a dream and a divination

[temporaryreality]

Short version, because other people's dreams are regarded as uninteresting, (but included here because it introduces the next topic, my ongoing divination project):

I am a plumbing apprentice, my mentor gives me a light ribbing for being slow to gather items and return to our "hall." I joke back, showing that I'm carrying his sunglasses that he's forgotten. We part (there's an indication we'll be heading to a customer's soon, but he has to get ready for something). I proceed toward a locker room to put on my uniform and find, along the way, that there are a fair number of women plumbers, one of whom is Katee Sackhoff (actor, played "Starbuck" in Battlestar Galactica reboot) and that others are wearing their level-appropriate uniforms. Introduced to the others, I find that they are all also accomplished musicians, artists, and writers. I become emotional, wondering at my own lack of accomplishment, then have a sudden awareness of many old masks being prepared, they are archetypal and downright frightening and I realize that's what my mentor has gone to prepare - I am being initiated. I accidentally refer to Katee as "Starbuck" but correct myself and apologize, recognizing that we're not dealing with personas (another type of mask) here, but with who we each really are.

(hehe, did I say that was the short version? oops)
...

This morning I asked the oracle if it would be useful to explore the metaphors and layers of the dream, and how I should approach it.

Result: Water of Fire. 
Interpretation: Your passions, that which brings you joy (through enacted will), are supported by traditions, teachers, and lineage, lending you ballast as you undergo fire's transformation. Accept the help of those who have gone before.

....

So... as is my experience lately, when I ask an important question, I get an answer.

...

I've been "honing in on" a divination system (I can't bear to say I've been "creating" it) and have written up some introductory notes. I'm at a bit of a standstill for the time being due the necessity of some preparatory work that must come before the next step, which is a deeper dive via scrying/pathworking into the elements and their combinations. I continue to use the system, though, on a daily basis and in the form in which it originally manifested:


Having meditated on each variation in the scheme, I wrote each one down. I refer to these notes (they're my little white book, though now that I've got most of the system superficially under my belt, I see what I come up with first in the moment, before checking the LWB). The "-mancy" method I decided on was the writing down of each elemental phase on, yep, raffle tickets. I get a chuckle at the phrase "admit one," for sure, though there are some drawbacks to the raffle-ticket format (more on momentarily).

I've been toying with any number of options (dice with numbers assigned to elements, dice with symbols, cards with images, cards with symbols, carved or scorched sticks or tiles, coin tosses...), but I'm unsure what's best suited to the characteristics of this system.

Here's what I'm working with (and I'm putting this out there to request input from those with more divination experience):

5 elements (Air, Fire, Water, Earth, Spirit)
25 combinations. Each element bears influences from all five (in my mind it resembles "houses": Earth of Air (or the earthy aspect of Air), Fire of Fire (the fiery nature of fire), Water of Spirit (water's influence on spirit), etc.).
3 states for each combination: balanced, imbalanced by excess, imbalanced by deficit...

leading to a total of 75 possible options per "single-card" reading. The entire set is the 75 (so, not including the five elements alone). I haven't yet decided or experimented with whether a "multi-card" draw would allow for repeats (as in, not a true spread, but a draw-and-replace-and-draw-again option). Not sure if that matters at this point.

I use 25 tickets. One side is the balanced version, one side shows the two imbalanced variations - excess or deficient are shown depending on which way is up as the ticket is drawn. 

The drawbacks of the raffle tickets include
1. their curvature when they're fresh off the roll of tickets. Until they are sufficiently worn, they have a characteristic bend that indicates to the touch, which way the card is facing;

2. There's a bunch of text on one side that's distracting - deeper meaning of "Admit One" notwithstanding;

3. They're not hardy. Mine are starting to wear at the edges.

The positive aspects include

1. It's a cheap alternative to having to purchase cards (or any other specialized tool) to engage in a divination system;

2. They're easily transported and concealed. I just clip them with a binder clip to contain them and they can be taken anywhere;

3. They can be very easily shuffled and mixed and turned and flipped in the palm of one's hand, ensuring (once the curvature is reduced) a good random mix.

I do toy with the idea of making this a marketable thing (no decision, just an idea), but I also like the idea of a very grass-roots, DIY type of system.

Is anyone aware of an encyclopedia of divination techniques? Maybe that's where I should look for options.

*****
a few edits made to clarify the way the tickets work
***

Comments

[sdi]

Oh, the raffle tickets are a good idea! Here are a couple others...

• Bicycle (the playing card company) sells blank playing cards inexpensively. My first thought was to buy a set or two of those and take a Sharpie to them!
  
• If you want portable, there's nothing better than dice: roll two five-sided and one three-sided dice to get your figure. (Specialty board game stores sell these. Five-sided dice are unusual, but three-sided ones are quite common: they're just normal cubes, but labelled 1-2-3-1-2-3 instead of 1-2-3-4-5-6. I actually have a set labelled with plus, minus, or blank that sound perfect for your three states.) This strike me as more convenient than cards, but alas! they're harder to customize (I've seen it done, but requires specialized equipment), so you'd probably be stuck memorizing how numbers map to elements (e.g. "I rolled a 3, which element is that again?" Easy with practice, but...).
  
