Felix Kent’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
A General Note:
I grew up in Los Angeles, in a household which many people would describe as New Age. A lot of things I believed then I no longer believe, or, more accurately, no longer believe are my business. However, certain habits of mind are ineradicable; one that I have been unable to eradicate is my desire to believe that the universe is sending me messages. These are my voyages.
*
Scantron Tests
1985-1999
Divinatory Process: If little bubbles in consecutive questions form a diagonal line across all rows, good things (unspecified) are about to happen.
Reasons For Abandonment: No more multiple choice tests to take. Also, the temptation to deliberately blow questions unsettled me.
Field Notes: At some point all those tests moved from actual bubbles to little broken up brackets, which seems way less compelling from a fortune-telling standpoint.
Math Homework
1985-1986
Divinatory Process: If 4 is next to 8, that’s good, because 4’s essential character is female and virtuous, while 8 is heroic and stalwart. If 3 is next to 8, that’s bad, because 3’s essential character is female and seductive. If 4 is next to 5, that’s bad, because 5 is a cad, who will seduce and abandon 4.
Reasons For Abandonment: My math homework was taking too long. Also, the higher forms of math didn’t seem as suited for narrative purpose — even I couldn’t truly believe that long division had any kind of correspondence to a Jane Austen novel.
Field Notes: Don’t allow your children to read Jane Austen when they are young; it will ruin their lives.
Dream Imagery
1992
Divinatory Process: One of my aunts went to a seminar, and told me that if I set an intention to have a certain thing in my dreams foretell something, it would do so. Okay, I said. She suggested that I use this technique. I said I wanted to use it find out when my period was going to start. I had just started getting my period and it was super-irregular and as a result there was maybe a certain amount of leakage. She seemed a little taken aback, but said that maybe I could use blood in my dreams as a symbol. It seemed like a good idea.
Reasons For Abandonment: It didn’t work at all, not even a little bit.
Dandelion Blowing
1993-1995
Divinatory Process: You close your eyes and you blow as hard as you can in the general direction of the dandelion while making a wish. If you blow all of the seed pods off, your wish will come true.
Reasons For Abandonment: Limited lung capacity meant I was always being told my wish would not come true. My mother lectured me on the annoyance of dandelions to a virtuous homeowner.
CD/iPod In Shuffle Mode
1993-Present
Divinatory Process: I don’t need to explain this; everyone does this, right?
Reasons For Abandonment: N/A
Field Notes: Sometimes now I’m too distracted to really pay attention, which makes me sad. Also, certain songs over time have acquired a patina, blurring their prognosticatory usefulness. Like, when George Michael’s “One More Try” comes on I am not just recalling its fateful appropriateness to my seventh grade dance, wherein a guy who had a crush on me was urged to ask me to dance by the guy I had a crush on, and did so, and confessed his love in the middle of the song and I rushed off the dance floor as a result, which was sad, but I am recalling all the times I thought about that dance, many of which were humorous and light-hearted in nature, and so it’s hard to say what the true meaning of the song is. Which is appropriate to how much muddier life becomes as one gets older, but when I’m looking for messages about the future, I don’t really want ambiguity and complexity.
Horoscope
1994-2000, 2006, 2012
Divinatory Process: Something about the stars.
Reasons For Abandonment: Often dull. Too easily verified. Too easily disproved. Or, worse, too vague to have any meaning. Too many people receiving the same message at once, which means I don’t feel special. Also Vanity Fair had the best horoscopes, but discontinued them.
Field Notes: In times of stress, I totally revert to reading my horoscope, so this saga is by no means over.
Runes
1995-1997
Divinatory Process: Well, there are a lot of different patterns, but I always used the Celtic Cross.
Reasons For Abandonment: Too lame. Too goth, but not in a cool way, in a hippie way. Also 1997 was a really great year, and so I felt like I didn’t need any comforting looks at the future. Which is funny, because that year my runes told me I could do no wrong, when all through high school, when I was miserable, they told me that I sucked. Accuracy is not necessarily what I’m looking for in my fortune-telling tools — hope is probably closer to the mark.
Pop Can Tab Pulling
1994-1995
Divinatory Process: You twist the tab of your can of soda pop back and forth while reciting the alphabet. The letter of the alphabet that the tab comes off on is the first initial of the person you will marry.
Reasons For Abandonment: Eventually I worked my way through the entire alphabet and lost faith in the process. Also, I was drinking fewer canned beverages.
