The Punk Rock Oracle
As I've studied divination, one of the things that's delighted me about it is how simple most of the traditional techniques are. Cover your ears and step out onto a crowded street, and the first words you hear are from Hermes. Write the names of your enemies on pieces of paper. Tuck the pieces of paper into balls of mud, and throw them into a bucket of water. The first mudball to dissolve holds the name of the man who stole your chicken. Look into a pan of water and relax your eyes and tell me what you see. Drop alphabet tiles on the floor and read what they say. If the bird flies one way, the gods say, "Yes," if the bird flies the other way, run inside quick.
Modern diviners have largely gotten away from that old simplicity. It makes sense. Without the old magical worldview propping us up, we need the effort of learning to read Tarot or astrology and a rich language of symbolism to infuse our work with meaning and prop up our magic. But just because we need deeply meaningful tools doesn't mean that they have to be precious, heirloom objects that are expensive and require a factory to create.
Now, I'd like to introduce, all the way from Portland, Oregon: The Punk Rock Oracle.
The Punk Rock Oracle is a cartomancy deck that you create yourself out of words, images, and symbols that are meaningful to you out of random shit you have in your house (or find on the street or the show at the VFW Hall or whatever). It's junk journaling meets SoulCollage meets the hundreds of pages of correspondence charts you keep in your online grimoire and can't find a use for meets three chords and a bass guitar (optional).
Materials:
Something to glue with (I used glue stick)
Something to glue on (I used index cards)
Something paper-like with pictures and words/phrases on it (I used National Geographic and Bella Grace because I was feeling fancy. You could also make a deck out of band stickers and junk mail.)
A way of randomly choosing symbols (I used astro dice and runes. You could use a random number generator and a table of number/symbol correspondences. (Eg. 1 = Jupiter, 2 = Saturn, 3 = air, 4 = alder, 5 = $$$ etc.)
A marker or pen (I used a Sharpie)
To make a deck:
Choose pictures that strike your fancy, and cut them out. (Don't overthink it.)
Choose words that strike your fancy, and cut them out (or use song lyrics and write them down). (Don't overthink it.)
Put the words/phrases in one pile and the pictures in another pile.
Glue the pictures to index cards (or whatever).
Put all of the words face down on your work surface (or dump them into a box) and randomly choose a word/phrase.
Randomly choose an index card with a picture on it.
Glue the randomly chosen word to the randomly chosen index card that now has a picture on it.
Randomly choose symbols and draw them on your index card.
Repeat until you have a good sized deck or get sick of it or you (finally) wear out your Saves the Day vinyl.
Ta-da! You now have a cartomancy deck that is as wyrd as the Tarot--and probably more so because you created this deck from randomness, which means the deck itself is deeply tied into the wyrd at the moment you created it. Wyrd.
The creation of a Punk Rock Oracle deck is itself a form of divination. Looking through my deck six months after creating it, I'm amazed by how many very important messages there are in this deck that I missed and had to hear another way.
I'm also amazed how cards that were deeply meaningful at the time feel...not dated exactly but a bit like a pair of jeans that really can't take another hole. At the time, my intent was to create a deck I could use for awhile, so I painted my cards with matte medium, but that only made them stick together and tear each other apart when the cards are separated. I now believe this deck is meant to be transitory, a reflection of a moment in time like those sand mandalas (video) Buddhist monks make or the paperclip piercing you gave yourself when you were drunk on Mountain Dew and vodka.
How do you use it? Unless you over-thought it (I told you not to overthink it!) the images you chose will be inherently meaningful to you. Magickal practitioners struggle and strain to stuff enough meaning into magickal workings, but if you just go with your first instincts, you will naturally choose things that say something to you. Those associations are what give this deck meaning. There's no little white booklet with card interpretations because you are the little white book. Whatever meaning you find in the images is valid. Because you are valid, you know?
Steal this deck: Ironically, considering what I said about transitoriness, you can actually download a copy of the original Punk Rock Oracle on GitHub. This link will allow you to download the cards as a zip file. They are also included as a deck option in BlackMirror, a free open source divination app created by Soren Tycho.
Or, better yet, make your own: And tag me on tumblr @beamagical or on Instagram @bea_magical. Use the hashtag #punkrockoracle.
