Music and Divination
I can’t quite explain why, but jazz and the Yijing go together hand-in-hand. Ambient electronic helps me understand the details of astrological charts, and anything upbeat keeps me focused on large cartomancy spreads.
There’s a tension in how people approach the environments wherein one does divination. At home, or even in a temple-like setting, many diviners across the spectrum are engaged in rather specific rituals — ranging from at least making sure you’re doing it on a clean surface, through to incense, candles, and prayers. Many divination textbooks tell us to treat oracular acts with such reverence. Even divinations that can happen “anywhere”, such as horary astrology, need a level of seriousness applied to them.
At the same time, many diviners have revealed utterly life-changing information to individuals at the base of some stairs at a party, in a small bedroom, while holding cards down outside on a windy day, or on a sticky coffee shop table, the list goes on.
Divination’s relation to its environment is a much wider question (quick answer: it depends on the system, and the diviner, ad infinitum), but it’s relation to music specifically has been playing on my mind.
I’ve noticed more and more that I’ve started to perform divination with music playing, without thinking about it. It’s not that I can’t divine without it, but putting an album on (and an album, not just a shuffled playlist!) has become a habit.
States of What?
A straightforward explanation of why music playing helps might be the idea of “states of consciousness” — Pharoah Sanders playing quietly while I re-read the same Yijing line will certainly have some kind of effect on my cognitive function. However, the fact that I used scare quotes there shows my scepticism (but, spoiler, I don’t think that’s wrong).
I generally try to avoid the psychologisation of “esoteric” phenomena. This is another blog post (or book) for another time (or life), but briefly put: I like to let divination speak for itself, and present its own systems of how it works. Applying late 19th century-onwards ideas of a singular brain that enters into “states” is different in many ways to all kinds of other understandings: animistic explanations of spirits delivering information, oracular possession, or even Jungian synchronicity.
As a rule of thumb: divination delivers us information. Any particular state of consciousness we enter into as we try to understand that information is a separate matter.
So what is it that music does when we divine?
A Divinatory Room
I realised, quite straightforwardly, that playing music does change me and my psychological state, but it also changes the entire environment.
The room becomes set for a specific purpose: while I’m using a phone and a Bluetooth speaker, the metaphorical equivalent of dropping a needle onto a record has started. Something has occurred, very intentionally, that is apparent to all in the room.
This is not necessarily a shift from an “ordinary” environment to a “sacred” environment. Often it can be sacred, but that’s usually a factor of the specific divination method (darkening lights to scry, rituals for spirit contact) than the act of divination itself (remember holding down Tarot cards to the table on a windy day?)
However, this is a still fundamental shift to a divinatory environment, from whatever it was previously — office, bedroom, coffee table slowly absorbing spilt cappuccino.
Navigating this shift is something that all diviners do, even when divining in rather un-reverential circumstances. A party Tarot reader trying to impart seriousness to an intoxicated guest may lower the volume of their voice, or get the guest to shuffle the cards and take a few deep breaths.
What Kind of Spaces?
Music fills the entire space instantly. On top of this, different pieces of music create different spaces. This allows us to think intentionally about the kinds of music we play, for the kinds of spaces we want to create.
It’s rare that everyone, in their day to day life, listens to Pharoah Sanders B-sides, or Four Tet tracks beyond what you find on Spotify playlists. Any piece of music that stands out — not a Lo-Fi Beats To Study/Chill To stream — will mark off the space as different. This does not mean it has to be music reserved just for divination, but anything that takes you out of “this is my office for sending emails” to “this is my boudoir for seeing the future” helps.
This applies even if you are just divining for yourself, or for a remote client — in fact, this is easier solo! Accommodating the musical likes and dislikes of others (to mention Pharoah Sanders again, sometimes that saxophone can be… too much) is more challenging than just scrolling through your collection and choosing something that changes your environment.
Feeling Like a Diviner
This ties into a crucial, but under-discussed aspect of being a diviner: that of being a diviner. “Diviner” is not a role most people in today’s Anglosphere understand or experience. For many of us, even professionals, it’s also not a role we do for more than a few hours a day — divination is part of the gig economy!
Anything that marks out a given space and experience as divinatory, even as opposed to other forms of spiritual informational exchange — meditation, counselling, coaching, ritual — helps the diviner understand their role in that moment as other, as delivering information for elsewhere (or from right here, depending on philosophy.)
Peace,
⭕