Ordinary Playing Cards
1994-1995, 2000-2001
Divinatory Process: I used to know a really good card game where you used the number of letters in the name of your crush to find out if he or she loved you, but I don’t remember how it works anymore, which astonishes me.
Reasons For Abandonment: The first time because I went off to college and got busy, the second time because I had been living in a tiny tiny town and I had the most awesome friend and we would hang out in her living room or my living room and drink beer and eat Oreos and try out the names of every guy we could think of on this card game and then I moved away from her and it was too sad to even think about playing that game again.
Field Notes: Drinking beer and eating Oreos and telling the future from playing cards with your best friend is awesome, and everyone should spend at least a year of their life doing so.
Tarot Cards
2000-present
Divinatory Process: Again, the Celtic Cross.
Reasons For Abandonment: N/A
Field Notes: My tarot cards are really pretty, which makes me feel better about my insatiable desire to receive messages from the universe, a desire that is apparently not ever going away. Also, I tell myself that it’s not so much that I’m trying to tell the future, as much as it is that by looking at the patterns I am clarifying my current thinking. But I’m still embarrassed by it, I’m not going to lie. Also, sometimes the patterns I see suggest that things are going to kind of suck for a while and that’s not so great. But there’s something about that process of stepping out of how things really are and peering into how things might be that I’m not willing to let go of, and probably never will be. That said, it’s a pretty good gauge of my emotional barometer how often I feel the need to plunge into the future. More than a couple of times a year spells trouble, which I suppose is a fortune-telling method all its own.
Tags: divination, felix kent, magic, the dark arts
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Nothing between 1977 and 1985??!
All of the Dandelion section was me as a kid, complete with the Virtuous Homeowner lecture. Asthma made me a little less hopeful about wish-fulfillment.
Also, I have always wanted to learn how to read Tarot Cards or Runes, but everyone I know seems to think they are dumb. I think they are fun and interesting! Alas.
I read tarot cards! Started in May, actually. It’s been interesting so far. IF you want to learn, go for it!
Here’s the current sidebar ad with this article:
TARGETED ADVERTISING.
This was so good.
Also,
Sentence Long Division (1993-present)
Divinatory Process: Taking all the letters in a sentence and diving them into equal groups. If the sentence is not prime, then the sentence is good and can be spoken.
Example: Takin gallt helet tersi nasen tence anddi vidin gthem intoe qualg roups
Field Notes: Sometimes I’ll hack punctuation (this question mark is worth two letters today!) just to make it fit.
That’s fantastic and I’m so glad I’m not learning about it fifteen years ago, because then I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from doing it all the time.
The thing your aunt told you about intention sounds a little like a book my best friend and I read in the early 90’s by Neville something-or-other, which (to the best of my recollection) taught that you could manifest your wishes by focusing on them and behaving as though they were real. To this day if one of us is whining about something they want we say “just Neville it”. Most of the time it actually works, though my theory is that has less to do with any mystical powers than the fact that people like certainty and will go along with nearly anything someone repeatedly states as fact.
I just remembered and reenacted the pop can tab-pulling at a bar the other night. In my youth, the goal was to find out who has a crush on you, and I pulled the letter “J” (that happens a lot, I bet) and my ladyfriend whose name begins with “J” was sitting across the table, so that was cute.
When I was a ghost tour guide, I made friends with a palm reader who would do a little demonstration at the beginning of my tour, which got the guests in the mood for Spiritual Things and got him a few returning customers. He read my palm a few times, and it’s mostly about who you are rather than where you’re headed since palm lines can change, but he did read my marriage lines. He said I had already had one relationship I thought would turn into marriage but didn’t (true), that I would have one long partnership until late life, and then I’d have one more serious relationship late in my life. I like the thought of myself as a kicky 80-something with a final fling, but I always wondered about the long middle life partnership. Ten years after that palm reading, it hasn’t happened, nor do I particularly want it to. I still have the same three marriage lines, though.
Also when I was a tour guide: I had a friend who read Tao Oracle cards, which are a sort of I Ching-inspired version of tarot. I loved it! This, too, was more of a mediation on life as it is rather than as it will be, but I found it extremely meditative and helpful to have my life-as-it-is laid out in beautiful evocative cards. For example, I nearly always pulled a card called “Darkening of the Light,” which meant I was hiding or downplaying the best parts of myself. Periodically true of me, then and now, but it never hurts to be reminded to glow.
“When I was a ghost tour guide”
And this hasn’t been submitted for an article on The Toast yet, WHY?
