Can I go home now please?For a long time now I have obsessed about how things work. I am a scientist as well as a pagan. These are not things that I do. They are things that I am. I can no more set aside my science to consider the mysteries than I can set aside my sense of wonder to look at science. I have been accused of being a reductionist, of having no innate sense of marvel, but this is not true. I am fortunate enough to have the kind of mind that is capable of being awestruck by the wonder of nature even when deconstructing my experiences to see what makes them tick.
And thus it was with divination. The science is clear. If divination is possible, if it is really, truly possible to see into the future, then the future must be fixed. The future is already determined. It is laid out before us and everything we do is part of it. There is no self-determination, no free will. It is all an illusion.
This particular argument is another matter altogether, but suffice to say that I believe in free will, and I believe that there is a chaotic factor in everything that means it is not possible for it to be fixed. The Universe is a dynamic thing. It is not set in stone or frozen in a complex matrix of multiple dimensions. So, as a scientist, I must be forced into the position that divination cannot work.
I do not believe this either. For ten years now I have used Runes as a magickal tool, including for divination. I have surprised myself as well as my friends. How can this be?
Obviously the Runes themselves know nothing. A decade ago I made them out of a piece of wood that had been discarded. It was a nice piece of wood, but it knew nothing of the questions I would be asked. Trees, in my experience, are not generally concerned with the personal problems of humans, even if they were capable of post-mortem communication. The Runes are a tool, nothing more. They are not imbued with some mystical properties that enable them to fall and tell what is written in the stars, if there is anything written in the stars other than a dream of the Big Bang. The Runes are a tool that allow us to communicate with our subconscious, the part that Knows.
We do our own readings. It may take the assistance of a caster, but we do our own. We make our own futures, we do our own readings. We tell ourselves what future we will make by doing what we are doing. Just as the hazel twig for the dowser is a tool to tell him when he has discovered water, divination methods are tools to tell us what we are making of our lives. It is as if somewhere part of you is broadcasting the information you seek, but at a frequency you cannot tune into. The tools are the radio that translates that signal into something we can read.
This is not to say that I believe we are all separated from ourselves. I do not. We are capable of sensing so much that we are not immediately aware of, that may require assistance to come to the fore. As an example, take the fact that it is often possible to learn startling things by listening to yourself talk. You are your own ultimate teacher. The surest way to learn something new is to try to explain it to someone else. The mere act of articulation can bring something dim into sharp focus.
At some level we are aware of what our actions will entail, at least in a vague sense. Divination allows whatever awareness exists at that level to articulate that knowledge and thus bring it to the attention of our frontline consciousness. We know, but do not need to articulate that sticking a hand in a fire will bring pain. We might need to think a little harder, and have a knowledge of biology, to describe the process of heat application, cellular risk, automatic removal of hand from fire, nervous impulse to brain, brain recognition, etc., but we do not need to describe this process to understand that Fire + Hand = Ouch That Bloody Hurts. That is patently obvious to anyone with a fully functioning nervous system.
Other situations are not so obvious. It is not quite so apparent that taking a new job will result in romance (as a fluffy and trite example). On some level, though, you know that you are failing to find someone to have a relationship with because you don't want anything to keep you in your present location. You may not realise that you dislike where you are living. Perhaps you feel that the company you are working for is the problem. Dissatisfaction with any aspect of life can overflow as general discontent. But somewhere you know. If you do a reading, because you are unsure whether or not to take the job, you discover happiness, romance. You do not find you dislike your present location, that is process. That is equivalent to nervous impulse and cellular damage. You give the information of fire + hand. You are told the result. Divination can be seen, in its most reduced form, as X+Y=Z. Perhaps you only know X, perhaps you know neither X nor Y. Not up front and personal, but somewhere you do.
This is why divination works. Not despite the future being mutable, but because the future is mutable. If we did not make our own futures, we would not be able to articulate to ourselves just what we were making with them.
Now. Isn't that wondrous?