June 20: Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics
By Selah Saterstrom
I.
My first divination teachers were my mother, an excellent and animated card reader who used a modified version of a Vegas playing deck, an aunt whose divination practice was based in scrying (she favored antebellum crystal punch bowls), and Mother Harriet Cossgrove, a practitioners working within the Southern Rootwork tradition. Mother Harriet used a regular deck of playing cards and the Bible as the foundation of her divinatory practice. Other early influences were Miss Maggie Burkley, who predicted the next essay of this book when I was 15 years old, and Sister Myrt, who taught me the art of fixing lights (preparing prayer candles), healing herbal remedies, and meditation.
In most Southern Rootwork traditions, apprenticeship periods are long and particular. Official acknowledgement from community elders affirming that one has sufficiently apprenticed in the art of Rootwork-based divination (which can involve completing an extraordinary set of tasks) comes with the understanding that it is never possible to master divination, as divination by its inherent nature, refuses to be a fixed phenomenon and does not submit to the limits of a human imagination.
There is no assurance that because a reader can attune to fortunate outcomes for others that she will be fortunate. Narrative orchestrations that collaborate with uncertainty work in varied ways through the live wires tucked within a reader. A story (but not for now): how master readers fall, become subsumed, or disappear. This is also true of some writers.
II.
I have come to think of divination as a form of reading-as-being: an embodied hermeneutics, an ontological situation. As I was taught it, reading cards is not a privatized method-event of predicting a given situation.
A bit of unsolicited advice: choose the reader with the forked tongue, a reader able to straddle the border between inside and outside, who is able to move, unburdened, through the ouroboros, dissolving the stitches holding in tension the binary, and who can, instead, give way to the realms of uncertainty, simultaneity, contradiction, paradox, and parable. [...]
IV.
Sometimes students, when studying card reading, wonder about meaning. If they memorize the meanings assigned to certain cards, will this help? Sure. Though this is when I say some iteration of, “What condition must be present in order to best position one’s multiple selves in the guts of the flux, all while remaining sentient, multi-conversant, oriented towards upliftment, and able, through a variety of modes and practices, to offer visibility to some poignant patterns?”
Being an effective reader is contingent upon the quality of presence with which one positions oneself in the constant stream of information and texts. That stream is wherever you are, all of the time, in every grand place, and in every suffering pit.
How are you in it? How does your awareness participate? How do you read and write there? What syntactical logics emerge from such writing, and what do they say towards being? In this place I wrote with water; in this place, an extinguished match; here, blood and cheap perfume; here, nothing.