Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Magick Monday newsletter sent out by Jason Miller. I just couldn’t pre-empt the sad news about Alobar passing away.
Divination vs. Decision Making Strategies
From time to time, students note that Divination plays far less a role in my courses than it does in a lot of other peoples teachings. About a year ago I stopped offering divination as a service. After 30 years of doing divination, I have grown to have a lot of reservations about it and how it’s used.
Yet, I clearly don’t hate it. I am passionate about cartomantic style reading, and have a whole Arcane Audio on how to read cards like a fortune teller rather than an esoteric twaddle pusher. I have been struggling with how to frame my divination concerns, until a friend posted something this weekend that kind of forced me to throw it into a sentence.
Here it is. Divination should be a tool that provides input for your decision making strategy, it should not be an alternative to it.
The advice of “Do a reading. Ask the spirits” is REALLY common in our community as the panacea answer to every question. In my experience its FAR better to cultivate the ability to think clearly about options, evaluate those options for viability and potential, make a decision and commit to it, and finally take responsibility for the decision – knowing that you never know all the factors at play.
If you can manage to do that, then you can use divination as tool to help that process along. But 9 times out of 10 that is NOT what happens. People seek divination as a way to AVOID doing all that.
Now, folks from traditional paths might step forward and say “well, thats because you aren’t in a tradition that has been handling things this way for centuries”.
HARD NOPE.
I have been around the block more than a few times and have seen people get readings from Lamas and Babalos and Priests that wind up in complete disaster. Sometimes its worse than getting it from a friend because the weight of faith that people have in people from these traditions can be so great that they treat it like a sure bet.
I am readying myself already for the hate mail this is going to generate, but remember, I believe in divination. I just don’t believe its infallible. I believe it is a piece of data that you should treat how intelligence agencies treat their data. They throw it up against other pieces of data, and run it through their decision making strategies to come up with actionable intelligence.
Make it part of your decision making strategy, not an alternative to it.
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