Oh boy, I have to share this – I was just watching EA’s new vid (here) and he says he got the script for the Universal Circle, and a whole lot of other powerful stuff, channeled whilst sitting on a stairwell.
Now, I don’t know the full story behind that, but quite a few years ago I did a shamanic-style workshop, and the teacher introduced the idea that staircases and doorways are both liminal spaces, “in-between” areas that (doctrine of correspondences style) allow us access to liminal states of mind, and maybe even states of being, halfway between the spiritual realms and our own everyday reality, and he then showed us a method of divination that uses these liminal spaces, and requires no tools whatsoever.
Hauntings & Traditions
I already knew that there are a large number of reported hauntings that involve staircases, hallways between rooms, and ghostly figures and shapes viewed through doorways, and I’d read that in some eastern cultures it’s considered inauspicious to shout or hold a conversation whilst passing through doorways, and to hand things through a doorway, although I don’t know whether that’s a current thing (I read it in a book about Indian culture and good manners, and no longer own that book).
There are also superstitions in the UK about not passing someone on the stairs, and although that’s largely ignored in public spaces, the older members of my own family, most of whom were very superstitious and fey, warned me about this quite regularly as a child.
And there was an over-riding superstition that I still kind of observe, that you never go partially up or down a flight of stairs and then turn round on a stair (because you changed your mind or forgot something) – you always complete the flight, then turn and go back once you’re off the stairs. More of the implication that within any home, these spaces carry a magickal charge.
Even Andy McNab, a British author who was in the SAS and writes fictional books that are noted for including quite a lot of “tradecraft” from real special forces training, mentions in at least one of this books that when people have just come through a door, their thinking kind of changes, because they’re still tuned into the environment of the room they’ve just left, overlaid with whatever purpose has caused them to leave the room, and are not attuned fully to the new space that they’re entering: assuming this is true most of the time, that means that all doorways hold the repeated energetic imprint of hundreds or thousands of moments where people are in this split, transitional kind of mental state.
Divination Method
Anyway, in this method I learned, which the guy described as having Celtic origins, you stand in a doorway or on a flight of steps, and turn round three times with your eyes closed – obviously, be VERY careful how you do this when you’re on stairs – and then open your eyes, and the very first thing your eyes alight on when you open them will be a symbol of what your answer is.
You do it three times, in three different liminal spaces, and that gives you the full answer, with the symbols in the world standing in almost like the symbolism of a tarot deck three-card reading.
You can work up any amount of correspondences (did you view anything resembling a cup or a sword, or a Runic symbol, or anything from your personal symbol set?) or, just as powerfully, simply go with your gut feeling on what that first-seen image means.
Like a lot of workshops and residential trainings, having learned this we then paired up, and the astonishing thing is that, even though I was at that time firmly into my “white light” stage, my partner in the exercise forsaw that I’d be commanding and communing spiritually with “darkness,” which she saw from the dark nighttime sky over a carved oak console table, that looked very like an altar.
The next two readings she did contained similar symbolism, and at the time that reading made no sense at all to me, but it turned out to be incredibly accurate.
I don’t remember what my reading was for her and sadly I can’t find my notes now, but she said that it represented an accurate option as an answer for the question she asked.
The stairway thing is a bit risky, but almost everyone has access to doorways, so this might be one to try and see how you find it?
And the general possibility of using these liminal spaces when divining, scrying, or attempting to make contact in some way might be worth exploring as well.
hahaha