• Another traditional option is a teetotum, which is a top that has a given number of sides with something written on each (like a dreidel), but this is probably not very useful in your case... I wouldn't want to spin three of them at once, and making a 75-sided top is silly.
  
• When doing geomancy readings, I have a bowl full of beads or stones, each marked with a different color, that I simply draw from. Teaching supply stores sell all manner of blank tokens that you could draw small figures on... What's nice about something like this is that 75*2=150 or 75*3=225 isn't too many stones to fit in a bowl or bag, so it would be convenient to handle readings involving multiple figures even without draw-and-replace. Alternatively, you could have two bowls: one for elements, one for states, and then you can just use stock tokens (colored beads, say).

[temporaryreality]

Great ideas, thanks!

- playing cards/tarot-type cards. Yep, that's an option. I could see using the symbols (as found in JMG's Druid books), maybe nested to show element-pairs. Or, depending on how the scrying explorations go and if my current idea has value, cards with landscape/landmarks drawn on them (because this can all kind of be mapped on compass points and if you add in various qualities, you get geographical/geophysical symbolism)

- I do have an assortment of odd dice (4, 6, 10, 12, 20 sided, plus a die within a translucent die - no 5-sided though) - your plus/minus/blank sounds perfect and though I'm finding some numerical correspondences with this system, I think you're right that trying to retain the number equivalents of the elements is too much. Plus, you'd have to figure out which die referred to which part of the relationship "gee, did I roll a four of 5 or a five of 4 - and is that an air of water or a water of air?"

- your geomancy setup is really elegant (go disks?). For Yijing, I've started using colored beads in a proportion that mimics the yarrow-stick method but I hadn't thought through the necessary math to figure something out for this system. I weight elemental balance as equal to both imbalanced states, so it looks like a tripartite relationship (though technically, it's reflecting alternating states of balance like so: balance - excess quality - balance - deficient quality). I'm not sure a quantity of tokens could achieve the direct outcome of something like "excess Fire of Earth".

This quickly gets complicated (she says, with her mind shooting off into thoughts of a mapping system and pulling out a number of tokens to correspond with map locations... and probably reinventing geomancy in some way, lol).

Maybe cards are the simplest - they could be DIY just as easily as they could be printed images. Maybe business-card or artist-trading-card sized...

Ok, I'll keep thinking about it...

[sdi]

Plus, you'd have to figure out which die referred to which part of the relationship "gee, did I roll a four of 5 or a five of 4 - and is that an air of water or a water of air?"

If you did manage to get past the numbers issue, then you could simply use two different sized (small of large?) or colored (dark of light?) dice to differentiate those.


your geomancy setup is really elegant (go disks?)

Thank you! Yes, they're go stones. Once upon a time I used to play go a bunch... I was never very good at it, though! :) It's been a long time, and I had the bowls sitting in a storage room gathering dust, so when I was asking myself the exact same question you are now, about the best way to cast geomancy charts, I thought I'd pull them out and given them a try. It's become my preferred method, though I fall back to using dice if I'm out and about. (But, then, I'm almost never out and about, especially in these times where we're all more-or-less under house arrest!)


It's probably worth mentioning the traditional way of casting geomancy was simply to poke a stick in the ground a lot of times without counting and afterwards see if you made an even or odd number of dots. You can, of course, do this with pencil and paper, too; and it would work by counting off threes or fives as well. For geomancy, it's fairly time-consuming (you have to do this sixteen times!), and I feel really guilty about wasting paper for the purpose, which is why I don't use the method.


The yarrow stalks are a good idea that I had forgotten! I'm sure there's some randomization process whereby the results you get can be divided in fives and threes (rather than in twos, like the standard method does). It has the advantage, too, of adjusting the statistics, if desired, so that you don't have an exactly one-in-five chance of getting, say, fire...


I suppose, as a computer programmer, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the many fanciful ways that computers can generate random numbers. But, to be honest, using electronics for the purpose always felt wrong to me. (And I don't carry a smartphone, anyway.)

[temporaryreality]

I can see that using paper for sixteen rounds of random dots would be less than desirable! I think your version is really nice - like I said, elegant.

As for the yarrow-stalk method or an analog in this case ... it will take someone with more insight than me to figure out if any of the 25x3 options are best weighted more heavily than others. My sense is that the 25 are "equal" but that the "element in balance" of equal weight as the "element in excess and the element in deficiency."

Well, maybe further down the line it'll make more sense when I have an actual write-up and samples. :)

Thanks for weighing in, it's nice to have others' perspectives and you've got a perspective doubly appreciated in this case, with your experience with geomancy and "math" (broadly defined to encompass computer stuff - speaking of which, I too have never felt computer-generated divination was a direction I wanted to go either).