Kimberly Steele

The Druids knew I was going to get to this one, having covered the other two legs of the Revival Druidry tripod: discursive meditation and a daily banishing ritual (or weekly traditional mass that serves the same spiritual cleansing function). For those who do not already know me, I was raised casually Protestant and became atheist in my late twenties. I began studying Druidry when I was approximately forty five, taking up the standard daily practices of discursive meditation, banishing, and divination about seven years ago. I now believe in many gods, read Ogham for other people, and talk to so-called inanimate objects and spaces as easily as I converse with other human beings. I talk to trees and I talk to my toilet when I clean it every night, and I believe I am far less crazy than when I was an atheist. My book about connecting with the spirits of place, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying is coming out in Summer of 2026 from Aeon Books.

Anyways, back to the subject at hand. Divination is something we all do whether we admit it or not, and that is why religious edicts against divination are so silly. The hyper-monotheists for whom divination is strictly verboten tend to be the most superstitious of all, endlessly hoping to stumble upon synchronicities that can be interpreted as direct messages from their remote and distant God. If I had a twenty for every religious fanatic who grasped for predictions of the future in the random events of any given week, I would have no shortage of pocket money. In fact, most of what constitutes “prayer” in modern religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, etc.) is begging God for a sign that everything is going to work out to the supplicant’s advantage. This is also known as casting God in the role of Santa Claus. It is an attempt at gaining control over the uncontrollable, or at least a facsimile of control via imagining that one is favored by those in control.

Why watch the weather?

There are religious people who eschew divination to the point where they refuse to read their horoscopes for fear of being infected with the Satanism of astrology. They freak out if their kids have a Tarot deck. They seem to be in denial about the commonness of divination in early America, when young women marked apples and young men would bob for them at the annual Halloween party to casually predict who would pair off. Another regular, wholesome method of old timey love divination was to pluck a daisy’s petals while asking “He loves me, he loves me not” until the daisy had no more petals. You cannot tell me this is Satanic, and anyone who needs to project such a weird shadow on flowers ought to have their head checked.

So if you are one of the unfortunate many who thinks Tarot cards and palm reading is Satanic, you need to stop watching weather forecasts immediately. Delete the weather app from your mobile phone — actually, burn your phone and toss its gloppy plastic-lithium carcass in the deepest ocean because mobile phones are the Mark of the Beast. You never should have owned one to begin with. Weather predictions are straight up divination, my sanctimonious friend. They involve wanting to know the future via signs provided in the present. The weather app is a divination tool. It is the prognostication of a cabal of so-called experts who take photos and pressure readings of Earth from low orbit. They do this with flying machines made of metals pulled from the innards of caves and pits. If you watch the weatherman or look at the weather app, you clearly trust those mortal experts and the devices that carry their advice more than your God, you apostate freak. Idolater! Satan!

In my own case, I have no religious concerns about meteorology, so I am free to keep my weather app which came pre-installed on the phone and is correct most of the time. There are, however, bad divination tolls that I would suggest all avoid. One of these is Ouija boards.

Hell is a place on Earth

Ouija boards, although cool-looking, should never be used for divination, whether alone or in a group. Ouija was a natural outgrowth of the Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century, and as its origins imply, it is a way of bringing Spiritualist seances into your living room or children’s sleepover. To my mind, Madame Blatavatsky and the Spiritualist movement were a double-edged sword: though both helped to remediate the state of general spiritual ignorance that plagues modern Christianity and our current demonic age, on the other end, she and they introduced the mass practice of opening the floodgates of the lower astral plane and unleashing demons who used to be kept in check by now-nearly extinct religious banishing rituals and offerings. The Spiritualist urge to communicate with the dead unleashed a flotsam of depravity, sickness, and horror from the lower astral that continues unabated to this day.

The lower astral is not a different place than our own — instead, it is superimposed upon this reality as a vibration that runs through all. In other words, the only way you can escape it is to vibrate much differently than it, and that is easier said than done. To use a Ouija board is to tune your radio to the lower astral station. Once you do this, you open the invisible door to infection. Negative hauntings act like opportunistic pathogens, seeping out of their own confines in order to assail new and juicy targets. Their mission and objective is to reproduce: as above, so below. The subtle planes act like the dense ones and vice a versa; the analogy of fractals is always relevant.

