DIVINATION Intuitive Divination: Crystallomancy, Hydromancy & Pyromancy Tarot which we covered in the last lecture is a very structured form of divination, another class of divination which I call intuitive has little or no specific symbol structure. Using these forms of divination requires a good imagination or the ability to "daydream" quite vividly. Some people find this kind of divination easier to perform as it can be picked up fairly quickly and requires almost no equipment and/or preparation, but others find that unless you have knack for it, it tends to give hazy and hard to precisely interpret answers. Crystallomancy or crystal ball gazing is perhaps the most familiar of the intuitive types of divination. Everyone has run across the gypsy fortune teller stereotype in movies and TV and the reality is not far off. To perform this type of divination you need a crystal ball, or some other form of crystal (a large quartz crystal works nicely as well). Lighting and mood are very important in getting a good reading. I have found that a quiet candlelit area, free of distractions, tends to work best. To begin, you should settle yourself in a light trance. This can be accomplished by concentrating on breathing deeply and regularly for a few minutes, then picturing a red 7 in your head then an orange 6, yellow 5, green 4, blue 3, purple 2, violet 1 (this is Laurie Cabot's crystal countdown...it works very well to bring on an altered state of awareness..there are thousands of ways to enter a trance state, but I have found this way to be quick and easy to both remember and perform). You will know that you are in the trance state by a feeling of tingling in your hands or body and a slight euphoric or floating calm feeling. Once in this state, concentrate on the crystal ball, let your eyes focus or unfocus as they will, don't think about it too hard, and let your mind wander like you would while daydreaming. After a time, you should begin to see shapes and forms in the play of light within and on the crystal. Like the children's cloud game, or the inkblot test, call or write down what these shapes look like to you...an example reading of mine (from my BOS) goes like this: horse, womans head, tree, forest fire, tidal wave, bird. Keep doing this til the symbols either start to repeat or you can't maintain concentration any more. Now the analysis. You take your question that you were divining for and relate these symbols to it. Do not worry what they might mean to someone else, these are YOUR symbols from YOUR dream consciousness...so they will mean what you think they should mean. Write them into a little story about the question (if you are doing a reading for someone else this story is what you would tell them and is the result of the divination). In the example I gave before the question was "Should I move to a new apartment?". Horse to me implies freedom and movement, woman's head I took to mean myself specifically my reasoning ability, trees I associate with health and happiness, forest fires I associate with necessary destruction for continued growth, rather like pruning or weeding...tidal waves I associate with a sudden overwhelming and unstoppable force, and in this case I got the sense of a migrating bird. The story I wove goes like this: I need to leave this apartment and begin the search for a new one early or I will be forced to take whatever thing comes up when the lease comes due. Well this proved to be a good reading, I started looking for a new apartment 3 months before my lease ran out and found a rather nice complex with limited openings and their waiting list was...you guessed it-- about 3 months :)...when my lease did run out the landlords offered to renew it but with a rent hike of $75 (not in the budget at the time), and fortunately my time on the waiting list also ended and I was able to move to a nicer apartment for the same amount I was paying for the old. Isn't divination wonderful! Hydromancy or scrying is similar in technique to crystallomancy, but instead of using a crystal ball as your focus you use the reflective surface of a bowl or cup of water, wine or ink...still natural bodies of water are also good such as a lake or pond. In this type of divination, mood and lighting are also important. A good time and place to perform hydromancy is during your new and full moon esbats, using your chalice which is full of some liquid (water, wine, mead etc.) and the reflection of the moon as your light source, but you can do it at other times too. The actual form and interpretation follows along exactly like crystal gazing. Pyromancy is another variant of the crystal gazing technique, this time gazing at a fire. I have found that campfires, bonfires, or fires in a fire place work better than a candle flame (which tends to be fairly steady and unvarying but can still be used). There are other forms of intuitive divination like reading tea leaves or clouds and these tend to follow the same pattern as crystal gazing. Experiment around, different focuses will work better for you than others and you will best find which by trial and error. I myself prefer pyromancy best, as the pictures seem to come easiest to me with fire-gazing whereas I have to work at crystal gazing and hydromancy falls somewhere in between. Next Lecture: Pendulums and dowsing

Copyright Anne-Marie Krone 1999. All Rights Reserved

This page last modified 4/8/99