the_arcane_archivist

The Druids knew I was going to get to this one, having covered the other two legs of the Revival Druidry tripod: discursive meditation and a daily banishing ritual (or weekly traditional mass that serves the same spiritual cleansing function). For those who do not already know me, I was raised casually Protestant and became atheist in my late twenties. I began studying Druidry when I was approximately forty five, taking up the standard daily practices of discursive meditation, banishing, and divination about seven years ago. I now believe in many gods, read Ogham for other people, and talk to so-called inanimate objects and spaces as easily as I converse with other human beings. I talk to trees and I talk to my toilet when I clean it every night, and I believe I am far less crazy than when I was an atheist. My book about connecting with the spirits of place, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying is coming out in Summer of 2026 from Aeon Books.

Anyways, back to the subject at hand. Divination is something we all do whether we admit it or not, and that is why religious edicts against divination are so silly. The hyper-monotheists for whom divination is strictly verboten tend to be the most superstitious of all, endlessly hoping to stumble upon synchronicities that can be interpreted as direct messages from their remote and distant God. If I had a twenty for every religious fanatic who grasped for predictions of the future in the random events of any given week, I would have no shortage of pocket money. In fact, most of what constitutes “prayer” in modern religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, etc.) is begging God for a sign that everything is going to work out to the supplicant’s advantage. This is also known as casting God in the role of Santa Claus. It is an attempt at gaining control over the uncontrollable, or at least a facsimile of control via imagining that one is favored by those in control.

Why watch the weather?

There are religious people who eschew divination to the point where they refuse to read their horoscopes for fear of being infected with the Satanism of astrology. They freak out if their kids have a Tarot deck. They seem to be in denial about the commonness of divination in early America, when young women marked apples and young men would bob for them at the annual Halloween party to casually predict who would pair off. Another regular, wholesome method of old timey love divination was to pluck a daisy’s petals while asking “He loves me, he loves me not” until the daisy had no more petals. You cannot tell me this is Satanic, and anyone who needs to project such a weird shadow on flowers ought to have their head checked.

So if you are one of the unfortunate many who thinks Tarot cards and palm reading is Satanic, you need to stop watching weather forecasts immediately. Delete the weather app from your mobile phone — actually, burn your phone and toss its gloppy plastic-lithium carcass in the deepest ocean because mobile phones are the Mark of the Beast. You never should have owned one to begin with. Weather predictions are straight up divination, my sanctimonious friend. They involve wanting to know the future via signs provided in the present. The weather app is a divination tool. It is the prognostication of a cabal of so-called experts who take photos and pressure readings of Earth from low orbit. They do this with flying machines made of metals pulled from the innards of caves and pits. If you watch the weatherman or look at the weather app, you clearly trust those mortal experts and the devices that carry their advice more than your God, you apostate freak. Idolater! Satan!

In my own case, I have no religious concerns about meteorology, so I am free to keep my weather app which came pre-installed on the phone and is correct most of the time. There are, however, bad divination tolls that I would suggest all avoid. One of these is Ouija boards.

Hell is a place on Earth

Ouija boards, although cool-looking, should never be used for divination, whether alone or in a group. Ouija was a natural outgrowth of the Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century, and as its origins imply, it is a way of bringing Spiritualist seances into your living room or children’s sleepover. To my mind, Madame Blatavatsky and the Spiritualist movement were a double-edged sword: though both helped to remediate the state of general spiritual ignorance that plagues modern Christianity and our current demonic age, on the other end, she and they introduced the mass practice of opening the floodgates of the lower astral plane and unleashing demons who used to be kept in check by now-nearly extinct religious banishing rituals and offerings. The Spiritualist urge to communicate with the dead unleashed a flotsam of depravity, sickness, and horror from the lower astral that continues unabated to this day.

