The anthropologist Richard Werner describes diviners as 'masters of the poetically contoured almost said'.
Divination is something that has and continues to happen all over the world in just about every human culture that has ever existed. When this question is asked of a diviner the answer will depend on who the diviner is, where they come from, to which tradition they belong and to what cosmology they subscribe.
Simply put, it depends very much on who you ask.
We are called to Di Taola by the ancestors at critical moments in our personal psycho-spiritual evolution. Called to divination of the depths in order to be facilitated in the breaking through to higher, more expanded levels of awareness.
Whatever you may think, you did not choose to come for a divination of your own will, you were brought to the divination because it was deemed important by the ancestors (those of the depths). You come to be told, not to receive answers to your questions.
Ask as you please and there may or may not be a satisfactory rational answer. But that is not important, that is not the prime work that must happen in the séance. The diviner, through their initiatory process, training and exhaustive self-preparation, becomes not so much the conduit itself, but the keeper of the portal and the invoker of those beyond it, those of the depths. “Come to the gate, the diviner might say,“ and for a fee I will see if I can get you audience with those within.”
Traditionally in most parts of the world the fee is payable up front and there is no guarantee that such audience will be granted despite the understanding that you were called to the gate in the first place by those within. Who can say why this is. No diviner has ever been able to satisfactorily answer this question when I have asked it of them. Scribbled in one of my notebooks is a quote I found once in a book. I didn’t record the name of the book or the author. In the opening pages, the author asks a Nepalese shaman/diviner how you know if the diviner you plan to visit is good or not. He answered something like this:
“If the shaman has done the work with the right teacher, and if he is truly called to this work, then there is a good chance that you will meet with the spirits, at least on most occasions. If not, then you will be disappointed and not return to the services of that shaman a second time. You will tell your friends and relatives that he is not a shaman but an imposter who steals the money of foolish people, a shaman who preys by the spilling of chickens’ blood and no more. Of what use is the spectacle of a dead chicken if there are no spirits present?”
So customarily, the seeker approaches the appointed time of the séance filled with hope and expectation. Yet if they are accustomed to visiting diviners, there will be a willingness to accept that perhaps little of what is expected will be received. Hopefully however, what is received will be of far greater worth and benefit than that which might have been consciously desired. Though relatively informal, the traditional divination séance is considered deeply sacred. This does not mean that it should be approached without a healthy portion of scepticism. Whether or not the diviner is a mere imposter can only be decided once the session is complete, and perhaps even only months or even years after that when what is received has had time to prove out. For the seeker in these modern western cultural times, I suggest, the question of prime importance is whether the session was transformative or not. Did it have potency?
