Diviners: what are you reading
Fortune tellers, diviners, tarotists, astrologers, geomancers, bones-throwers, rune-readers... what are you reading??
I’ve heard tell, recently, of someone who got a reading from a Tarot card reader. The client came in with questions about their business.... and the Tarot card reader answered with advice about the gods and spirits, and connecting with the ancestors. They talked in numbers of disks and singular swords, and emperors and Devils.
Umm.
My friend was bewildered. And angry to be out $45. And lacked advice — actionable advice — about how to manage a deteriorating relationship with a business partner.
OK, I get it — I myself have shelves that are bending and sloping under the weight of tarot card decks and books about astrology. I have piles of workbooks and guides to being a better astrologer. And I’m certainly interested in gods and myths and legends of spirits, and how to do magic to make them help you get what you want. If you’re anything like me, THAT’s on your bookshelves, too.
BUT.
I read eight to ten books about business — about sales, about administration, about marketing and advertising, about business design — every year. I read two or three biographies of historical persons (partly to pick them apart for astrological purposes, partly because real people are interesting). I read five to six books about magic, because you have to keep your skills and techniques up-to-date, and know whether or not you’re doing stuff right. I read three or four books about history (ancient and modern) to have examples to draw on in consultations with clients. I read four or five how-to books (and devour YouTube educational content) on sewing, embroidery, woodworking, and more, every year. As my parents (and I) age, I’m reading more books about health and medicine, too.
And because I’m cis-, and white, and straight, and male, I read books by and about and for women, queer people, women of color, men of color. I read books by non-Americans, too, and try to get a sense of the world beyond my state and nation: geopolitics, the economics of South America, the logistics routes that make T-shirts and jeans in the US possible.
In ancient times, the laws of the city of Delphi, home of the most famous oracle in the Mediterranean, simply required that only a woman could sit on the tripod in the adyton and prophesy. By the Classical era, it was required that she be a married woman with children, in her fourth decade — someone who knew something of the world, and knew its pitfalls and challenges, as well as its opportunities.
Please don’t get me wrong — if you’re nineteen, or fifteen, and starting to learn a form of fortune-telling or divination, that’s fine. You don’t have to be married and in your forties to start. You don’t even have to wait for someone to give you a tarot deck or a pack of runes.
But PLEASE —widen the horizon of what’s valuable knowledge for a diviner. It’s not just the official meanings of the cards in the little white book. It’s ALL the other reading and information you’re carrying around in your brain: the things you learned in summer camp about making Friendship Bracelets and the class about computer programming; the obsessive binge-watching of every documentary about China you could find; the map you drew in your journal in math class of who was kissing whom; the lemonade stand you ran with your cousin during the family reunion; the book you borrowed from the library about how to write a novel.
Fortune-telling, divination, is a weird method for deciding what information you carry around in your head is relevant to a given conversation with a client or a friend. But feed that head. Locked up inside that head is a treasure-house of experiences, and the more you put in there, the more that you will be able to unfold to a client in the course of a consultation.
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Shoutout to KrausArts for making the ideas in my head come to life in this beautiful artwork. My obsession with The Fiend "Bray Wyatt" mashed up with my love of Yugioh (Dark Magician). If you have any creative ideas please hit up Kraus this dude is absolutely amazing!
I'm going to try and find a good Orca shop to make these into cards and give them away on my Twitch Channel. Once we hit 1,000 followers i'll be doing a HUGE giveaway so if you haven't please help me out and go follow my Twitch account. - http://twitch.tv/bradradke
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Weekly Astrology June 26 - July 2
JUNE 25, Moon enters Libra 6:57 pm ET
JUNE 28, Moon enters Scorpio 4:55 am ET
JUNE 30, Moon enters Sagittarius 10:59 am ET
JUNE 26 Mars in Leo squares Uranus in Taurus at 21+°
Urges spontaneous radical actions and unexpected but to-be-expected chaos. Internet outrages, cyber assaults, irritability, accidents, crypto craziness, and market jitters, explosions, earthquakes, and radical…
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