Why divination? Why get a reading? Why should anyone mess around with a deck of cards?
Structures for insight that ordinary thinking cannot reach
A Few Opening Notes 🪄🎩
🚨 Last Call - Begins June 16! Join Kristen for Witchcraft & Magic, an immersion into the witch as a radical figure of atmospheric disturbance: the hum beneath empire! This class will explore the witch as a dynamic force who transfigures the thresholds of language, history, and power.
Drawing on feminist and queer theory, decolonial critique, and divinatory practice, this course invites participants into embodied study through a generative blend of writing, ritual, and cultural analysis. Check out the schedule and sign up!
✍️ Essay Intensive: Three New Works with Selah (10 hours of class time | 4 lectures | 1 one-on-one feedback session) August & September—Enrolling Now!
If you enjoy our work, an easy way to show support (that helps us out a lot!) is by giving us a 🖤
Why divination? Why get a reading? Why should anyone mess around with a deck of cards? A Few Thoughts.
by Selah
Divination—but as an ethics of attention, as a practice of attunement, an embodied and relational mode of inquiry that treats language as a site of listening rather than mastery (it is how we overhear the silence inside our own voice). Divination isn’t an instrument of certainty but a way to deepen our experience of presence.
To divine is to stand inside the weather (of a moment or a scene) and to sense what thickens, what strains against articulation, and what falls into words like a box full of birds startling into flight. Like a deck of cards, loosed from the hand: flickering, a swift hush broken by clicks, settling into a crooked, radiant spread. The soft percussion of chance piled with conditions, arranging itself.
Divination, in a deep bow to Cixous, is a form of écriture feminine, a compositional art that begins where language swells, opens, circles back: in the body, in the dream, compositions that seep from the body’s dreaming, from the dream’s remembering.
Divination, writing, the body, the dream: each a return!
Each an organ of knowing (through drift, through the sudden glinting flash of recognition at the heart of the labyrinth). To divine is to encounter yourself: the body dreaming, the dream listening, the self, returned, remade.
Divination is a form of erotic knowledge so I hope you have a fainting couch. It emerges from deep feeling and brings forth. It moves through the body, plural, the body, carrying the sediment of our ancestors’ memories, the body: a collaboration. This erotic knowledge does not seek to classify our identity. It floods and flowers. Desire is not lack and it is not (only) hunger, but is or can also be the magnetic pull toward what makes life more vivid, more bearable. It says: let’s follow the body’s gravity toward the real.
Divination is a dialogue with absence and her gorgeous and terrifying costumes. At the threshold between what is known and what exceeds knowing, a new kind of fidelity becomes possible. A fidelity to trembling (whereby a different sort of truth emerges that does not answer but asks: Is the ache in fact the altar?).
Divination is a freedom practice. Freedom from the violence of certainty. It does not ask permission to know how and what it knows. It legitimizes somatic and bodily intelligence, which are not secondary to reason, but parallel and sovereign. It cites the body as an archive, as instrument of reading and world-making, as a legitimate citational source.
Divination is gut instinct dressed in rhinestones if it wants to be. Divination will wear a red dress to a funeral. Divination tucks a lady’s knife into a high-heeled boot. Divination is storytelling with stakes. You tell it because it hurts. You tell it because it saves. You tell it because it’s kissing the inside of your mouth.
Divination: an inside-your-body practice, an outside-your-body practice, hallelujah and lamentation practices.
Why divination? Why tarot? Why do it? Why Why have it done to you?
Because we need to understand what is happening in our lives and the world and the cards give us a structure for insight that ordinary thinking cannot reach.
If this tugs at your insides, I hope you’ll check out Deep Calls To Deep: A Tarot Cultivation Circle—we begin in September! We are also currently booking divination sessions and accepting new clients. We offer a variety of services (you can read about them here 🖤). Until next time—x Selah
"...hallelujah and lamentation..." FAinting couch alerted!