The lower astral is not a different place than our own — instead, it is superimposed upon this reality as a vibration that runs through all. In other words, the only way you can escape it is to vibrate much differently than it, and that is easier said than done. To use a Ouija board is to tune your radio to the lower astral station. Once you do this, you open the invisible door to infection. Negative hauntings act like opportunistic pathogens, seeping out of their own confines in order to assail new and juicy targets. Their mission and objective is to reproduce: as above, so below. The subtle planes act like the dense ones and vice a versa; the analogy of fractals is always relevant.

For whatever reason, little lettered boards with planchettes attract lower astral plane vibes. The most common lower astral critter invoked by Ouija board is the mimic or impersonator spirit. Just as certain pathetic human scumbags compulsively posture as larger-than-life — for instance the young man I once knew who claimed his father was secret CIA and/or one degree of separation away from a famous celebrity or world leader — loser spirits like to impersonate important people. They will prey upon your wishful thinking and attempt to manipulate you via your ego and naivete. They will choose people who were close to you in life: your beloved grandmother, your cousin who died tragically, your dead spouse. If they sense you are especially naive, they will impersonate a famous person. Reliably you won’t be talking to Marilyn Monroe or your deceased uncle. No, you’ll be talking to the non-embodied equivalent of the junkie selling illegal substances out of his dilapidated ground floor apartment. He will be under control of a more powerful dealer-pimp, and that dealer-pimp is probably a demon.

Most negative hauntings do not escalate to full demonic possession. Full demonic possession is certainly the goal of most demons but it seldom happens. At any rate, the beings who love Ouija boards have full demonic takeover of persons and places as their ideal. Be glad they seldom get their way. The energy of Ouija is nearly identical to seances, and seances should also be avoided. I plan on discussing Ouija, seances, and the trouble with Spiritualism in a future essay.

All of these dire warnings about Ouija and seances are not meant to dissuade you from taking up a daily divination practice. Ouija boards and seances tend to be the exception to the rule. Divination is a way of talking to the Divine, hence the root of the word.

Refine and sift

There are many ways to divine. The oldest methods involve reading what is already there: clouds in the sky, numbers of leaves or petals on a plant, the lines and creases on the palm of the hand. For instance, I recently had to make a decision about working on Saturdays and I did not bring my usual divination tool, the Ogham, with me. I was in my car en route to work, so I asked the powers to help me decide. There are rose bushes blooming in front of the building where I work at the moment. I asked the spirit to provide an answer in the number of blooms on the bush closest to the door. If they were an even number, I was to work on Saturdays for approximately the next two years. If they were odd, then I would say nothing and continue to enjoy my Saturdays off. They were even and I am now working on Saturdays.

In this particular example, I did not want to work Saturdays. Though I love my job, I am now working seven days a week. As most middle class and lower middle class people understand, it is not easy to mentally or physically handle working every day of the week because the rest of life so easily gets in the way. Also, it is healthy to have a rest day and Saturday was it for me. That said, I am trying to get out of credit card debt once and for all, and in my current circumstances, if I want to be credit debt free, it means working Saturdays for the foreseeable future.

It is important not to vacillate in these matters or interpret signs they way we would like them to be. There were spent blooms on the rose bush that could have counted as five and not four, but I knew if I stretched the answer in such a way, I would suffer the karma of not accurately reading the writing on the wall. Why should the powers give me messages if I am only going to ignore them for what I want to hear? Also, had flowers not been in bloom, I would have found another natural phenomenon to determine my path: perhaps the number of students who cancelled that week or the number of cars in the adjacent parking lot when I arrived besides my own. Numbers are everywhere, waiting to give us a clue even if we have no formal divination method. The moral of the story is you can’t just give up and if you want an answer, you must accept it as it is given.

If I had not fine-tuned my powers of discernment, divination would be useless as it is for most people, even so-called holy people and self-labeled “sensitives”. For instance, there is a Youtube influencer who claims to divine spirit messages from trees, and these messages are always generic, New Age pablum that paints humanity on the verge of a great awakening. In other words, she tells people what she believes they want to hear for prestige, clicks, and clout. In my opinion, she is full of crap and though it is possible she does not know herself to be lying, it is also entirely possible she does.

