Ogham Reading Sanity Check
Apr. 20th, 2022 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jprussellUPDATE 4/22/22: See bottom of entry for some further thoughts
Well, I suppose this is my first actual post to my own journal here. I mostly maintain it to participate in other communities and comment on others' posts, but I'm noodling over something and thought I might see if anyone has thoughts. I very well might post this to the next Magic Monday, but I thought I'd solicit thoughts ahead of time.
My wife and I are expecting our second daughter in October (hooray!), and because of that, I'm going to need to put any progression in ceremonial magic on hold. I was considering the Dolmen Arch as an alternative to the Druid Magic Handbook I've been working my way through, as it sounded like a good way to build on the lore and symbolism I've already learned and maintain a rigorous practice without (much) ceremonial magic.
So, I did an Ogham spread for the question "Should I take up the Dolmen Arch course while I put the DMH on pause?" and got the following:
Whatever else this is, it seems like a pretty clear "no". I read it as "I've got what I need, but I'm missing it and need to pay more attention and work out a better way forward with what I've got to hand, very possibly because I'm misunderstanding what my true goal is/ought to be."
As such, I'm thinking I might be better off meditating my way through all of the Ogham correspondences, pathworking the wheel of the year, and otherwise exploring the non-ceremonial parts of the DMH, while keeping up with the Earth and Sun path stuff in the Druidry Handbook.
Obviously, I'll have to work this one out for myself with thinking, meditation, and divination, but if anything from the above jumps out at you as an especially good or bad idea, or if I've gotten the reading entirely wrong, I'd appreciate hearing so.
Any and all thoughts decidedly welcome!
Update 4/22/22
Thanks to sdi and aelric for your comments, and if anyone has further thoughts, those would still be helpful. I ended up casting more readings throughout the week, each building on the previous results:
Question 1 (4/20/22): "Should I set aside the DMH and its work while my kids are too young for advanced magic?"
- Setting: Ur
- Work: Huath (Reversed)
- Outcome: Saille
My Take: I've got a strong spiritual base, and moving forward I'll need flexibility, but it would be rash to set aside the DMH entirely.
Question 2 (4/21/22): "Should I keep up with the safe work from the DMH while my kids are too young for advanced magic?"
- Setting: Nuin
- Work: Ur
- Outcome: Coll (Reversed)
My Take: There is a wider world of context and connection around me I need to be paying attention to, and doing the work of the DMH will provide plenty of spiritual richness (note the repetition of Ur, here), but if this is all that I do, I'll run into creative blockages, perhaps holding myself back through fear of failure.
Question 3 (4/22/22): "Should I combine the Dolmen Arch with my DMH study while my kids are too young to safely do ceremonial magic?"
- Setting: Koad
- Work: Duir
- Outcome: Tinne
My Take: There is great possibility and capacity for freedom around me, and I have the strength needed to follow this path. Doing so might result in some challenges/conflicts, but if I am decisive and bold, those can go my way.
Commentary on the process: This might look like nitpicking or asking the same question in slightly different ways, but for me, at least, I've found the Ogham to be pretty well suited to these kinds of narrowing-down/circling around the main point kind of questions. It does seem to be important to take each answer seriously, and for any subsequent questions to build on previous ones, but or lack of a better way to put it, the Ogham seems to "like" exploring the same general idea from different angles, especially if it's a question of spiritual relevance.
In this case, I began with an overloaded question: "Should I take up the Dolmen Arch course while I put the DMH on pause?" This 1) assumed I should put the DMH on pause and replace it with something else, and 2) assumed that replacement ought to be the Dolmen Arch. Realizing it was overloaded (with some help from commenters!) led me to test those assumptions. First, "should I put the DMH on pause?" and then when I got a seeming "no" to that question, just to be extra clear "so, I should keep up with the DMH, then?" which got me a "yes, but. . ." And then, based on Aelric's comment, I got back to specifics and asked "Okay, so is the thing I should combine with it the DA?" and got what looks like almost as close to an unqualified "yes" as I know to look for from a 3-card spread in Ogham.