For whatever reason, little lettered boards with planchettes attract lower astral plane vibes. The most common lower astral critter invoked by Ouija board is the mimic or impersonator spirit. Just as certain pathetic human scumbags compulsively posture as larger-than-life — for instance the young man I once knew who claimed his father was secret CIA and/or one degree of separation away from a famous celebrity or world leader — loser spirits like to impersonate important people. They will prey upon your wishful thinking and attempt to manipulate you via your ego and naivete. They will choose people who were close to you in life: your beloved grandmother, your cousin who died tragically, your dead spouse. If they sense you are especially naive, they will impersonate a famous person. Reliably you won’t be talking to Marilyn Monroe or your deceased uncle. No, you’ll be talking to the non-embodied equivalent of the junkie selling illegal substances out of his dilapidated ground floor apartment. He will be under control of a more powerful dealer-pimp, and that dealer-pimp is probably a demon.

Most negative hauntings do not escalate to full demonic possession. Full demonic possession is certainly the goal of most demons but it seldom happens. At any rate, the beings who love Ouija boards have full demonic takeover of persons and places as their ideal. Be glad they seldom get their way. The energy of Ouija is nearly identical to seances, and seances should also be avoided. I plan on discussing Ouija, seances, and the trouble with Spiritualism in a future essay.

All of these dire warnings about Ouija and seances are not meant to dissuade you from taking up a daily divination practice. Ouija boards and seances tend to be the exception to the rule. Divination is a way of talking to the Divine, hence the root of the word.

Refine and sift

There are many ways to divine. The oldest methods involve reading what is already there: clouds in the sky, numbers of leaves or petals on a plant, the lines and creases on the palm of the hand. For instance, I recently had to make a decision about working on Saturdays and I did not bring my usual divination tool, the Ogham, with me. I was in my car en route to work, so I asked the powers to help me decide. There are rose bushes blooming in front of the building where I work at the moment. I asked the spirit to provide an answer in the number of blooms on the bush closest to the door. If they were an even number, I was to work on Saturdays for approximately the next two years. If they were odd, then I would say nothing and continue to enjoy my Saturdays off. They were even and I am now working on Saturdays.

In this particular example, I did not want to work Saturdays. Though I love my job, I am now working seven days a week. As most middle class and lower middle class people understand, it is not easy to mentally or physically handle working every day of the week because the rest of life so easily gets in the way. Also, it is healthy to have a rest day and Saturday was it for me. That said, I am trying to get out of credit card debt once and for all, and in my current circumstances, if I want to be credit debt free, it means working Saturdays for the foreseeable future.

It is important not to vacillate in these matters or interpret signs they way we would like them to be. There were spent blooms on the rose bush that could have counted as five and not four, but I knew if I stretched the answer in such a way, I would suffer the karma of not accurately reading the writing on the wall. Why should the powers give me messages if I am only going to ignore them for what I want to hear? Also, had flowers not been in bloom, I would have found another natural phenomenon to determine my path: perhaps the number of students who cancelled that week or the number of cars in the adjacent parking lot when I arrived besides my own. Numbers are everywhere, waiting to give us a clue even if we have no formal divination method. The moral of the story is you can’t just give up and if you want an answer, you must accept it as it is given.

If I had not fine-tuned my powers of discernment, divination would be useless as it is for most people, even so-called holy people and self-labeled “sensitives”. For instance, there is a Youtube influencer who claims to divine spirit messages from trees, and these messages are always generic, New Age pablum that paints humanity on the verge of a great awakening. In other words, she tells people what she believes they want to hear for prestige, clicks, and clout. In my opinion, she is full of crap and though it is possible she does not know herself to be lying, it is also entirely possible she does.

The only two ways I know of improving discernment are regular discursive meditation and banishing rituals or their traditional mass equivalent, and that is why I recommend having both of those in place before diving into divination. The results of any divination should always be examined in discursive meditation. As far as banishing, it is the equivalent of bathing or of a surgeon scrubbing up before he goes into the surgical theater. Divination is serious stuff. It sure isn’t a party game, despite the protests of Hasbro. Divination takes practice and work. It is something you will get better at with time and experience.

There are three aspects you must bring out of yourself for divination to be effective:

1. You must honestly admit you could be wrong and your divination inaccurate
2. You must honestly consider your results in discursive meditation and not game them to say what you want to hear or fear (more on this later)
3. You must follow up with honest intention of becoming a better person than you were yesterday, if only by the slightest bit

Admitting “I could be wrong”

