Jules Moreno
Divination@tarot_in_brooklyn
Third Tower of the week. Fine. FINE. I'll call the landlord about the bathroom ceiling.
Rituals, prayers, dreams and encounters from every faith.
Third Tower of the week. Fine. FINE. I'll call the landlord about the bathroom ceiling.
This is the time of year I get out the black mirror. It's an old picture frame with the glass painted black on the back, nothing fancy, made during my first year in coven. One candle behind me, never in front (you want the glass dark, not reflecting a flame), the cat banished to the bedroom, and twenty minutes of soft-focused looking. Most nights: nothing but my own tired face. Some nights the glass clouds over like breath on a window, and images come the way dream images do. Last night it was a staircase going down and a hand holding a lantern. I'm not interpreting it yet. It's written in the book, and I'll sit with it until the sabbat. Practical note: candle on a heatproof plate, well away from curtains and cat tails. The veil is thin this time of year. So are old curtains.
Lost my keys this morning. Did what any reasonable data analyst would do: cast a horary chart for the exact minute I asked 'where are my keys?' The significator was in a water sign, in an angular house, near the cusp of the fourth. Traditional reading: somewhere low, damp, inside the home, close to where I started looking. They were in the bathroom. In the laundry basket. In the pocket of yesterday's jeans. Low, damp-adjacent, home, and about two meters from where I first panicked. I know, I know. Confirmation bias, n=1. I'm logging it in the spreadsheet anyway. 14 hits, 3 misses this year.
Half my clients sit down and say 'just tell me what's going to happen.' I don't do that, but I do have a spread for it. Three cards: 1. What you're holding onto. 2. What you're afraid to pick up. 3. What happens if you put the first one down. That third card does all the work. It turns a prediction into a decision. Yesterday a client pulled the Eight of Cups in position three, went very quiet, then said, 'Oh. I already know, don't I.' She did. They almost always do. Steal it, tweak it, tell me how it goes.
Morning rune pull: Hagalaz. Hail, disruption. By noon the forge roof was leaking. Fixing it Saturday. The runes are not subtle in this house.
Taught my granddaughter Lily to read tea leaves Sunday afternoon. Loose black tea with a pinch of dried chamomile from the garden, wide white cups, no strainer. Drink it down to a spoonful, swirl three times toward you with your left hand, turn it over onto the saucer, count to seven. Her cup had a very clear bird near the rim, which in my mother's book means news on its way, and soon. Mine had what I generously called a lantern and Lily called 'a trash can.' An hour later her best friend phoned to say she's moving back from Ohio. Lily now considers me a professional. I am not correcting her.
Found a well-loved oracle deck at the thrift shop for $3. When I got it home I realized the previous owner had written tiny pencil notes on the backs of some cards. 'Called Mom.' 'Got the apartment!!' 'Not yet.' One just says 'Breathe, D.' I almost erased them. Then I decided the deck had come to me as a conversation, not a blank slate. First pull, before I'd even cleansed it: the card with 'Breathe, D.' on the back. My name doesn't start with D. I breathed anyway. Whoever you are, D, I hope you got the apartment and that things are good now.
Geomancy is the most underrated divination method in the Western tradition, and I will die on that hill. You need a pencil and something to write on. That's it. Sixteen rows of random dots, count each row odd or even, and four Mothers fall out. From those you generate the Daughters, the Nieces, the Witnesses and the Judge. It's elegant enough to make an engineer weep. Cast a chart on the back of a coffee receipt Thursday about whether to take on a new student. Judge: Fortuna Major. Right Witness: Puer, which tracks, because he is enthusiastic and impatient. Said yes, with a list of conditions. Diary entry filed. We'll see in six months whether the dots knew what they were doing.
Bought a secondhand Rider-Waite deck this weekend after reading far too many posts in this category. Shuffled it badly for a long time, asked something vague about work, and drew the Hermit. First reaction: great, the card for being alone. But the little booklet says it's more about stepping back to look inward, carrying your own light. Which, honestly, is exactly what I've been avoiding at work. For the readers here: when you were starting out, did you read straight from the booklet, or just look at the picture and see what came? I'd rather not start with bad habits.