Wow! That never ever occurred to me. It was a really fun time of my life and I do I have a lot of stories–about the ghosts, about drunk tour guests, about researching and performing a voodoo tour, about New Orleans police doing weird and rude things during my tour–that I don’t really know where to start. But I am going to give it serious thought. Thanks so much for the idea!
YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!
Would read.
I would love to read about it! (And don’t get me started on New Orleans police doing weird and rude things …)
Getting into the Tarot was one of the best things I’ve done for myself. Not because it has been very useful (although like you say, the symbols and patterns help to clarify my thinking), but because it allowed me to reconnect with the mystic part of myself that was squashed by decades of early-adulthood cynicism.
And somehow now I have like eight decks and the Pyramid Collection catalog comes to my house although I never requested it.
Meanwhile, I have requested the Pyramid Collection catalog like eight times and all I ever get is their emails. Maybe all their crystals allow them to sense that I’m mostly just going to make fun of their merchandise.
Clearly, the answer is to buy more Tarot cards…?
I love my tarot cards exactly for the reason you said. They’re pretty and, as you say, they do help me focus. Sometimes when shirt is just too overwhelming I’ll do a spread and while thinking over the meanings and symbols I can sort out my thoughts better.
Oh Pyramid Collection with your swishy witchy dresses…. I get those too but I’ve never ordered from them (Mostly I get the Llewellyn catalog and I have ordered from them)
Same here. And I have 7. *hangs head in minor shame*
I even run a side tumblr blog for my tarot stuff.
I do Tarot as well, using a Celtic Animal theme because the meanings were much kinder than the doom and gloom of traditional decks. Giving readings to friends & family was always interesting but after two or three in a row, I always found myself spiritually drained. The best one? I was giving a reading to an acquaintance when suddenly goosebumps shot all over my arms and I blurted out “someone you are very close to is here with you”. She replied that a dear friend had recently died and that she was really missing her.
Fun fact: both my Grandmothers were intuitive/psychic (they read tea leaves with good to moderate success) and “Nanny” would experience the odd vision or two (foreseeing her bother’s death, for example).
Lastly, here’s a fun card game for love struck teens: take a regular deck, pull the Kings (or Queens) and lay them out in a row. Hearts (love) are for your favourite crush, Diamonds (money) second fave, Clubs (children) third fave, Spades (hate) the least fave. Take the remaining deck (facing down) and ask a question, ie. Who loves me the most? Start flipping cards, one by one, and match the first suit played to the corresponding King/Queen. That matching suit answers the question.
Repeat until all the cards have been played (you should have four rows of Kings/Queens with layers of cards underneath. Then gather each pile separately and it’s showdown time: if a majority of hearts is under the King/Queen, then that person loves you most, diamonds are money, clubs are kids, spades are total incompatibility.
I used to do this with my niece and we’d have loads of fun with it (“Oooh, you hate “x” but he wuvs yooooo” and “OMG, you are pumping out the kids with ‘y’ “).
That’s the card game that we played! That’s totally it!
Once my mom did a tarot card reading for me, and the card she said would represent my love life had a picture of a one-legged homeless man looking into a room full of people laughing.
I love this. I have used a lot of these methods myself. And, if I’m being completely honest, I’ve kind of created my own divination rituals out of everyday activities. For example, I know a first date will go well if the guy orders beer and not a cocktail or mixed drink, but depending upon what beer he orders, that determines how many dates we will go on in the future. Or, on coffee dates, I know I can confide in/trust someone if they order a black coffee that day. They are not to be trusted if they order something fancy, and they can’t handle any dark secrets or important information if they order tea.
I recommend these methods to everyone. They have proven true like 30% of the time.
I will never not believe in the Oracle of the Playlist Shuffle. Last year, when I left a soul-crushing career to move halfway across North America to live with my beloved and sorely missed partner and reinvent myself somehow, I was driving over the bridge into New Hometown when Alanis Morissette’s “Hand in My Pocket” started playing.
And what it all comes down to
Is that no one’s really got it figured out just yet
But I’ve got one hand in my pocket…
ALANIS KNOWS THINGS.
I did the iPod on shuffle thing once, but only accidentally.
Huh, I thought, I didn’t realize I had two different songs called “Maria.” Weird.
Huh, I thought about two minutes later, Three songs called “Maria,” and they all played consecutively.
Huh, I eventually realized, How did I get halfway through my music collection before realizing it’s not on shuffle but sorted by song title?
For the record, the songs called “Maria” are from West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Blondie’s recent (at the time) comeback.
We used to twist apple stems instead of pop-can tabs!
