Liz Dean - The Ultimate Guide to Divination: The Beginners Guide to Using Cards, Crystals, Runes, Palmistry, and More for Insight and Predicting the Future

Before you begin with any divination technique, formulate your question. If the question is right, the answer is more likely to make sense to you. In my work as a tarot teacher and reader, I help people formulate questions that really reflect their situations. The most common request is, Will he or she come back? My response is, Is this really the question? Most people already know the answer. What theyre really seeking is confirmation, and confirmation requires a yes-no response. In divination, its best to avoid these closed questions (unless you do want a yes-or-no answer and if so, try working with a pendulum; see ). They set a limit on a reading, narrowing it to one answer rather than exploring the myriad possibilities a good reading can offer. Instead, the questioner might ask, What can make me happy? or What do I need to know now? The answer to their original question will usually arise within the scope of a much broader, more rewarding reading.

To foretell the future , our ancestors turned to the natural resources of their environmentsharvesting small stones and crystals from the earth or carving runic symbols on stone and wood. They sought counsel on whether they would survive battle, illness, or a dangerous voyage or if their herd or a marriage would bring prosperity. From them, we have inherited some of the simplest yet most powerful techniques for divination. In this chapter, youll see how to divine with crystals, cast runes, and use a pendulum.

Divining with stones was practiced at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the famous oracle site built around the seventh century BCE. The Homeric Hymns, a collection of poems to Greek deities dating from the same era, refers to the Thriae, three-winged sisters credited with inventing fortune-telling by means of little stones: mantic, or prophecy, stones placed on a dish would move in answer to a question.

On Tsaghkahovit Plain in central Armenia, researchers discovered a three-thousand-year-old settlementand evidence of divination by lithomancy (the use of bones and stones). One shrine included eighteen pebbles that appear to have been used for divination. The researchers also unearthed other divination tools: marked animal knuckle bones and dough stamped with symbols. Although it had lasted for around one hundred years, the settlement had been suddenly abandoned, leaving researchers wondering if the diviners had predicted the likely end of their own lives if they had stayed.

Today, the shamans of Tuva in southern Siberia still follow the tradition of fortune-telling with stones. Each divination stone is collected from a different river and is believed to hold the rivers wisdom. This suggests that the provenance of the stones and crystals we use for divination is important.

When you intentionally seek stones, you are setting the intention for powerful and helpful divination. Some crystals, however, find you. You might come across a stone on a walk, be given a crystal by someone important to you, or be drawn to a crystal in a shop. Each crystal makes a journey toward you.