Posts Tagged ‘divination’

It was a hectic day.  But I reminded myself of a tradition I began last year at this time…weeing what I found roadside that told me a clue to the future.

The roadside was unusually clear today, and I didn’t have a lot of time to go far; I was almost despairing when walking back into my own driveway.  And then, fluttering in the ivy, I saw it.  A bumper sticker that had washed off the car in ONE piece.

It is a U.S. flag…kind of; it is green and orange and says “Please stand by, Our Democracy is experiencing technical difficulties.”  It had been on the car since Bush’s re-election in 2004.  I found it very interesting that it washed off in one piece and I am hoping it means my Democracy is no longer suffering “technical” or human rights difficulties!

No, what we have now is not perfect.  The economy is sucking, politicians are being political; especially the GOP—they are being spoilt douchbags about having lost.  Obama may not be a perfect answer to every thing facing us.  But I do believe my bit of divination is right—-it is a step forward out of an age that was becoming very dark indeed.

Yesterday’s post, where I spoke of the last of about a week’s experimentation with divination using only what roadside debris one found, saying that the body of a baby duck was the final sadness?  Well, I was wrong.  I was apparently right earlier, but it still feels so very wrong.

The sadness hit much later that day, checking my email for the DOD list of the dead.  I sometimes get several of these per day as the names are released.  Usually, single names and occasionally double; more infrequently multiple names.  So, it was a gut punch when I got one with three names—men who apparently died together.  On the final day of my experiment with divination, the rough prediction of the first day seemed to come true.

Back on the 21st of April, I picked up three little Southern Comfort bottles and said, hoping it was a joke, that perhaps these “dead soldiers” (what we call empty booze bottles) represented three actual men from the South who would die.  And on the 30th of April, on Walpurgis Night, my list was composed the names of three young men who died on the 28th, all from the South (N.C. Florida and Texas) and from southern military posts as well.  This is not the entire moon phase list….but the three that crashed me into a dread of walking at roadside and looking at anything:

Pfc. Adam L. Marion, 26, of Mount Airy, N.C.
Sgt. Marcus C. Mathes, 26, of Zephyrhills, Fla.
Sgt. Mark A. Stone, 22, of Buchanan Dam, Texas.

My sincere sympathies to their families and friends and comrades.

Just for fun, because tomorrow is Earth Day, lets have a semi-comic diversion, shall we?

I walk my dog, Jayne, most days of the week.  And my Earth Day honoring decision this year is to have my son and husband construct a cart for the big dog-lummox to tow behind him a couple times a week so I can pick up trash and recyclables without trying to juggle a bag AND controlling the Hairy Beast.  But, in the meanwhile, usually, I pick up objects such as can be hand carried home.  I often wonder about how those objects got to the roadside I walk.  We live in a once-rural area now being converted to housing, acre by acre—but it still has a country quality about it.  So without further ado, since I am one of those nasty, evil (according to Rome—probably a devil worshipper!) pagans, I give you the “roadside divination.”

Here is the way to play, and I encourage you all to try this at least once, just for fun and possibly for surprises!   You pick up a found object(or objects) as you walk along your own local road and try to use it as a divination tool.  The example will be my mornings “find.”

In the space of about 20 feet, I picked up three little booze bottles—Southern Comfort bottles, the tiny ones like airplanes and motel mini-bars stock.  So what does Madame Labrys see?

(1) Some low-class asshat is littering my road!

(2) Whoaaaa…some asshat is tossing back shots while driving on my road!

(3) Some wussy assbrat can’t toss back anything better than this alcoholic cough syrup–Southern frickin’ Comfort?!

I’m not getting properly oooky-spooky about this, am I?

Oh, fine, alllllllll righty then.  Hail, Hekate Enodia—show me what this means?? (Her first three answers are STILL above!)

Three, three bottles–three is the number of resolution, resolving the inherent conflict of “2″ with a synthesis.   So, for whom is some resolution ahead–the drinking driver?  Me, the finder?  My troubled nation?

Plastic bottles–the very original definition of plastic was malleable, changeable.  Change on the way, then, to take us to resolution?

SOUTHERN Comfort–south, the direction of the element “fire” in Western esoteric thought.  Fire is the element in alchemy which is the agent of transmutation, again change upon the wind?  The element fire also has ancient linkage to solar religion, and the triumph of light over darkness and the destruction of evil.  But, one must ask the specific nature of fire—anyone who has seen a house afire knows it can be destructive as well as useful .  Is it fire on an earth-axis, related to energy, heat and eroticism?  Or is it fire on air-axis, tying into mysticism and purification?  On the one hand, it can mean transcending the human condition; but on the other it can imply a wish to annihilation.

Which do our three bottles connote?  From the source, the idiot drinking while driving, one would assume the earth-fire connection, heading to destruction.  But, is this changed by my finding—by my will to do something that corrects?  Did I elevate the meaning of the “fire” of these emptied “fire-waters” by my act?

This brings me to the question of me as the finder.  I am the Labyrinth keeper and former military.  We call empty alcohol bottles at this house “dead soldiers.”  Perhaps my picking up three empty bottles merely means that there will be three literal dead soldiers added to my list from the wars, and perhaps from the southern states?

And as always, when I come back to that, the game ends.  Nonetheless, I will try to play this one out the rest of the month of April as I wait for my dog-cart’s completion.  Further exercises of this will not be posted here, but at http://labrys6.livejournal.com.