Category: Divination

Astrology in science and business

In this episode of the Religious Studies Project podcast, Dr. Nick Campion discusses the history of western astrology. There is lots of fun and interesting stuff in there, but two bits stuck out to me.

Firstly, so many enlightenment scientists and modernist intellectuals were into astrology, theosophy, and the occult! The brief mentions of the shift from astrologies of fate and predestination to astrologies of spiritual development and personal evolution in enlightenment Europe make me want to read Campion’s history of astrology. I’m interested in what all kinds of people use divination for and how they understand it to work, and I am especially intrigued to know how it was conceived of by rationalist, materialist, reductionist natural philosophers.

Secondly, I was stunned by the direct lineage from Greek astrology, through Jung, into the personality type category systems that are so common in contemporary business culture. Recently at my hilarious yet rewarding corporate job (long story) I have been doing a bunch of Myers-Briggs and similar self-assessments and discussing them with other people as part of a training. The comparison we make most often is to astrology (i.e., you can find relevant descriptions of yourself in most of the categories, everyone has traits of various types in different ways), so I am both surprised and not to learn of this heritage.

Campion’s idea that astrology fills a need for personalized psychology and meaning in an increasingly impersonal world seems astute, and corporate workers are surely faced with depersonalizing forces. (I am regularly referred to as “a resource” instead of a person, to my face.) Perhaps the endless personality quizzes do some work to make people feel human and individual again; perhaps they are just compelling under the circumstances.

Tanya Luhrmann on prayer as emotional management

Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford, presents her work on prayer as a set of meta-cognitive practices that have health benefits. This is the first time I can remember getting ideas for magick and mindfulness practices from contemporary American evangelical Christianity.

Dr. Luhrmann briefly discusses some ways of understanding common prayer activities as emotional management techniques:

  • The practice of offering gratitude during pain and suffering as a form of cognitive behavioural therapy
  • Confessing sins as a way of verbalizing experience to gain a sense of control, and setting small, manageable goals
  • Asking for help as “externalizing hope”, in a similar sense as many placebo medical treatments

She then goes into detail about another prayer practice, adoration of God and experience of God as a real presence. Parts of this seem similar to other ways of personifying spontaneous thoughts, and I enjoyed the descriptions of activities people use to learn to talk to God. Luhrmann emphasizes that feeling God as a personal presence requires learning (and even play) as well as constant work, which I found reassuring given how much effort I put into my own (admittedly very different) practices for meeting presences in my mind.

The panel responses at the end are solid as well, but as usual I skipped out after the first “this is more of a comment than a question” from the audience.

Divination as strategic observation

Auguries and sacrifice: crude tools of toothless practitioners. Or so her mother said, even as she’d rehearsed Hild in every variation. But she said, over and over, there was no power like a sharp and subtle mind weaving others’ hopes and fears and hungers into a dream they wanted to hear. Always know what they want to hear– not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn’t even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.

— Nicola Griffith, Hild

Hild is Nicola Griffith’s historical novel about the childhood of St. Hilda of Whitby, and it goes deep into how Hild(a) could have become what she was: an advisor to kings. In the 600s, advising a king mostly looked like fortunetelling and making wishes come true, so this is in a lot of ways a non-supernatural story about a very successful witch.

The book presents divination as a material skill. Rather than contacting the spirit world, Hild learns to read things that other people can’t. Why the birds are nesting low in the trees, what makes someone stand straighter, how wealth is going to shift, or, more literally, gossip in foreign languages, and what it all reveals about opportunities, motives, and risks. It reminded me of Dune or Sherlock Holmes, from the perspective of a girl. Obviously I love this– forest whispering and social intuition are the kind of witch skills I want to have.

Personification of the unconscious

Perhaps the subconscious of the Roman soldiers [, who had seen a vision of the god Pan showing them a safe place to cross a river,] was perfectly capable of making lightning calculations as to the river’s depth and the speed of its current, but was unable to pass it to their conscious minds in the direct manner that modern brains employ. Could it be that the visions of gods or supernatural figures that populate our histories are projections, messages from an unconscious that was at the time unable to communicate in any other way?

— Alan Moore, From Hell (back matter)

I like to think about Alan Moore’s projection idea when I work with visualizations and self-guided meditations. Could it be that apparitions are a pretty good way to talk to your own subconscious?

The first visualization I learned, and still the main thing I do, is to ask to meet a particular character (a dream teacher, a life coach, a friend) and then ask that character questions. At first, all I could do was act out the scenes with my usual conscious mind, but with practice I am much more able to wait quietly until these figures take their own forms, and give me sometimes surprising answers. It feels more and more like asking my unconscious mind to meet up for a chat, and more and more like a mindfulness exercise where my task is to let my conscious mind get still.

The deepest insight I can currently get from these dream figures is on the level of “what should I ask you?” or “why am I anxious?”. In the beginning the answers were often things I knew consciously but didn’t want to admit. These days the answers are more opaque and strange, more like a dream. I am curious whether I could practice enough to get (correct) answers to questions like “where did I forget my keys?” or “is my body healthy?”– things I might know on some level, but can’t think of in my conscious mind. It occurs to me that when I ask to meet someone in a visualization, I should try asking for my unconscious mind itself.