When I teach I
often emphasize the importance of divination. It’s a tool we should be using
all the time not just when we want to see what our love life is going to be or
if we are going to get a job etc. I use
divination when I have specific question, but those cases are in the minority.
Usually what I use divination for is planning a ritual or spellwork. Is this a
favorable time for this ritual etc? Is this what the Gods want, or are they asking
something else from me? Have the Gods accepted my offering? And so on. Although I am not a member of ADF, I have
always admired that they use divination at the end of their rituals to determine
if the offering they have given the Gods were accepted, and any messages from
the Gods. Why don’t we see more of this kind of divination?
In addition to all
that there is another sort of divination that I find I often use, something I
call divining the chaos. In a way it could be seen as simply paying attention to
omens, but I find it is more subtle than that.
Most of us are accustomed to doing divination with a set of card, runes,
bones etc. There is a physical, tactical component to it. We don’t get into that state of Seeing unless
we have our tools in font of us. I
personally use bird divination a great deal, which requires nothing more than
being observant of the world around us and being open for the answers it wishes
to give you. Perhaps that is one of many
reasons I find divining chaos to be just another intuitive step.
So what is divining
chaos anyway? Well basically its paying
attention to the chaos and events that unfold around you. Here are a few examples. During a big ritual at an event I run we had
all but two of the main people hosting one of the rituals have something come
up where they could not be a part of it.
We have three big rituals at this event, and the first two went on
without a hitch. But the closer we got to the last ritual the weirder things
got. The first thing, which should have been a glaring stop sign to me, was
that the bag with items we were going to use during the ritual was the one bag
that didn’t make it to the event. It was all packed and ready to go, sitting on
the couch and in plain sight. How I didn’t see it when I did the final “we got
all the things” check before we left I have no idea. Still I planned to just
carry on and adapt. Then one person who
was involved in ritual has a family issue and let me know they would have to
leave a little early on the last day of the event, the day of that particular
ritual of course. Then the next key
person bowed out, they had been up too late doing some intense work with some
folks the night before. All good reasons,
all part of the chaos of running an event.
It comes with the territory.
So basically about
a half hour before ritual I was left with myself and two other people and no
way of doing the ritual we had originally written. A few years ago I probably would have been in
full panic mode. Instead I sat next to
the ritual fire and listened. I was remarkably
calm. Then I planned out a completely
new ritual in my head and that what we ended up doing. And you know what? It ended
up being exactly what we needed. The
ritual I ended up writing in my head in five minutes had elements that had
profound messages to some folks, all elements that would not have been in the
ritual if I just chugged on and stayed the course I had originally plotted
out. One person told me afterwards that
they had been given a very specific message that when they received a specific
item in ritual it would be time for them to continue on their path, and because
the other tokens I had originally envisioned were left at home, I ended up
using the item they were told to look for. Another person had been having an initiatory experience
all weekend and was having misgivings about moving on from a dedication from
one deity to another. The deity they
were moving on from was the one I ended up focusing on in the ritual. My original
ritual had little to do with that deity and focused on other ones. Afterwards
they said they had the closure they needed and felt love and acceptance from
the deity they were moving further away from in their practice.
The point of course
is that there are messages in the chaos. They are there, we just have to
listen, to read their meaning so that we can change our course of action. If I had just stopped and listened when I forgot
my bag and just changed the ritual at that point, I doubt all the other chaotic
coincidences would have happened.
Another more recent
occurrence of divining the chaos happened where someone who was originally
supposed to facilitate a ritual I was involved in ended up having some chaos
happen at home. In the end they ended up
being a participant and receiving the messages they needed rather than being the
one facilitating and giving the messages to others. In the end it was exactly what the Gods wanted
it and needed it to be.
Divining the chaos
instead of just trying to side step it can be invaluable. It required that we stop, take a breath, and
ask what are the Gods telling me? Where
are they pointing me? We like to think
we have everything mapped out, that everything will go as planned, but that’s not
how life works. That’s not how the Gods
or the universe works. There is meaning in the chaos, and sometimes it leads us
exactly where we were supposed to be in the first place.