Too many people think they could not possibly be wrong. They come in all spiritual and non-spiritual persuasions. New Age cornucopians love “fake it until you make it” false transcendence. They pretend they know the Secret and that pretending hard enough will bring them oodles of consequence-free unearned wealth. LOL I think Rhonda Byrne and her devotees are going to be highly surprised about their outcomes in future lives, but then I could be wrong. Atheists insist there is no God because Meatworld sucks and a just God would not sign off on such a sucky world. Never mind they are looking for proof on a stage set of illusions designed to train the soul and not inform it. Whatever… lost cause. Moving on. Monotheists who mislabel and misinterpret the Divine in attempts to get its attention are bludgeons, shutting down their own subtle senses with a far more addictive set of knee jerk reactions. Since the Bible/Koran/whatever could not possibly be wrong, it provides a nice dopamine rush of titillation and self-righteousness to condemn any experience outside the narrow confines of one holy book and demonic and Satanic. If and when they do contemplate the Bible, it is usually in a group setting where they are told what to make of the Bible’s lessons by another garden variety sinner. The blind are leading the blind. The lessons never quite seem real, and the attempts to relate a bunch of Middle Eastern Bronze Age shepherds to modern life are nearly always a reach. If divination comes with help from God and the gods, which I believe it does, the puny human with her six inch meat brain needs to take a back seat and let Jesus take the wheel. This means not putting words into His mouth, earnestly contemplating His words, and accepting His truth over her own.

Meditating on the results

Divination is absolutely worthless without contemplation of its results. Before I began reading Ogham, I did at least three sessions of discursive meditation on each tree card (there are twenty five in the system I use) and I made a project of going outside and finding every tree I could. Because the Ogham and its trees is northern European in origin, I ended up devising my own Prairie Ogham based on my local tree and plant life. Once I started doing readings, I was able to get fairly accurate divinations because I had already laid the groundwork and gained the knowledge the old fashioned, hard way. This is what I believe is meant by “spiritual work” — from my experience, it is similar to effective musical practice. It must happen every day and it must put the ego aside for the slow drip-drip of accumulation that is replete with setbacks. Meditating on a reading involves a great deal of sifting to understand what lessons were being imparted on any given day. As you continue to do daily readings, overarching patterns will emerge and these too will require discursive meditation. Discursive meditation is truly an endless rabbit hole that eventually turns you into Gandalf the White. Not that I am Gandalf the White, but that is the direction it seems I am supposed to go and meditation is slowly and painstakingly helping me to get there.

Intention

As I have said in essays and in Sacred Homemaking, there is but one way drops of water become the Grand Canyon: persistence. Remember that the mighty Grand Canyon was once a pathetic dribble of a stream on a patch of rock. Over great expanses of time that no incarnated human can reasonably contemplate, those drops of water carved a river and eventually became huge. One of the reasons the Grand Canyon is so beautiful is that it represents so many forces aligning for vast, incomprehensible stretches of time. It is larger than life, or at least it is larger than our puny human existences. You are that drop of water and your intention is what will one day make a spectacular natural wonder, if not on this plane and this time, on other planes at other times. You have got to keep going and continue the alchemical process. This is not going to happen overnight.

 

When I was sixteen, heartbroken from my first failed romantic relationship, I turned to witchcraft with desperate hopes that I would gain the coolness and perspective of a sage adult.  My relationship with religion had always been complicated despite having an average suburban upbringing and average attendance at the local church.  I was confirmed in the usual way.  Truth be told, I never much felt adoration for the Christian god except for when we sang his music.  The music wasn’t enough to hold my interest.  At sixteen, frightened of my increasing hypnogogia and suicidally depressed, I dived into Gardnerian Wicca. 

 

In my opinion, Gardner is the type of occultist who is like a broken clock: he’s right twice a day and wrong the rest of the time.  His version of Wicca is more empty pomp and circumstance than substance — his rituals weren’t all that user-friendly to the sole practitioner, his explanations of what magic is and does were completely obtuse, and his frantic need to grant authenticity to his brand of witchcraft undermined its intention as a revival religion, which I would presume to be reviving a religion, to state the obvious.  I got myself a Tarot deck and it was the Thoth deck.  I love the Thoth deck to this day and I’m grateful for my early study of it, however, because of it I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.  I started delving into the works of Aleister Crowley.  Crowley, like Gardner, had no practical advice for other occultists and, like a bad music teacher, assumed every student was starting out with a basic working knowledge of the field's principles.  Crowley also was simply an awful person.  He’s a man who started out with everything in life: good looks, wealth, intelligence.  He squandered all of it, most likely molested children, and died broke and friendless in a fleabag rent-a-room.  His reputation as the “evilest man in the world” is somewhat of a joke, because shouldn’t a thoroughly evil man have bottomless sources of wealth and power?  Nevertheless, to dismiss Crowley’s labors, especially his magnum opus (the Thoth tarot deck) is to skip over a secret key to a vast storehouse of knowledge.  I bumbled through my late teenage and early college years, gaining a reputation among Christian paranoids at my city university because I dared display my esoteric books on an open shelf.  Yes, a small but rabid Christian constituent in my dorm tried to stop me from displaying 777 and Tarot: Mirror of the Soul.  Christians can be real asshats, and they don’t do their waning religion any favors by acting in such a fashion.

