Hi, a stupid question, how do you tell the upside and downside of similar ogham symbol staves? And second, if there is no limit on requests, can I have another shufflemancy?
Nope, no restrictions or limitations regarding divination here, except for the number of requests I’m willing to receive and fulfill from a person at any given time, which is only one. I’ll be keeping this round of free divination session open and available until midnight on my thirty-second birthday of September 8th, 2019, so feel free to send as many requests as you want or need between now and then. Just only send one request at a time please. That way I won’t end up becoming overwelmed and burn out as a result.
For you, I received the song “Wayward One” by Alter Bridge.
I want you to know before I keep going with this divination that Hekate is speaking directly to you through this song in this divination at this time. I felt her presence the moment I started shuffling my music and she’s been taking over my fingers as I attempt to type this all out, causing me to type her name instead of the band’s name several times. She wanted me to know fore sure and thus tell you in this answer of your ask that she’s speaking to you directly right now.
“Wayward One” is a song that is very much about the lost, the lonely, the abused, the disabled, and the broken. It is a song about guiding the lost back to where they belong or being guided yourself back to where you belong or need to go. It is about healing the harmed and the broken and being healed if you are harmed and broken in some way.
It is a song of hope for the hopeless and a song about bringing the light to the darkness of some lives.
Hekate is saying that she is the light to guide you where you want to go, where you need to be, and the balm to heal your wounded spirit. She is and wants to be the torcchlight to guide you through the darkness of the night and across the crossroads of your life.
She’s got your back, she’s listening to you, even if you don’t know or aren’t aware of her presence. She’s answering the call you made, agreeing to something that you asked along the way that only she heard.
Damn, that was a powerful message. And now I’m tired as fuck as she just drained a good bit of my energy just to type all of that out. I’ll probably take a bit of a nap after I finish answering this and post it up on my blog.
As for your question regarding how to disern which end of an Ogham character is which, that’s not a stupid question at all. A lot of people struggle with this and it’s one of many things that tends to put people off from Ogham in the beginning when they’re attempting to approach it.
Hell, it took me a couple of years to figure this out myself and that was even more years before I got my hands on the right materials to research it properly.
Ogham is a very tactile system of divination by nature, maybe even the most tactile form of divination in the world, or at least that’s my opinion on it. It was traditionally carved on materials such as stone, wood, etc.
Yeah, a lot of people use other materials to etch, draw, etc, the characters, which can then confuse the hell out of people which character is which by how you hold and look at it.
Ogham is also a bottom up kind of system. What I mean by this is that the first character in a group of five will be carbed or eched at the bottom or near the bottom of the center or stem line, which symbolizes the edge lines that Ogham was originally carved on. So a grouping of five will start from the bottom and work it’s way up.
Of course a lot of people who make and sell Ogham sets these days, especially in the more Neo-Pagan section of online shops, for example, will either not know any of this or will disregard these facts if they do know about them in the first place.
Also, a lot of traditional sets of Ogham will contain an arrow head or tail like marking at the bottom of a character to help tell the reader working with the Ogham set which end is which. If an Ogham set contains these markings, they’ll either have them on all of the characters or they’ll have them only on some of them. If the set only contains these markings on some of the characters, it will only contain them on either the first grouping of five, the second grouping five, or the first two grouping of five characters altogether.
Another way to help a person to discern which ones are which is to keep in mind that Ogham isn’t read with reversals or shouldn’t be read with reversals at least. I know a lot of people do read or at least attempt to read them with reversals but doing so with Ogham is very clunky and inpractical at best and just down right confusing, redundant, and problematic at worst.
Actually, the reason why I don’t read reversals at all with any kind of divination system I work with, Oracle and Tarot decks specifically for example, is due to Ogham being the first system I learned how to divine with. Most of my divination based practices, habits, techniques, patterns, and even my mindset is based on all the years I studied, got to know, and bonded with the energies of the characters themselves.
The best advice I can give to someone trying to read Ogham, especially if they are new and/or are working with a set that contains no straight forward method to tel groupings of characters from each other is to look at how you are holding the characters. Assuming that the characters were made in a block, rectangle, oblong, or stick like fashion, look at how you’re holding them. If you are holding the characters that contain single lines to one side of the edge, stem line, or center linein a vertical or horizontal fashion, you can easily tell which characters from the first two groupings of five you are reading. Characters that are either right of or below the center line when held in one of those fashions are characters of the first grouping of five: B, L, F, S, and N, while any characters that are either to the left of or above the center line are the following characters: H, D, T, C, Q
I hope that explaination helps!