The only two ways I know of improving discernment are regular discursive meditation and banishing rituals or their traditional mass equivalent, and that is why I recommend having both of those in place before diving into divination. The results of any divination should always be examined in discursive meditation. As far as banishing, it is the equivalent of bathing or of a surgeon scrubbing up before he goes into the surgical theater. Divination is serious stuff. It sure isn’t a party game, despite the protests of Hasbro. Divination takes practice and work. It is something you will get better at with time and experience.

There are three aspects you must bring out of yourself for divination to be effective:

1. You must honestly admit you could be wrong and your divination inaccurate
2. You must honestly consider your results in discursive meditation and not game them to say what you want to hear or fear (more on this later)
3. You must follow up with honest intention of becoming a better person than you were yesterday, if only by the slightest bit

Admitting “I could be wrong”

Too many people think they could not possibly be wrong. They come in all spiritual and non-spiritual persuasions. New Age cornucopians love “fake it until you make it” false transcendence. They pretend they know the Secret and that pretending hard enough will bring them oodles of consequence-free unearned wealth. LOL I think Rhonda Byrne and her devotees are going to be highly surprised about their outcomes in future lives, but then I could be wrong. Atheists insist there is no God because Meatworld sucks and a just God would not sign off on such a sucky world. Never mind they are looking for proof on a stage set of illusions designed to train the soul and not inform it. Whatever… lost cause. Moving on. Monotheists who mislabel and misinterpret the Divine in attempts to get its attention are bludgeons, shutting down their own subtle senses with a far more addictive set of knee jerk reactions. Since the Bible/Koran/whatever could not possibly be wrong, it provides a nice dopamine rush of titillation and self-righteousness to condemn any experience outside the narrow confines of one holy book and demonic and Satanic. If and when they do contemplate the Bible, it is usually in a group setting where they are told what to make of the Bible’s lessons by another garden variety sinner. The blind are leading the blind. The lessons never quite seem real, and the attempts to relate a bunch of Middle Eastern Bronze Age shepherds to modern life are nearly always a reach. If divination comes with help from God and the gods, which I believe it does, the puny human with her six inch meat brain needs to take a back seat and let Jesus take the wheel. This means not putting words into His mouth, earnestly contemplating His words, and accepting His truth over her own.

Meditating on the results

Divination is absolutely worthless without contemplation of its results. Before I began reading Ogham, I did at least three sessions of discursive meditation on each tree card (there are twenty five in the system I use) and I made a project of going outside and finding every tree I could. Because the Ogham and its trees is northern European in origin, I ended up devising my own Prairie Ogham based on my local tree and plant life. Once I started doing readings, I was able to get fairly accurate divinations because I had already laid the groundwork and gained the knowledge the old fashioned, hard way. This is what I believe is meant by “spiritual work” — from my experience, it is similar to effective musical practice. It must happen every day and it must put the ego aside for the slow drip-drip of accumulation that is replete with setbacks. Meditating on a reading involves a great deal of sifting to understand what lessons were being imparted on any given day. As you continue to do daily readings, overarching patterns will emerge and these too will require discursive meditation. Discursive meditation is truly an endless rabbit hole that eventually turns you into Gandalf the White. Not that I am Gandalf the White, but that is the direction it seems I am supposed to go and meditation is slowly and painstakingly helping me to get there.

Intention

As I have said in essays and in Sacred Homemaking, there is but one way drops of water become the Grand Canyon: persistence. Remember that the mighty Grand Canyon was once a pathetic dribble of a stream on a patch of rock. Over great expanses of time that no incarnated human can reasonably contemplate, those drops of water carved a river and eventually became huge. One of the reasons the Grand Canyon is so beautiful is that it represents so many forces aligning for vast, incomprehensible stretches of time. It is larger than life, or at least it is larger than our puny human existences. You are that drop of water and your intention is what will one day make a spectacular natural wonder, if not on this plane and this time, on other planes at other times. You have got to keep going and continue the alchemical process. This is not going to happen overnight.