Re-Reading Words in the Language of Divination
Divination is a language, and the tools we use can carry their own syntax, lexicon, and abstract expressions. But all forms of divination can benefit from a bit of language training.
The High Priestess can signal intuition and mystery, as well as secrets and silence, or a wise teacher or the Moon or virginity or a librarian, among other meanings. Rarely does she mean a literal priestess in a reading. Experienced tarot readers learn this flexibility of language based on context thanks in part to specific strategies and core interpretive concepts. Tarot is poetic in its expression of ideas, but often it can be hard to read it precisely.
The poet and novelist Charles Bukowski said something that’s relevant here: “Most poets can’t even write a simple line like, ‘The dog walked down the street.’” Honestly, I know nothing about Bukowski, but this quotation is the basis for an irreverent book on writing that I really enjoyed when I was getting more serious about fiction writing. And the critique applies to many tarot readers, not just poets.
What cards would you use to express that phrase, The dog walked down the street? Once you’ve figured that out, try to imagine a scenario in which you want to express that phrase. As difficult as the first exercise might be, the latter could be even more challenging. There are certain things we expect tarot to be able to express, and others that don’t seem as important. But that doesn’t mean that those expressions are not ever important. I’m sure you can think of a time when you wanted such clarity from the cards. I know I can.
Many modern tarot readers have become so focused on the big picture and high ideals of contemporary spirituality that it can feel uncomfortable and limiting to drill down into the nitty-gritty. It can feel like psychic readings or forms of fortune-telling that are hard to support, not just because of well-intentioned assumptions about ethical standards but also because of fear. What if I predict something specific and it’s wrong? If there’s enough wiggle room for interpretation, then I’m less likely to be wrong, right? And of course, a more abstract interpretation leaves a reading open enough for the querent to co-create the reading.
There’s good reason to stay abstract, and I certainly avoid being overly precise with clients for multiple reasons, but it’s useful to be able to drill down and nail that jelly to the wall sometimes. If the querent has no idea what you’re talking about, if they’re not sure which of multiple interpretations would be a viable option, or if they simply need clearer guidance, it’s handy to be able to dance between the high-minded abstraction and the details of specific realities. That takes well-honed intuition, but also practice and strategy.
If you have only ten words in your lexicon, there’s only so much even a well-developed intuition can help you say. Even 78 doesn’t seem like a lot when you think about it. But tarot readers can leverage the poetic tendency to contract and expand meaning through language. It’s actually my core method for interpreting Lenormand cards, where the Snake might mean a reptile, a clever person, deceit, seduction, a twisted circumstance, or a pipe, among other concepts associated with literal and figurative snakes.
Getting back to using the language of tarot card interpretation, I mentioned that the High Priestess could represent a librarian. Was that puzzling or did it seem sensible? You probably won’t find that concept in most books, but it might have seemed intuitively right, and it’s not hard to get there if you know that the card represents wisdom and silence and arcane knowledge.
Is it the only card that might represent a librarian? No. You could make the case for others, especially if you use the imagery of the cards themselves, a helpful aide in expanding your understanding of what a card “means.” But it’s a useful example of something more specific than you’ll usually find in a guidebook that could actually be really important and helpful in a reading, unlike (presumably) the dog walked down the street.
If you’re excited to play with the language of tarot, order my seminar on Tarot as a Language. The live session is January 13 at 11AM US Pacific Time, but you can also download the recording after the session ends if you can’t join us live. It’s the first of my four Saturday Seminars in the upcoming semester of tarot.
And while this is a useful skill for tarot readers, it can also help oracle card readers and new rune readers!
Re-Reading with Bibliomancy, Stitchomancy, and Shuffle-mancy
On the other end of the divined language spectrum are the forms of divination that primarily use words, often without additional support from imagery or even much context.
There are many ways to conduct bibliomancy or, as a people on social media have learned to call it, stitchomancy (used to distinguish from sacred-text-based bibliomancy), but however the act of divining is done, the end result is typically a string of words. Sometimes this is general guidance, and other times it’s the answer to a question, much as the High Priestess might be the answer to a question.
Depending on the type of question and the book you use, you might end up with a lot or very little interpretive work. The response might be poetic or abstract and translatable, if not especially helpful. But it could also be literal and specific, and that can often be not as helpful. Here’s an example using the aforementioned book, The Dog Walked Down the Street.
