AUTHOR'S NOTE: When I "calibrated" my new pendulum, the horizontal axis responded to "Yes," which made the vertical axis "No" for all future readings. To test this method, I asked the question "Will we receive our full deposit back?" for a contract we cancelled when the contractor failed to perform the work within a reasonable … Continue reading A Cards-and-Pendulum “Yes-or-No” Example Reading: Return of Deposit
Practical Mysticism
“Actions with Spirits”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the title of a 16th-Century book by Dr. John Dee and the scryer Edward Kelly that is a seminal work of Enochian magic. Here I'm borrowing it to launch a discussion on using divination (principally the tarot) for contacting ancestors and other disembodied beings. Recently I've noticed an increase in interest … Continue reading “Actions with Spirits”
Reckoning the Rewards: Divination in Review
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've acknowledged before that I don't consider myself much of a psychic, although every form of divination certainly involves some level of mystical perception in its skill-set. (If it didn't, we would call it "science.") Here I'm going to examine and to some extent rank my own experience with the practices I've used … Continue reading Reckoning the Rewards: Divination in Review
Swords and Wands As “Present” and “Future”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here's another unusual twist from Alejandro Jodorowsky. Although I certainly don't love everything he's written since so much of it is mystically obtuse (when it isn't merely peculiar), he does come up with some thought-provoking notions. In comparing the Ace of Swords to the Ace of Wands in The Way of Tarot, Jodorowsky … Continue reading Swords and Wands As “Present” and “Future”
Aleister Crowley: “Hierophant” or “Devil?”
I'm now reading Alejandro Jodorowsky's commentary in The Way of Tarot about the number Five and its "decimal equivalency" in the Pope (Hierophant) and the Devil. One passage struck me as an accidental portrait of Aleister Crowley as an exemplar of what Jodo is talking about: "The Five of Wands represents two temptations: sublimating the … Continue reading Aleister Crowley: “Hierophant” or “Devil?”
The Post-Rational Diviner
I've always felt that the Enlightenment (or "Age of Reason"), which spanned the 17th and 18th Centuries, was the single most devastating blow to mysticism in general, and to the practice of divination in particular. To this day, causal determinism trumps the more allusive modes of cogitation in the dim view of the average intellect. … Continue reading The Post-Rational Diviner
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 