i spent a third of my life living in Glastonbury. it was an easy place for an outsider, since only the outsiders were the real insiders. i had begun to study certain forms of divination long before i moved to Glastonbury, but it was there that i actually practised as a divination counsellor.
my criteria for being a useful divination counsellor is that one should have a neutral approach, clarity of vision, considerable life experience, an enthusiasm for patterns and cycles, and no ulterior motive. ulterior motives include doing readings for gain - in my book. of course i understand that there are many who don't share this view, and why should they? but once you combine money and service, you have to be pretty sure that the person you're serving is not yourself.
many of those who came for readings berated me for not charging, which they interpreted as failing to value myself, though i suspect what irked them was that they felt beholden. their discomfort with that was, of course, part of their 'process' - how easy it is to spot another's 'process', and how hard it is to perceive ones own! they had their own ideas about my 'process' - but as far as i was concerned, not charging meant that i had nothing invested in a reading other than the satisfaction of making connections, however tangential, and the privilege of accompanying others as they struggled - or joyfully played - with the unfolding puzzle of themselves.
so: does divination 'work'. well, yes - incontrovertibly. forty-one years of observation have convinced me, anyway. it works because it is essentially a process of amplification of information which lies beyond the grasp of normal consciousness. one can do the same thing with almost any communicative medium - painting is an example - but the metaphorical language of the Tarot, the I Ching and other conventional forms of divination lends itself particularly to the way the imaginative mind forms creative associations. of course, output depends on input: the trick to any good reading is asking questions: a reading is all about finding ones way to the right questions.
divining the future, however, is a misunderstanding: what divination does is to locate the viewer at a vantage point from which he or she can more comprehensively view the present. since time is almost anything but linear, from this vantage point one can perceive the divergent and uncollapsed potential of the present - we call this the future. however, in order to activate the future, we have to engage with its uncollapsed state in the here and now. our very act of perceiving is an act of engaging, which means that perceiving the future and creating it are one and the same, when done with intent; hence the need for a responsible (and respectful) attitude, when practising divination.
when living in Glastonbury i knew of many readers who had only minimal experience with their medium, and little grasp of its interactive and potentially subversive nature. by using divination to solve mundane problems, they were handling the subtle divinatory tools as if they were puzzle books with solutions at the back. mostly with good intentions but with poor judgement, they tended to arrive at restrictive, banal, or emotionally loaded interpretations. it was clear to me that these practitioners weren't finders, they were seekers. that is - they were essentially uncreative, with an unhealthy belief in answers. i can't possibly say they did more harm than good, because i don't know. there are many ways of getting to the same place, and certainly the path shapes itself to the traveller. seekers tend to keep to signposted ways; finders, on the other hand, are always blundering about - but probably both arrive at the centre of the maze. the difference between them is that, at that point, the finder keeps going...
the way divination works, i think, is also the way dowsing works. we know so much more than we realise. the knowing isn't out there: it's in us, or rather, we're in it. yet, rather like hearing a message tapped out on radiator pipes, we have to work out the code - we need to learn a new language. doing this requires a musician's ear, an artist's inner eye and a mathematician's feeling for 'elegant' solutions. it's all about patterns, harmonies, incongruities (and therefore jokes) and learning to see connections which lie beyond the reach of the conscious mind. it's like doing a jigsaw with blank pieces: the game is whatever you say it is, and the picture is whatever you see. this is deeply unsatisfying to anyone who wants an authorised version of reality, but it's very pleasurable to the creative mind.
i don't believe it's the divination practitioner's place to impose a reality-picture on others; the purpose of a reading is to awaken the querent's own visionary understanding. but just as there are practitioners who want to feel powerful by hijacking their client's reality, equally there are some clients who only want to be led: who set the practitioner up as some kind of an authority figure.
there are ways to handle this, but it can be risky: if you're holding a hand out to a drowning person, you don't let go and leave them to flounder if they want you to do all the swimming for them. my own way is to be rather subversive and anarchic - play the Fool, in other words. this allows both of us to play (the highest creative state) and the querent to become powerful in their own right, rather than dependent on me. but, as with all things Foolish, the risk is that you tumble back into the void with nothing resolved. not that that is necessarily an undesirable outcome: sometimes things need to be un-resolved, before they can get resolved again, in a different way.
i no longer do divinatory readings for anyone but myself. even those i do for myself are few and far between: i have learned to be more comfortable with a narrower perspective, which imposes fewer demands. in that respect i have almost - but not quite - attained the blessed state expressed on the t-shirt of a friend of mine, which depicts a cabbage and underneath, the words: A CABBAGE WAITS.
those who've been through the mill one too many times will smile at that. the rest won't understand.