I’m going to randomly divine for general guidance with the book. I landed on the sentence, “List each chapter and what happens with characters, plot, and subplots.” If I’m not working on a book, that’s not very helpful advice, at least not on the surface. But what’s the core essence of the sentence? To me, it feels like getting organized by getting down to the basics to see the necessary structure of things, the meat and potatoes without proverbial garnish or the skeleton, as it were. It feels generally like advice to figure out the core elements and build up from there. And that can apply to many areas of my (and probably your) life.
Now I could also divine with the book in response to a high-minded question like, “How can I express my life purpose better?” My finger landed on a reference to an article titled “Debating the Lessons of Frey.” (Truthfully, that was the second thing I landed on.) I have no idea who Frey is in that context, but I do know who Frey is in my life (a Norse god), and the specificity is wild. The first part of the reference, however, isn’t as clear. I could take it at face value, to literally debate the lessons of Frey and do some sort of compare-and-contrast analysis of the mythology related to Frey. Or I might decide that it’s worth my time to work through the contrary nature of this complex divinity. Perhaps as an answer my question, the phrase is suggesting that I will need to work through these contradictory aspects over the course of my life and see how they play out over time. How much weight I give the divination is going to be influenced by how seriously I conducted the reading (not very in this case) and how valuable the information is (surprisingly helpful).
Of course, I could also divine with the book in response to a more specific question like, “What themes will be ripe for discussion in the next season of the Vaguely Woo Book Club?” (Yes, that’s a real thing. Email me if you’re interested in joining us. It’s free.) I landed on two words, one from each side of opposing pages, “advance” and “written.” This is not a sensible phrase, and I could pull in the context of the words in their sentences, but that wasn’t what I intuitively felt when I chose two unconnected words on two separate pages, so I’m not going to give myself an easy out. Instead, I’m going to bring in the poetry of language and noodle on the word advance. (Written feels very much about a book itself, a written product, the thing that has been written.) Advance can be a verb, meaning to move forward, and as the adjective advanced, it can mean something that has progressed well or quickly or is ahead of its time. It could also be linked to the vanguard or the avant-garde, the forefront of battle or ahead of trends.
Knowing that the next book we are discussing is This Is How You Lose the Time War, I’m excited by the idea of being ahead of one’s time and related to a vanguard. But I asked about the next season, not the next session, with the implication of picking new books, and this makes me think that a sequel might be good. And that makes me think of the sequel/prequel to a book we read last year, Legends & Lattes. I recently finished the follow-up Bookshops & Bonedust, and at the end, the writer explains that he had a completely different book planned out when he started writing. And that’s a fascinating twist on the advance written, sequels (the written products most likely to receive a reasonable advance) that were very different from what the writer planned to write (upending the advance writing).
Will that be an easy list to create? Will that create a cohesive set of books to discuss? Maybe not, but it’s a fun place to start. And I don’t really need more than a starting point for this question. It’s not like I was asking about life purpose or anything.
It’s important that you determine how to answer the question you asked and get the information that you need. You can and should have many ways to interpret answers in divination, but most of us think through language (that’s the whole concept behind the movie Arrival, not to mention the origins of linguistic anthropology), so it’s valuable to understand how to use that as a basis for expanding beyond the immediate keywords or basic concepts or literal text of divining. You’ll grow by leaps and bounds, and you’ll be able to slide up and down systems of meaning to get abstract or specific as the reading requires.
What’s this about Shuffle-mancy?
I have no idea what it’s called when you read the titles of shuffled songs as an answer to divination, but it’s a fun form of divination and message-receiving that most of us can do virtually anytime we have a smartphone at hand. You shuffle your music library or playlist or whatever, and you land on a song. It’s not complicated.
You can read the title of the song, as if divining a phrase from a book. You can look at the titles of several songs in a row and see if there is a pattern or if a story is told or if words from different song titles leap out at you. Or you can scrube to a random part of the song and listen to the lyrics (or music if there are no lyrics) and see what message emerges. The point is that, with the exception of lyricless music, you have a string of words as an answer, much as with bibliomancy.
It can seem unmagical to traditionalists because it involves modern technology, and if your music library is anything like mine, your answers may skew toward the thoroughly profane, but randomness and intuitive interpretation are randomness and intuitive interpretation, wherever you find them. If you’re connected to your inner guidance system and you know how to extrapolate outward from the overly specific or to hone the overly broad, you can confidently use what I call “shuffle-mancy.” It’s especially good when you’re looking for a message but not realizing it. Just as you might look at the microwave and realize there’s some important angel number for you, you can look at the music playing on your phone at the right moment and feel the importance of a song titles.
And with that I say, “Love Train,” the song that came up for me when I pressed shuffle. What does it mean for you and your day? I don’t know, but you can practice. But for me and my evening, it sure sounds like fun!