Is this sacrifice acceptable?” “Is this candidate ready to be Your priestess?” “Is this message really what You want me to tell this person?”

— A Need For Divination – Under The Ancient Oaks

Author’s emphases.

Magic comes in a great range of forms of participation, which it is helpful to break down further. Three forms of participation can be distinguished: transcendence, transformation and transactions. Transcendent relations exist where the universe is influencing people but is beyond their ability to affect it. A classic example of transcendence is astrology, where astral bodies shape human lives, but people do not influence the movement of the stars or planets. The Medieval and Early Modern European maxim concerning astrology was ‘as above, so below’, a clear one-way set of influences. People can understand, navigate and respond appropriately to transcendent effects, but there is nothing they can do to change them.

Transformation is an aspect of participation: for example, alchemical practices might turn lead into gold, or unremarkable chemicals into an elixir of eternal youth. Magic often also surrounds and informs strong transformations: such is the case with metalworking, where, in many African instances, the smith prepares himself by magical means for his work…. People also transform themselves. Shamans on the Eurasian Steppe can inhabit another creature, such as a reindeer or bear, or become a spirit to enter the spirit world. The process of initiation as a shaman often involves the person being taken apart and put back together in a new form, with novel powers. For Australian Aboriginal people the landscape was transformed during the Dreamtime by the actions of ancestral spirits, such as the Rainbow Serpent, to give the land a set of powers and dangers that people need to attend to through ceremonies.

Here transformations blend into transactions. In many forms of magic people make bargains with the universe in its many forms. In China the ancestors were given feasts and offerings to ensure their good will towards their living descendants and could be contacted through divination. Divination was common in many other instances, such as in Ancient Greece, when the gods responded to questions put to them at oracles. In some cultures, especially monotheisms, a host of lesser beings, such as demons, angels or saints, received forms of supplication or more aggressive attacks to influence their behaviour in favour of humans. Across prehistoric Europe we will see how carefully placed deposits of important objects and bodies were made to the spirits of the place and the social group over many thousands of years in continuing cosmic bargaining.

Transcendence, transformation and transactions were often all found together in mutual interaction. In Medieval Europe, for example, people believed in astrology, with the influence of the planets paramount, experimented with alchemy in the hope of getting rich and gave offerings to saints to gain their favour. But when transcendent relations were predominant, people could feel alienated and fearful of the universe, lacking control over it. More mutual relations existed through transformation and transaction, in which a moral relationship was often important, motivating people to act with due respect and care.

— Magic: A History, pp. 9-10

Londo Mollari:

Now, if I may ask: does this torment end when you leave, or am I going to have to spend the rest of my life paying for one little mistake?

Elric the Techno-mage:

Oh, I’m afraid you have to spend the rest of your life paying for your mistakes. Not this one, of course; it’s trivial. I have withdrawn the spell, but there will be others.

Londo Mollari:

What are you talking about?

Elric the Techno-mage:

You are touched by darkness, Ambassador. I see it as a blemish that will grow with time.

I could warn you, of course, but you would not listen.

I could kill you, but someone would take your place.

So I do the only thing I can: I go.

[Starts to turn away then turns back.]

Oh, I believe it was an endorsement you wanted. A word or two, a picture, to send to the folks back home confirming that you have a destiny before you.

Londo Mollari:

Yes, it was just a thought, nothing more.

Elric the Techno-mage:

Well, take this for what little it will profit you:

As I look at you, Ambassador Mollari, I see a great hand reaching out of the stars. The hand is your hand. And I hear sounds—the sounds of billions of people calling your name.

Londo Mollari:

[Brightens.]

My followers?

Elric the Techno-mage:

[Scowls.]

Your victims.

[Turns and walks away.]

— “The Geometry of Shadows” – Babylon 5, Season 2 (1995)

Ynyr:

We seek the Black Fortress.

Emerald Seer:

Such a vision will be opposed.

— “Krull” (1983)

Divination magic! And with complications! 😀

Much magic involves attempts to do good in the world, or to avert bad outcomes. Benign magic is more common than its malign twin.

Relationship work. This is a very broad category, as people have multiple relationships with significant others, which can include the land on which people live, plants, animals, artefacts, houses, fellow humans and so on. Each relationship might have its own magic, so that if relationships have gone wrong in some way, or need to be rebalanced or readjusted, effective action can be taken….

Apotropaic/protective magic. This is linked to relationship work above and seeks to protect people, animals, plants, landscape or ancestors from harm, and involves practices such as those found in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (immuring cats or shoes in walls) or symbols, such as those used to keep out the devil.

