Fortune Telling: Tips for Choosing & Using a Divination Tool

“The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your Inner Psychic

Every person has spiritual vision to some degree. It’s just a matter of learning how to open those figurative eyes! First, you should know that a psychic nature is natural. We all have instincts; it’s just that some are more developed than others. It might take you a while to get good at divination readings because, like exercising a new muscle, practice makes perfect. When you first start trying, please be patient with yourself.

Note it!

For novices and “old pros” alike keep track of your readings diligently and encourage anyone who gets a reading from you to likewise take notes. Some folks are easily distracted, leaving them with questions and uncertainty. Remind querents that it can be days, weeks, months and sometimes years before the results from a reading become clear to us. Better still, readings can take on whole new meanings over time, and still prove just as insightful. Having notes or tapes for reference builds confidence, fueling improved reliability.

Helps and Hints For Choosing & Using your Divination Tool

For those who seem to have trouble with divination, there are a few things that may help.

Use your senses: In choosing a system, pick the one that really appeals to your senses. If you’re a highly visual person, for example, a specific Tarot deck may jump out from the rest. If you’re tactile, try the runes!

Trial Runs and Observation for Choosing a Divinatory System

Trial Run: If possible give your chosen divination system a try. Many stores offer opened packages so you can do just that. Just remember that you shouldn’t have specific expectations at this time. Keep your question simple. Also, remember that Spirit sometimes uses a divination tool for getting a message across that you’re overlooking.
Hint: Use hand wipes before touching the sample. There’s likely to be residual energy involved because of so much handling.

Watch and Learn: If any of your magical friends have divination tools, ask them for a reading so you can see how it works. Ask why that person likes this particular system. You have a firsthand review here!

Patience and Mastery of Divination

Be Patient: Give any new divination system a fair chance. Working with it for at least three months, during which time you study the symbols and try various layouts, castings, or whatever. By the end of that time frame, you’ll have accomplished three things. You’ll understand this system more intimately, you’ll have developed your own inner sight, and you’ll have determined whether this method will work effectively and consistently for you. If not, try another, and keep trying till you find a system that works.

Self-Awareness: Avoid reading for yourself or others when you’re ill, angry, or otherwise out of sorts. Also, don’t read if you feel you cannot put aside personal prejudice or feelings. Those skew the results you get.

Divination Limitations: Divination won’t answer all of life’s questions. Use it when you need additional perspective, but don’t run to it twenty times over the same issue. People sometimes go to different readers hoping to hear what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. The phrase “Yes, other readers have told me that” comes up in sessions all the time. An apt reply might be, “So why haven’t you done it?” Just like any metaphysical method, one should be ready to follow up from that reading with substantive action in the mundane world.

Modern Adaptive Methods

In the search for divination methods, there is nothing wrong with a little creativity. Looked in and around your house. See what items could be used for a personalized divination system in which you assign the meanings to each piece: Here are just a few examples.

• Colored buttons (interpret by size and/or shape) as a cast system like shells and runes.
• Dry beans (cast various colored ones onto a paper surface and scry the results).
• Anything in your junk drawer (reach in blindly with a question in mind and pull out an answer). Say you’re having a rough time at work and can’t figure out why. You pull out a rubber band. This could represent a greater need for flexibility.
• Alphabet soup (scry the surface). Internalize the results!
• Nuts, bolts, nails, etc. (make a good caste system. Just assign meanings).
• Books: Grab one randomly and interpret either a title or a spot of text on which your eyes immediately fall. This is called Bibliomancy.
• Greeting cards or coupons: use the words on the cards or coupons, or the imagery, for interpretive value. If you grab a coupon featuring chicken soup, for example, it’s a sign to be careful with your health.

Keep your eyes open. There are potential divination tools everywhere. It just takes considering the most mundane of items as having the potential for spiritual and magickal possibilities.

Adapted from the “Witch’s Book of Wisdom,” by Patricia Telesco. All rights reserved.