Colette Brown - How to Read an Egg: Divination for the Easily Bored

First published by Dodona Books, 2014

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Text copyright: Colette Brown 2013

ISBN: 978 1 78099 839 8

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The rights of Colette Brown as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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For Jim, my darling husband who makes life complete.

For my daughters, Jennifer and Jillian who continue to thrill me and make me proud every day!

You have tried the tarot, ruminated with the runes and are all angel carded out! Now try the less well known, the tribal, the forgotten and the truly bonkers! Divination, the art of prediction or psychic insight by use of supernatural means, can be accurate and fun!

I am a professional clairvoyant and tarot reader and have enjoyed using many different forms of divination in my professional life. These seem to come to me rather than me searching them out. I had always been interested in the tarot and it was always the backbone of my readings, but when I first started out professionally, I had a paperweight that had Celtic knot work designs inscribed into it and every way I turned it I saw symbols that could be interpreted for the client. I never actually wrote down a system of how this worked, but basically it was a bit like reading a crystal ball with wavy lines in it! I became quite well known as the clairvoyant who read the Celtic Crystal but I did find it tiring on the eyes. Then the Runes presented themselves and I learned as much as I could about them and incorporated them into the readings as well. Along the way, there were also divinatory relationships with Psycards, ribbons, pendulums, shamanic totem cards and other oracles. However, I have been very focused on the tarot and have even had two tarot books published. The tarot speaks to me! Its wonderful visuals captivate my third eye and give me answers from deep in my psyche. I actually use three tarot decks in every reading and also use the runes to pin down dates and times. My reading desk is quite busy! I do the same sort of reading that I have done for about 17 years. It works, I am happy with it and clients come back for more.

I believe that as clairvoyant I can see and predict without anything other than my third eye. However I do feel that a divinatory tool can help back up what you are receiving, make it more accurate or simply give expanded access to a question or problem. I am sure a plumber could unblock your toilet without his toolkit but it might take longer and not be so pleasant an experience. Consequently, I feel that as a clairvoyant it is important to have a toolkit too. This is where divinatory tools, such as the tarot and runes, come in very handy. I could certainly do a reading without them but I dont know if I would want to. They give me focus, extra information and look good. I feel that the client trusts the answer more if they can see that it is coming from somewhere and not simply out of apparent thin air.

Recently I was at lunch with a new business client and wasnt officially working. However, in the course of the meeting something important came up that he wanted an answer about. I didnt have my tarot cards with me (conscious decision: I am not working, just networking). I answered the question clairvoyantly and was very happy with my answer as it felt right and the client was happy. Then I panicked as I felt I hadnt had my divinatory tool with me. I realized that I had actually used a focus to help me with my answer! I had looked quickly for a symbol in front of me and saw it very clearly in my lunch! Divination by Croque Monsieur! Not that I mentioned this to the client.

This then got me thinking about how divination was done in the days before tarot cards and so forth. I also remembered that my mum had told me that when she was a young woman she used to have her fortune told by an old lady who read an egg. Basically, you would take an egg from home and sit with it in your hand until you were called. The lady would then break it into water and tell you what she saw for you. I had run a psychic development circle many years ago where we tried things like tea leaf reading and dowsing and I had forgotten not only the fun of this, but also how accurate some of it could be. Obviously this was dependent on the reader.

I felt it was time to revisit a time of past experimentation and also time to explore different forms of divination again. So, I decided to look at the ancient, the maybe soon to be forgotten, the unusual, the taboo and the simply weird and bonkers! I would also endeavor to gather what was necessary to do some short readings with some weirder skills of divination with willing guinea pigs chosen from my Facebook page. I would also revisit my own experiences from the past when I actually used less well-known methods.

What followed was a journey into some very weird experiences, which was at times frustrating, but which was also enlightening and truly wonderful and sometimes just very absurd! All clients names have been changed but they are real people. I have been totally honest about the success or failure of my attempts and also about difficulties and embarrassments. I hope my experiences can help you choose a divination tool that suits you or more simply, that you become more open to challenging yourself and trying new things. Who knowsyou could be the next big name in buttock reading!

Most forms of divination end in the suffix mancy. I didnt realize that there were so many mancies out there until I started to research. Some also have the suffix graphy and some are hard to contemplate and even harder to pronounce! I had used a Croque Monsieur to help me back up a clairvoyant decision and had thought this odd. No! Food is in fact one of the most common mancies out there. I felt instinctively drawn to oinomancy, the divinatory use of wine. That sounded such a good way to combine two obsessions, wine and divination, and nothing would go to waste! Yet, cromniomancy, using onions, didnt quite appeal. Ovomancy, using eggs, was a definite after my mums stories and maybe even pessomancy, using beans. Tasseography or tea leaf reading seemed like fun and I had actually done this many years ago but stopped as most folk didnt like cold, black tea and it was very messy with lots of washing up afterwards. So food divination definitely looked like something I wanted to explore.

But even better was divination using the body. Did you know that omphalomancy is the study of navels? Talk about navel gazing! Phrenology is the use of bumps on the head and moleosophy is the study of moles to give divinatory advice. The best one has to be gastromancy, or the sounds that the belly makes! I wasnt up for spatulamancy, which involves skin, bone or poo! And to be truthful, I dont like feet so podomancy was never going to happen! Using physiognomy or facial features could be fun but may be a bit disconcerting for the client who doesnt like being stared at. Not any more so though than rumpology where their bottoms would be on show. Funnily enough, I quite fancied a go at that one! If Sylvester Stallones mum could do it, then why not me? There seemed to be safer ground using scrying or gazing at a reflective surface and psephomancy, which used marked or indented pebbles or stones. Gazing at earth and sand as in geomancy sounded fun too as did pyromancy or reading the meaning in fire.