Why Divination and not prescience

A bit of late night ramblin to process my thoughts of the last few days. :face_with_monocle:

So to start off some defintions

Divination (from Latin divinare “to foresee, to be inspired by a god”,[2] related to divinus, divine) is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual.[3] Used in various forms throughout history, diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a querent should proceed by reading signs, events, or omens, or through alleged contact with a supernatural agency.[4]

Vs

Precognition (from the Latin prae-, “before” and cognitio, “acquiring knowledge”), also called prescience, future vision, future sight is an alleged psychic ability to see events in the future.

So why would you want indications or a road map on the energetic flow of events and its possible outcomes rather than the foresight to predict with certainty?

Well the former offers choice and the freedom to shift your words,thoughts and deeds if you decide to alter course for one reason or another. Where as the latter locks you into a loop of having to track detail after detail lest one cause evade your sight and shift events from your outcome and knowing what always comes next would get boring pretty fast as all surprise and spontaneity is slowly sucked out of life.

Then there is the idea of the “prophet” who often ends up shapeing the future as much as speaking predictions on it. The practitioner through acts of divination shows a overview of current forces at work based on the method selected and then allows for a more profitable choice to be made in terms of thought,word and deed whether it be of magickal or mundane in nature.

The results of which if applied correctly and tactically allow the practitioner to create to a degree their own self fulfilled prophesies in their own lives and the lives of others even if the outside party was not aware of their role in things.

The act of divination sometime after a working allowing one to get an idea of any possible hurdles that may have sprung up either as a result of causes made either as an effect of the practitioners work or the work of others, again either of a magickal or mundane nature and finding out what actions may be put into effect to overcome them.

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Brilliant.

Because if you do it yourself. Your assumptions impressions and desired outcome or result will be influenced by your need for it to happen, divination on the other hand drops ego and is pure divine truth

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Great work D.

Not all things are certain, and honestly, sometimes a bit of mystery is fun.

Gettin’ into heavy philosophical territory here with free will versus destiny. :smiley:

The way I look at it is: if the future’s fixed, there’d be no point in divining it because we couldn’t change it anyway. I don’t see too much difference between divination and precognition, as both seem to involve getting a general idea about the future if nothing else changes and all factors and influences proceed as normal. We use this general knowledge to discern what trends exist and what we can do to alter the future towards something more desirable to our ends (or, if need be, how to make sure the future stays as projected).

:+1:

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This is where a shift in perspective is needed. One who has no notion of magick can argue this till their in the ground. One who dives into the heights and depths of magick learns to utilize will to weave destiny and fate. The only variance is in regard to skill of the practitioner.

The different of the 2 is precognition implies a 1 fixed stream of time to view and to just step into it as an inevitability. There have been quite a few movies on this idea. As well as religions with gods that have “perfect” knowledge of the future so to further lock one into that limit.

Divination on the other hand points to a multitude of time lines and as a result reality matrices that the active awareness can shift itself into as a result of thoughts,words and deeds that reverberate across the multiverse.

In this paradigm one can choose to let events play out or work to shift,alter or shatter event chains changing local and world events. We have a few examples of this in the large scale group works on the forum as well as the small scale workings people do individually.

Also anothet aspect that exists in this paradigm is the ability to “scry” into past events to gain insight from the past. As well as scrying into the probable furtures to observe how possible event chains may turn out at a given moment. Though to “seal” these event chains it would require active maintenance and divinations to deal any cause-effect chains aimed at halting the desired outcome.

One way of doing this is molding the nexus of energy that represents this outcome on the spiritual planes creating a lens on ones personal reality matrix, maintaining and then projecting the image of this nexus onto the matrix of the collectively observed reality.

The personal lens slowly eclipses the collective matrix projecting or shining the light of the created nexus into the minds the localized area of the target and expanding outward.

In this way divination is turned into an active tool for change instead of a tool for evaluation and insight.

:alien:

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Yes, :thinking:

Considering the Double Slit Experiment,
Whatever man observes/thinks (in this case being future or destiny),
he changes on a quantum level instantaneously.

So it seems to me that divination is, willing into existence the most desired destiny through use of thought.

I don’t know if there has to be a VS maybe it’s both
The free will in choosing your own destiny because as mentioned above “one” is constantly creating it.

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My point is regardless of skill, certain beliefs are being held with regard to these concepts. If we’re able to weave or change destiny/fate, then it wouldn’t really be fate in the first place. So it depends on whether you believe in absolute fate, or if you think that free, conscious will exists and we are able to change these futures that we perceive through these methods. As magicians it’d be rather self-defeating to believe in the first concept. :laughing:

I don’t think this is a necessarily valid implication… after all, when people get precognitive dreams of, say, a train crash killing their husband or wife, they don’t just sit at home and shrug “oh well” because the train crash must be inevitable. They try to convince their partner to stay home from work, thus changing the future.

Now the dictionary definition of precognition according to Merriam-Webster is “clairvoyance relating to an event or state not yet experienced.” To me this doesn’t imply that the event can’t be changed; instead it’s just saying that we’re directly seeing what’s going to happen if nothing else changes. This differs from divination using, say, Tarot or runes where we don’t always have a clairvoyant vision but can still discern what trends are at work in the world. So perhaps a better distinction would be that of precision, where divination is less precise than precognition but both visions of the future are still mutable?

Yes, I agree. It seems likely that some mix of the two is what’s in play (ie the compatibilist theory), but exactly how that goes down is a bit of a headfuck. And of course if you add in the Libet experiments, it starts looking like we actually don’t have free will in the first place, but at least pragmatically speaking I prefer to believe we do. :rofl:

Awesome discussion though. I’ve been getting hard into divination lately so the topic has also been on a lot of my mind. :flying_saucer:

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With this i think we have different concepts of “fate” for me its similar to the web of wryd from what i have learned of it. A kind of living tapestry that is woven from the cause-effect chains to make up our reality from going to the store to stars collapsing.

Divination allows us threw various methods to view this tapestry but at the moment being viewed it changes as our thoughts,words and deeds are changed by what we perceive and creates ripples or waves as a result of what actions are or are not taken. Sometimes the ripples have a small effect as they are dispersed by larger ripples and waves.

Kinda like the difference in ripples made throwing a pebbles versus an earthquake causing a tidal wave. An extreme example but in the case of some long term group and singular workings more accurate i think.

Now when you consider humans are creatures of habit it can be seen how some can perceive this “fate” to be immutable or challenging to change if they themselves are not working to take the actions needed to alter course drastically.

This would be why in this constant cosmic dance of becoming it seems like some fates shift suddenly and often and some like molasses or never.

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