 

By the time I was leaving my 20s and college behind, I came to a watershed.  I was on anti-depressants because at seventeen, I voluntarily started taking antidepressants so I would stop thinking so seriously about killing myself.  As an adult, I decided the drugs had done their job.  My psychiatrist, a vacuous, incompetent, rich, comfortably numb boob, insisted I was nuts and that I would have to be on tricyclic antidepressants for the rest of my life.  This conflicted directly with me becoming an adult, and at the time depression was considered a pre-existing condition which could prevent me from getting health insurance.  I fired my shrink and weaned myself off of antidepressants.  My hypnogogia waned along with my antidepressant dosage, and it felt natural to stop thinking so much about Crowley, Tarot, and magical rituals that didn’t seem to do much of anything, let alone improve my life.  

 

By 30, I was atheist.  I still had hypnogogia and encountered odd things while in that state; I just chalked it up to the undiscovered scientific truth of inter dimensional bleed.  I still did magic, meaning, I threw my intentions in certain directions and uncanny stuff happened as a result.  Like any good atheist, I was a solipsist, trusting that I was God of my own mind and no other forces could possibly be at work there.  I condemned all forms of belief in God as various manifestations of the fear of death.  I ignored any and all beings who tried to talk to me; hidden deep down was the fear that my shrink was right, that I was crazy and soon enough the voices would prove I was insane.  I was gleefully nihilistic in my atheism.  Though I suppose it bothers some atheists that death is a one-way trip into a permanent void, that didn’t bother me at all.  In fact, I wrote my first novel, Forever Fifteen, as a look into the horror of being forced to exist in the flesh for a thousand years or more.  The protagonist, Lucy, longs for the black, permanent void of death, as boring as that may seem.  I have always loved tedium and the atheist version of what happens after death is about as tedious and boring as can be.  

 

Oddly, my atheist self also wrote a decidedly non-atheist music album, the Dream of Flight, which is an entire, programmatic album about what I only now belatedly understand to be the astral plane.  Occultists see human existence as the simultaneous manifestation of the soul or Individuality on approximately seven planes ranging from the lightest, the spiritual plane, to the densest, the material plane.  The astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of emotions and daily and nightly dreams, is somewhere in the middle.  Despite having written an album about dreams that talked about “bringing a whole world to life” via the dream world, I puttered on, quoting Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell and not believing there was any such thing as a disembodied spirit, non-corporeal being, or god. 

 

Fast forward to around age thirty-seven, when I went vegan for the animals.  Veganism gets accused of being a religion for good reasons, one of which is that it takes tremendous will power and dedication to ignore opposing forces who would have you conform to their animal-eating and abusing ways. People in our anti-religious culture believe that sort of dedication can only come from belief in a higher power, but I would argue that humans are naturally religious and if the Christian god cannot fill spiritual needs, actually living ones values as a vegan rushes into that spiritual void.  Most vegans I know are atheists who suffer from the binary delusion of either having to have one God (usually the Christian god) or no god at all (atheism).  Most are not willing to hear (at least in my opinion) they’re both wrong.  When I went vegan, suddenly all that bilge I used to spew as an ova-lacto vegetarian about not wanting to take on the energy of suffering and sad animals by eating them actually made sense.  When you go vegan, the weight you lose is mainly spiritual.  I was one of the lucky people whose health benefitted from going vegan — it helped that I already cooked most of my own meals and didn’t subsist on junk food — however, the feeling of clarity and purity that happened when I stopped eating animals and their secretions was one I wouldn’t trade even if being vegan gave me cancer, so there’s that.  

 