Background: engineer, skeptic, but my farmor's brass pendulum has a strange track record in our family. So I ran an experiment. Setup: 200 yes/no questions with answers I could check later (coin flips, sealed envelopes my sister prepared, next-day weather). Half the time I knew the answer while asking. Half the time I didn't. Results: • When I knew the answer: pendulum 'correct' 91% of the time. • When I didn't: 52%. Basically a coin flip. So the ideomotor effect is real, and my hands know what my head knows. Case closed, right? Except here's the part I didn't expect. During the trials where I knew the answer, it started moving before I'd consciously decided anything, like it was showing me what I believed faster than I could think it. Which made me wonder whether my farmor was ever asking the pendulum to predict the future. Maybe she was asking it to tell her what she already knew, underneath the worry. Last week I tested that the honest way. I'd been going back and forth on a job offer for days. Held the pendulum, asked 'Do I want this?' and it swung a hard yes before I'd even finished the sentence. I sat there laughing, because the spreadsheet would say that's just my own muscles. And yes. That's the point. I'd been ignoring them for a week. I took the job. Farmor would have said 'I told you so' in Swedish, over coffee. Still a skeptic. Slightly less smug about it.
Drew kyō, bad luck, at the shrine today. Tied the slip to the rack and left it with the kami to sort out, as is proper. Bought a mochi on the way out to balance things.
I cut my ogham set from fallen hazel years ago, twenty staves, each with its notches burned in. Every autumn I draw three: what to let fall, what to keep through the winter, what to plant in spring. This year: Beith (birch, beginnings) to let fall, which made me laugh, because I've been starting new projects compulsively. Coll (hazel, wisdom) to keep. And Ailm (pine or fir, depending on who you ask) for spring: clear sight, the long view. So: fewer beginnings, more finishing, and a long look ahead. The trees are blunt when they want to be. Back to my half-laid hedge, which I'm going to finish before I start anything else. Probably.
Took my mother to the temple on Saturday to ask whether she should sell the old house. She doesn't trust anything that isn't jiaobei: two red wooden crescents, flat on one side and round on the other. You kneel, give the deity your name, your address and your question, then let them fall. One flat and one round side up is yes. Both round is no. Both flat means the gods are laughing, usually because you asked badly. First toss: laughing. My mother had asked 'should I sell the house,' when the real question was 'is it all right to let go of your father's garden.' She asked again, properly this time. Yes. Yes. Yes. Three in a row. She cried a little, then insisted on buying sesame balls on the way home. That's how you know it went well.
Folks ask why I don't use tarot. Simple: my uncle Roosevelt read a plain deck of playing cards at his kitchen table, so I do too. Hearts for love and family, diamonds for money, clubs for work and worry, spades for the hard things. He'd shuffle, have you cut three times toward yourself, then lay nine cards in a square and talk to you the way a good mechanic talks about your car. Gentle, but no nonsense. Read for a young lady from church this week (she asked; I don't go offering). Nine of hearts dead center, the wish card. Ace of spades down in the corner. I told her what my uncle would have: the wish is real, the hard thing is real, and you're going to have to walk through the one to get the other. She said it was the first reading that didn't just tell her what she wanted to hear. Uncle Roosevelt would have been pleased.
The ancient roadside oracles used knucklebones, astragaloi, and I finally made a set. Four lamb knuckles from the butcher (he didn't ask, I didn't explain), simmered clean, dried on the balcony for a week. Each bone has four sides that land differently. Throw all four and you get a combination, and the old inscribed tables match each combination to a short oracular saying. I keep a modern translation in my notebook. My question: should I go to my cousin's wedding in Athens next year, given the cost? The bones gave a line about a traveler who will not regret the road. In fairness, I'd already looked at flights before asking. Hermes, patron of travelers and of excellent excuses, approved.
In my family, when nobody can decide, we do chits. Write each choice on a slip of paper, fold them the same way, place them before Ganesha with a flower, say a prayer, and let the youngest child in the room pick one. This weekend it was my sister's question: rent the flat near work, or the one near Amma. Two chits, one jasmine strand, a little ghee lamp, and my four-year-old nephew, who took this responsibility extremely seriously and picked one with both hands. Near Amma. My sister pretended to be neutral, but she was smiling before she even unfolded it. Ganesha removes obstacles, including the obstacle of pretending you haven't already decided.
You’ve reached the edge of the sky.