Some out of town magical friends dropped by for dinner this week, and because they are awesome they brought the most amazing gift: The Britney Spears Oracle Deck, in all its rosy glory. After dinner, we wandered down into the game room and broke out the deck for some tipsy one card draws. This is kind of the worst possible way to do readings by the way: unserious, generic questions, untested new deck, card of the day single card draws… the works.
So of course the readings were completely accurate and if you skip past the fashion overview in the little pink book, quite helpful in a girl-power kind of way. Of course they were. A completely frivolous deck of cartoon Britney with no provenance or depth is just as capable of being a messenger of the workings of the universe as anything else… it’s a part of the universe, just as you and I are. And maybe it’s, yes, because Britney Spears has lived something of an archetypal life, being famous and basically a princess locked away in a tower by her evil father and so forth (resolves to check if there’s some kind of Princess Di deck, because that would rock). But it’s also because the universe is always speaking to us, always communicating, and we only have to unlock the right way to listen.
In the book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (highly recommended) there’s a point where a character gains the ability to read the meaning of all things: they can see the messages written in the clouds, in flocks of birds, in the movement of people, in the wind. While this is easier in fiction, it’s also not untrue. There is information embedded in all these things, in every tree-branch and traffic snarl and slime mold (thanks Danny) as well as within us. The universe is, in a very real way, made of information. Not “data” in the computer sense, but raw meaning and purpose and connection.
Information gathering is one of the four tools that I’m always going about in my classes as needed for effective enchantment. And that information can come from anywhere, which is the whole reason for cards and stars and runes and yarrow sticks and the absolutely staggering wealth of -mancies around the globe. Yes, it’s easier to get that information from some sources than others, which is going to depend on you but also on the transparency of the thing — its ability to be a clear window into the language of the universe. Some things are better than others, but all things contain the building blocks of this literal universal mother tongue.
This is the Ur Tongue, the source of all meaning, the common ancestor of the language of rocks and snakes and stars and our myriad human tongues. Our own languages go back and back to the mythopoetic understanding of a single human source, but to take them further to the meaning that underlies all things we need the tools of magic, rather than the human tools of myth or linguistics or archeology. We don’t read this language so much as we feel the understanding of it, just as we don’t read the walls of Lascaux or Kimberley or Leang Karampuang. It’s a way of understand that’s visceral and emotional and, above all, magical.