Anyhow, again, if anyone sees any glaring errors in the above, I'd love to hear about them, and even if not, I hope that explaining my process gives some helpful insight to someone.
Well, I suppose this is my first actual post to my own journal here. I mostly maintain it to participate in other communities and comment on others' posts, but I'm noodling over something and thought I might see if anyone has thoughts. I very well might post this to the next Magic Monday, but I thought I'd solicit thoughts ahead of time.
My wife and I are expecting our second daughter in October (hooray!), and because of that, I'm going to need to put any progression in ceremonial magic on hold. I was considering the Dolmen Arch as an alternative to the Druid Magic Handbook I've been working my way through, as it sounded like a good way to build on the lore and symbolism I've already learned and maintain a rigorous practice without (much) ceremonial magic.
So, I did an Ogham spread for the question "Should I take up the Dolmen Arch course while I put the DMH on pause?" and got the following:
- Situation: Quert
- Work: Ailm (Reversed)
- Outcome: Tinne (Reversed)
Whatever else this is, it seems like a pretty clear "no". I read it as "I've got what I need, but I'm missing it and need to pay more attention and work out a better way forward with what I've got to hand, very possibly because I'm misunderstanding what my true goal is/ought to be."
As such, I'm thinking I might be better off meditating my way through all of the Ogham correspondences, pathworking the wheel of the year, and otherwise exploring the non-ceremonial parts of the DMH, while keeping up with the Earth and Sun path stuff in the Druidry Handbook.
Obviously, I'll have to work this one out for myself with thinking, meditation, and divination, but if anything from the above jumps out at you as an especially good or bad idea, or if I've gotten the reading entirely wrong, I'd appreciate hearing so.
Any and all thoughts decidedly welcome!
Update 4/22/22
Thanks to sdi and aelric for your comments, and if anyone has further thoughts, those would still be helpful. I ended up casting more readings throughout the week, each building on the previous results:
Question 1 (4/20/22): "Should I set aside the DMH and its work while my kids are too young for advanced magic?"
- Setting: Ur
- Work: Huath (Reversed)
- Outcome: Saille
My Take: I've got a strong spiritual base, and moving forward I'll need flexibility, but it would be rash to set aside the DMH entirely.
Question 2 (4/21/22): "Should I keep up with the safe work from the DMH while my kids are too young for advanced magic?"
- Setting: Nuin
- Work: Ur
- Outcome: Coll (Reversed)
My Take: There is a wider world of context and connection around me I need to be paying attention to, and doing the work of the DMH will provide plenty of spiritual richness (note the repetition of Ur, here), but if this is all that I do, I'll run into creative blockages, perhaps holding myself back through fear of failure.
Question 3 (4/22/22): "Should I combine the Dolmen Arch with my DMH study while my kids are too young to safely do ceremonial magic?"
- Setting: Koad
- Work: Duir
- Outcome: Tinne
My Take: There is great possibility and capacity for freedom around me, and I have the strength needed to follow this path. Doing so might result in some challenges/conflicts, but if I am decisive and bold, those can go my way.
Commentary on the process: This might look like nitpicking or asking the same question in slightly different ways, but for me, at least, I've found the Ogham to be pretty well suited to these kinds of narrowing-down/circling around the main point kind of questions. It does seem to be important to take each answer seriously, and for any subsequent questions to build on previous ones, but or lack of a better way to put it, the Ogham seems to "like" exploring the same general idea from different angles, especially if it's a question of spiritual relevance.
In this case, I began with an overloaded question: "Should I take up the Dolmen Arch course while I put the DMH on pause?" This 1) assumed I should put the DMH on pause and replace it with something else, and 2) assumed that replacement ought to be the Dolmen Arch. Realizing it was overloaded (with some help from commenters!) led me to test those assumptions. First, "should I put the DMH on pause?" and then when I got a seeming "no" to that question, just to be extra clear "so, I should keep up with the DMH, then?" which got me a "yes, but. . ." And then, based on Aelric's comment, I got back to specifics and asked "Okay, so is the thing I should combine with it the DA?" and got what looks like almost as close to an unqualified "yes" as I know to look for from a 3-card spread in Ogham.
