Divination as a Key to Your Mind Palace: Learning to Think Symbolically

Whether you are a Tarot reader, an astrologer, or a practitioner of palmistry, one of the hardest things about being a diviner is learning to think symbolically.

We are used to treating symbols the way we treat words. The pound sign (#) can mean number. It can be read as a hashtag. It probably has other meanings in programming, but the only reason to use # instead of “pound” or “hashtag” is brevity. # is faster to type and quicker to read than “pound.”

Because we are used to seeing symbols as shortcuts to simple concepts, we automatically assume that astrological symbols and Tarot cards are short-hand for very simple concepts that can be reduced down to a word or two.

This couldn’t possibly be any further from the truth.

They had image literacy. We have word literacy.

Once upon a time, image literacy—not the literacy of the written word—was the primary literacy of the masses. People read pictures instead of words. People looked at statues and stained glass windows and paintings, and they didn’t see pretty pictures. The symbols in the pictures told stories full of metaphor and meaning.

These pictures were able to tell stories because the people reading them already had those stories in their heads. They could look at a picture of a fish and a loaf of bread and tell stories about Jesus miraculously feeding people. They could look at a picture of a man with an elephant’s head and tell stories about Ganesha removing obstacles. The world was full of mnemonic devices helping people find their way through the library in their minds. Or their mind palace, if you’re a fan of Sherlock.

Slowly, in most places, alphabets became easier to write and more abstract, and images were replaced by simple patterns and symbols. People turned to books full of words to find stories instead of their own minds. This was safer. People die, but a book can last for generations. Knowledge could be passed from one hand to another through the exchange of texts, and texts can be copied. As long as you know where to find knowledge, and the source of that knowledge is freely available, you don’t need to keep it in your head.

People tend to assume that this was progress and that our ancestors were stupid because they dealt with abstractions much less than we do, but abstraction didn’t come out of nowhere and fill a void of idiocy. It replaced a different kind of intelligence. When knowledge lives in our heads, it doesn’t just sit there like a statue in frozen accuracy. It interacts with the other things we know. We make connections between disparate things. Creativity is knowledge stew, different ideas simmer in the brain until they create something new.

I say the old style of image literacy was replaced, but it isn’t entirely gone. Artists and art historians and poets and (some) liberal arts majors still learn how to read images. For most of us, it’s like the language we learned in high school and never have use for in adult life. Mind trinkets. We, theoretically, have a more interesting time at art museums, but how much time do most people spend at art museums?

But when you start dealing with art and symbols used by people who lived before the printing press, you start to bump into an interesting problem. The old rule that # equals pound doesn’t work anymore.

Symbols aren’t shortcuts. They are mnemonics.

An example of this is the Irish alphabet Ogham. Ogham symbols are very simple. They are collections of 1-5 slashes, usually carved on pieces of wood. By arranging these slashes at four different angles in sets of up to five slashes, you can create an alphabet of 20 letters. (Five symbols that didn’t fit the pattern were added later, bringing the alphabet up to 25 letters.)

Theoretically, you can write books in Ogham, but that’s not what it was used for. Mostly, when Ogham was used to communicate, it was used on things like road markers.

Instead, Ogham was used as as a mnemonic to help people (mostly Druids) remember collections of things. Ogham letters were assigned to trees and tools and colors. There are stories about Druids who carried on conversations with each other by pointing to parts of the body that corresponded to different Ogham letters. Druids could remember a huge library of knowledge by switching the meanings of the Ogham letters to different sets of correspondences. They could move seamlessly from a system in which one slash meant birch to one in which it meant white to one in which it meant beginning.

This was an alphabet for an oral culture where knowledge was kept in brains, not books.

Astrology comes from a similar world. The planets can be gods, family members, body parts, temperatures, degrees of moisture, careers, places, stages in life, entries in any number of a dozen symbol sets.

Diviners must have image literacy.

Divination is a product of the world where symbols weren’t shortcuts for words, and many people think there’s something wrong with them when they start studying divination because they encounter a symbol, and they can’t figure out how to reduce it to a single word.

Is Mars a butcher? A warrior? A surgeon? A boil? A god of war? A desert? A war? A planet? A problem?

Yes, it is all of these, and it is all of the stories that you can tell about all of these.

Trying to reduce an astrological sign or a Tarot card to a word is like trying to open a beer bottle with a closed Swiss army knife. The symbols aren’t meant to be reduced. They are meant to be opened and expanded.

Or, put more accurately, the symbols are meant to open and expand your mind.

This article was originally published on adapembroke.com in November 2020.