Divination. What's your favorite?

Divination. What’s your favorite? Like donuts, they are all so beautiful in different ways. Tarot is the major contender, of course, because it has stood the test of time as a stronghold of reliability and depth. Also people like a book with pictures and The Book “T” has that in spades, I mean disks. There are also a wide variety of spreads for using tarot cards which make it adaptable for your personality. Unfortunately, I have a chronic habit of losing one card, just one card, from every tarot deck I have ever owned. (My current deck has to be sealed in a bag immediately after using.) But everyone knows I don’t play with a full deck!
As Tigger the Tarot reader used to sing while attending a tarot convention with Winnie the Seer, “The wonderful thing about tarot, tarot are wonderful things. There tops are spun out of DE-signs. There bottoms are made out of dreams.” You can use a deck of tarot cards to work the paths of the Tree of Life or to do dream invocation work, attracting the influences you want while sleeping. Specific tarot cards may be laid out as the Enochian Tablet of Union with interesting results. Regular playing cards may be used for readings as is popular and affordable to many. The tarot multitasking is virtually endless.

Now, holding more affection for me is the I-Ching. Whether you use Canadian coins, yarrow stalk, Chinese coins, painted rocks, or turtle shells, the I-Ching is a fantastic method of getting some pretty direct answers to your inquiries. There are also as many different methods to get your answers as there are paths to walk down to get home from your work. Are you a person who uses the three coin method or the six coin method? Do you embrace the “running line” or ignore it? I crafted some I-Ching sticks modeled after Aleister Crowley’s method given to Grady Mc Murtry. Jerry Cornelius has a great blog entry showing a picture of a set of sticks he made based on Mc Murtry’s sticks which were given to him by Crowley and they work really nice for me. There is also a great story Grady told Cornelius about Crowley devising his own methods using the I-Ching framework without using sticks or coins. Crowley would walk down the street stating his question to the universe and if the next person he encountered was a woman he chalked that up to be the equivalent to yin. If it was a man he came across he would be counted as yang. And so on until he had the requisite lines for the “reading” filled out. This is a very creative way of utilizing a divinatory system without needing pesky cards or coins. You could basically create your own system deducing your own methods and outcomes.
In my Golden Dawn work, I used geomancy for awhile with great results. If you have a chance to look at this method of divination I really recommend it because there are some fun things going on with the calculations of the reading. Originally, geomancy was drawn with a stick in the dirt, but now it is more “user friendly” to use the same method with a pen and paper. (Carrying sacks of dirt on the chance you may do a reading for someone really gets old. You have to have enough dirt to cover the table at Starbucks and you receive some seriously “dirty” looks. Get it? Right, let’s pretend this never happened.)
Maybe you’re more of a pendulum reader. Or a conch shell thrower. I even own a book on using a Rubik’s cube as a “Cube of Light” to do readings with! There are some fantastic divination systems out there. It’s all about finding which one works for what you’re doing and what feels right to a Magus like you.

Here's Cornelius' writing regarding Crowley's I-Ching sticks: http://www.cornelius93.com/CROWLEYSI-CHINGSTICKS.html