And probably half the time I dream I get my period the night before it happens. I figure because my body knows what’s up before my brain does, but it’s pretty cool.
Yes! And I still do this, despite not wanting to get married or having much faith in the prophetic power of fruit.
Also, does it only count if you eat the apple/drink the soda?
My fave is always tea leaves.
I never knew that other people did the numbers-have-personalities thing until I read about ordinal-linuestic synesthesia.
My 4 is female but amoral, tending towards mischief. 3 is her male companion, who gets up to shenanigans with her. My 8 is male, avuncular and sort of foolish, and my 5 is female and even more foolish than 8, like a clueless aunt.
I love that. People would get confused that my female numbers were often the spiky angular ones, while the curvy rounded numbers were often male, so I’m psyched that you saw 4 as female too, and 8 as male.
The narrator in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn devised her own system of family relationships between digits, too. I remember being fascinated by it, and I thought about adopting it to make math less boring to me, but I discovered it took forever to sort the story out in my head and basically the last thing I needed was to be slower in math class. So it didn’t work out for me.
I just got a deck of tarot cards and am learning to read them. It’s going slowly but I really like the deck. I looked around for awhile before I picked one, as many of the standard ones seemed to be really harsh.
I just got a deck of tarot cards and am learning to read them. It's going slowly but I really like the deck. I looked around for awhile before I picked one, as many of the standard ones seemed to be really harsh.
Oh man which deck is that? And that type of thing is often why I have issues with the tarot. Like, what if you're doing a spread and in the spot that's supposed to represent 'best possible outcome' or something else positive you get The Tower or some other card that's upside down and can only have a really negative meaning? It just seems so limiting.
Bibliomancy! Open a random book to a random page and point to a random word. (Or is it?)
I have tarot card for NES called Taboo that I definitely suggest grabbing if you find it. Even if you don’t have an NES. haha
I have tarot card for NES called Taboo that I definitely suggest grabbing if you find it. Even if you don't have an NES. haha
I have a thing (which has lessened a lot as I’ve gotten older) where, if there is a sequence of numbers it’s auspicious if the numbers can be related to each other sequentially through basic math operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). For example, when I was in 3rd grade we moved to a new house that had the house number “2328.” This was good luck because 2 x 3 + 2 = 8. It doesn’t count if you have to reorder the numbers. I have no idea where I got this from, but I have done it automatically whenever I encounter any series of digits for as long as I can remember. Now that I’m writing this out, maybe this just means I’m on the autism spectrum.
I have no idea, it was really pretty though!
I'm very much not a believer in that sort of thing (and at the time was just becoming a baby atheist) so luckily it wasn't too crushing. She spun it in as upbeat a way as she could (positive things are right there, he just needs to take the initiative to go inside, so you need to take initiative in relationships), but still. I think tarot tends to be a lot more counseling with a prop than future telling and it was good advice.
OH MAN. I also have a card game involving crushes.
1. Tap a shuffled deck of cards once for each letter in your crush’s first and last name, then once for every letter in your first and last name.
2. Divide the cards (face down) into four equal piles.
3. Pick up the piles one by one and flip them over into a discard pile until you get to one of four cards: the queen of hearts (you); the ace of hearts (your love); the king of spades (them); the ace of spades (their love). Once you turn over one of these cards, pick it up from the discard pile, put it on top of the pile you’re holding (face down again) and set it back down.
4. Take the next pile. Continue discarding cards until you see one of the “trigger cards.” Once you do, set what’s left of the pile in your hand on top of the pile from step three. Repeat with the two remaining piles.
5. Now, with the new deck that you’ve made from the four piles, sort them into three piles. Repeat the turning over process with the trigger cards.
6. Last time, make two piles. Flip over cards again until you find the cards you’re looking for.
7. Once you’ve gone through four piles, then three piles, then two, you should have a pretty small number of cards. Deal them face up, left to right, and look at where the king, queen, and aces are in relation to each other.
8. Now it’s time to interpret! In theory, the best result is just four cards, with the two of you on the outer edges and the aces (love) in the middle. If an ace is behind someone’s back, that could mean they’re cautious or selfish or not in love with you. If there are cards between you, those are obstacles. Low numbers mean smaller obstacles, larger numbers mean bigger ones. Other face cards can represent people, and tend to belong to the person they’re close to, or if they match someone’s suit. Another ace represents someone else’s love. Generally, the fewer cards you have, the better it is, and the closer together you and your crush are, the better things are.
I haven’t played this in years, but I kind of want to now…