Foretelling the future. This can often concern relatively local or personal issues—the health of a child, personal career prospects and so on. Here local fortune-telling or divination may take place, which we think of colloquially as reading the tea leaves. More learned forms of prediction came into being through astrology. Scrying the future can be even grander and more cosmic, through inspired prophecy, often of momentous events such as war or even the end of the world….

Understanding the past. Looking at the causes of things is also very important, with oracles a powerful technology for finding out the cause of an accident, a death or another misfortune. People want both to diagnose the cause of what happened and then to take appropriate remedial action. The classical anthropological case is the Azande poison oracle, although looking for past causes takes many forms.

Dying, death and the dead. Notions of how to die, what happens immediately after death and becoming more stably dead in the form of being an ancestor are all of great interest—the Ancient Egyptians created very elaborate means of dealing with dying and the dead, although this is a theme relevant to all humans. In addition to becoming an ancestor, widespread preoccupations include talking to the dead and making sure they do not bother the living.

Medicine, sickness, health and possession (mental and physical). Prior to the existence of germ theory (and even after its rise) people’s ideas of health often involved relationships with a range of spirits, demons or bad human relations that needed to be counteracted. Frequently, as in the case of Ancient Mesopotamia, dealing with relationships involved herbal remedies but also a series of spells or practices to negate the effects of demons or other malign forces. In most cases, little distinction is made between mind and body, something found increasingly in “Western whole-body approaches to well-being.

Understanding and effecting transformation. This involves activities such as craft production, with concerns about the practices of the smith, who is able to wield and control powerful forces, being common. Craft production often involved a series of magical practices vital to its efficacy. Alchemy was a series of varied attempts to transform base metals into gold, giving rise to more recent chemistry. People also worry about monsters and hybrids (griffins, sphinxes, etc.) or more usual transformations, such as a predator eating its prey. The arts shared between the Steppe and Europe in the first millennium BCE exhibit an obsession with transformation and ambiguity.

Manipulating desire. Siberian hunters feel they have to make reindeer desire them so that they will give themselves up during the hunt. People have ancient relationships with reindeer, going back to the Last Glaciation, and it is possible ideas of physical closeness have developed over millennia. Similar notions of sexual desire are also found in Aztec contexts. Many other cultures, such as those of Ancient Greece and Rome, concentrated efforts on love magic, with occasionally comic outcomes.

— Magic: A History, pp. 19-24

Divination was undoubtedly the most important of the disciplines that a Mesopotamian would have categorized as “scientific,” and should be viewed not as some primitive magical or occult activity but as one of the most basic features of Babylonian life. Indeed its senior practitioners were men of influence, held in high esteem in the own society. They were consulted on all important occasions both by private individuals and officers of state. The army was always accompanied by a diviner who in the Old Babylonian period seems to have acted also as general….

Divination represented, basically, a technique of communication with the gods who, according to Babylonian religious thought, shaped the destinies of all mankind, individually and collectively. Its purpose was to ascertain the will of the gods, to the Babylonian synonymous with the prediction of future events. Its philosophy, of course, presupposes supernatural cause and effect in all perceived phenomena and assumes the cooperation of the gods in their willingness to reveal the future intentions. Evil portended was not inevitable; there existed a variety of purification rituals…and other means of averting unwelcome predictions…. A clear distinction was made between provoked and unprovoked or natural omens. Preference for these various techniques differed markedly from one period and area to another. Although there exists some literature pertaining to the interpretation of dreams, Mesopotamian philosophy was curiously reluctant to admit that the gods made use of man himself for the expression of divine intention—and indeed a dream was significant only when “interpreted” by an expert. Thus shamanistic concepts, often considered universal in primitive religion, are absent in Mesopotamia.

— Babylon, p. 178

Emphasis mine.

The practices of divination may seem puerile or at least so primitive in character as to appear irreconcilable with the elaborate Chaldean cosmogony. However, such reasoning does not take into account the world concept of the Chaldeans, which was essentially magical, akin to that of the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. We find similiar “superstititions” among all these peoples, where divination is the logical application of their theory of magic. To the magus, there exists no accidental happenings; everything obeys one law, which is not resented as a coercion but rather welcomed as a liberation from the tyranny of chance. The world and its gods submit to this law, which binds together all things and all events. Certa stant omnia lege: everything is established solidly by that law which the wise man discerns in happenings that appear accidental to the profane. The curve observed in the flight of birds, the barking of a dog, the shape of a cloud, are occult manifestations of that omnipotent coordinator, the source of unity and harmony.

— The History of Magic and the Occult, p. 5