Anyhow, again, if anyone sees any glaring errors in the above, I'd love to hear about them, and even if not, I hope that explaining my process gives some helpful insight to someone.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-21 02:54 pm (UTC)Secondly, here is my two cents. I recall JMG saying something along the lines of not making major life decisions based off amateur-level divination readings; that the whole point of doing divinations at beginning levels is to develop general intuition skills in addition to technical competence for the divination system in question. So by that, it seems it might be rather easy to overthink a simple Ogham reading.
On the question itself, ""Should I take up the Dolmen Arch course while I put the DMH on pause?" .. it appears to be two questions loaded into one. (1) "Should I take up the Dolmen Arch course," and (2) "Should I put the DMH on pause?"
Thirdly, these two courses are really branches of the same system. My own amateur take here: I don't see why you can't develop your meditation and pathworking of the Ogham while exploring the rich philosophy and mental exercises of the DA. Though if you want to do the whole DA course, the meditations will be focusing on the branches of the Mabinogian instead of the Ogham. Also, nothing within the entirety of the DA involves doing any ceremonial magic, whereas you can't really progress that far in DMH without doing the Grove rituals, which of course is full-blown ceremonial magic. So logic would dictate that IF your goal is to complete a system of instruction within the next several years, that of the two books, DA is the only viable choice given your family situation. Of course, if you don't mind putting off progression in DMH for the next 5-7 years, then you can just stick to the meditation parts. But in that time you could have gotten through all of DA.
tl;dr in a nutshell I think a vague, amateur-level divination should not override simple logic. But honestly, I'd ask a condensed/concise inquiry on all of this on MM, as my own lack of experience might be shining through here.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-21 08:04 pm (UTC)1. Point well-taken on amateur divination readings. I am at a point in my readings (~11 months of daily Ogham readings) where I usually feel pretty good about my interpretation, but for weightier decisions, I get a bit of cold feet. Luckily, when it comes to "what should my spiritual practice be for the next few years?", the factors are mostly within my control, as long as I stick to some basic magical safety the risks are pretty low, and I can always course correct as I learn more, so it's not quite as dire as deciding whether to move across the country or something!
2. Excellent point! After posting this, I realized that I had buried some assumptions in there, so yesterday afternoon, I did a reading asking "Should I set aside the DMH and its work while our daughter is too young for me to do magic?" and got the following:
- Setting: Ur
- Work: Huath (Reversed)
- Outcome: Saille
I took this one to mean that I have a strong spiritual base to start from, and that I need to be flexible moving forward, but that it would be rash to totally set aside the DMH. Which leads me to your third point.
3. Here is the assumption I've been working from that I don't think I conveyed above: one of the reasons I took up the DMH, rather than keeping on with a cobbled together set of practices (Heathen LBRP+MP, Daily Rune Reading, Meditation themes taken from Norse myth), was that for a variety of reasons it would be valuable for me to take JMG's advice to pick a published system, and follow it to the letter beginning to end before trying to move on to any kind of customization or the like. As such, I have been assuming that after it is safe to do so, I will come back to DMH and complete it as written, and I've worried that jumping to a completely new system would be undermining my resolution to do DMH front to back (even if it takes a pause in the middle).
Given those assumptions, I was a bit leery of deciding "Eh, DA and DMH are pretty much the same, except for the ceremonial magic, it should count", hence the divinations. That being said, something very much like your logic is what led me to ask the question I did (I had already started reading DA and thinking "how should I start fitting this into my daily practice?")
So, in closing, you've got some good points I'm definitely going to consider, and yes, I think I'll ask a condensed version on MM, unless any comments here and/or further divination and meditation make the right way forward clearer!