Around the same time, my absolute hatred of the suburbs and car obsession led me to an author-blogger named James Howard Kunstler.  Kunstler is devastatingly witty and because of this, I became a constant fan of his podcast and writings.  Every now and then, he featured a guy on his podcast named John Michael Greer.  I began to read John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report, which ostensibly was not about Druids or their religion but about the same subjects as Kunstler wrote about: peak oil, people, and politics.  I quietly ignored Greer’s “other” blog, The Well of Galabes, which was about magic.  As an atheist, I hardly cared about woo-woo interests I had abandoned along with antidepressant drugs and childhood.  I’m not sure at what point I decided to read Greer’s other blog or the many books he had written at that time about magic, but I did.  Unlike so many religious people, Greer was high on the reliability meter and low on the hypocrisy and narcissism meters.  I read the Well of Galabes and just like the Archdruid Report, it contained pragmatic, well-rounded perspectives about the world, and it made its points about religion with no obvious or subversive aims to convert the reader.  When Greer brought Archdruid Report and Well of Galabes to an end, he began a new blog called Ecosophia, I followed it eagerly.  Comments on Greer’s blogs were always lively and fun, with many smart people throwing around provocative and intriguing ideas.  The Greer essays that gave me the most to think about were The Next Ten Billion Years, which over time got me to rethink my belief in short term human extinction: yes, that’s what Extinction Rebellion is blathering on about.  I no longer believe the human race is going to cause the end of a livable climate in the next 300 years, and I think the reasons why I used to believe that would happen is because the thought allowed me the luxury of thinking nothing I do matters.  Once he was on Ecosophia, Greer wrote an essay people had been asking for about reincarnation.  If there is a such thing as a life-changing essay, I believe Greer’s A Few Notes on Reincarnation was it for me.  That particular essay explained mysteries about my own experience and also helped me to understand the chaotic world around me.  I started considering the possibility that I was the reincarnation of a chain of people behind me and that I had many more human lifetimes to go.  I became nascently aware of realities I had considered impossible as an atheist.  

 

At this point, I started looking into Druidry, because as a long time writer of Celtic-sounding music and long haired tree-hugger, I figured, why not?  Druidry (and other magical paths) required three things on a daily basis:

1. Discursive meditation, which is not the mind-emptying Eastern kind but rather a disciplined form of rational thinking invented in the ancient West. 

2. Divination, which I already had some experience in via Tarot cards. 

3. The Sphere of Protection, an approximately 20 minute bit of solo performance that involved memorizing a script of invoking and banishing elemental forces (once you’ve got the elements down, you graduate and assign a pantheon of existing gods to each part of the ritual) designed to shape and master one’s thoughts and actions via unseen forms of energy.

 

I have no problem committing to a daily routine — as a highly-functioning autistic, routines are my bread and butter.  I began the Sphere of Protection on January 1, 2018 and did it every day without fail. The SoP has always felt helpful even when I was bumbling through it, barely memorized and doing it without a pantheon.  By about six months in, I chose to assign the Druid god pantheon because for me, John Michael Greer’s system outlined in The Druid Magic Handbook was the appropriate fit.  I would often be so overcome with emotion during certain elements that I would cry.  After the SoP would be discursive meditation, which I prefer to do while writing in a journal as it allows me to jot down thoughts as they occur.  I first started doing a daily three card Tarot divination, which gave me much insight into the old Thoth deck, however, I changed to Ogham as it is part of the Druid Magic Handbook course of study.  

 

The last two years have been the oddest and best of my entire life.  I now consider myself deeply religious.  I pray every day and I highly believe I am in near constant communication with deities and spirits.  Furthermore, I believe I may have always been talking to the non-corporeal entities without realizing it.  I think many people who talk to themselves don’t understand they’re actually not talking to themselves but a non-corporeal entity.  All I know is that the interactions I have with non-corporeal entities are of a far higher quality than they were when I was first experimenting with Wicca, and that’s due to the SoP and the discernment that accompanies discursive meditation. 

 

I’m not sure what we are to the gods we are working with.  As far as I can tell, they are super-beings who were wisely worshipped by the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese and if you’re sensitive and kind to them, and if you ask them politely and respectfully, they just might mentor you and give you their excellent advice.  However, if you’re disrespectful and you do stupid human things like:

 

A. Arrogantly presume they can’t possibly exist because Jesus/Allah says you’ll burn in hell

B. Use and wear their name for a pair of overpriced sneakers

C. Curse them for not helping your lazy, regressive butt to win the Lotto 

 

You can expect to have a bad time, or at the very least, you can expect the gods not to care about you.  If an annoying hamster was biting my ankles, shouting at me in a high, squeaky voice to make it King of Hamsterland, I’d probably ignore it too, despite my soft spot for hamsters.  

 

In my two years of becoming religious, I became calmer, stronger, and more sanguine about everything in my life.  I have begun to understand that limits are the key to a happy life and that our culture has an insane disregard for them, most likely because of the absurd amount of petroleum wealth we have enjoyed for the last 200 odd years.  I became far more detached from money, that is to say, I began to look at it as valuable in terms of keeping me clothed and fed, and as far as having loads more than that, I have seen the benefits of rejecting the infinite perversions and complications that come of having too much.  I have come to understand why throwing your unexamined bad intentions around inevitably drags you into being a crappy person with rotten luck, no matter how much you insist you are one of the Blessed & Good People.  I have made the affirmation that I am a better person tomorrow than I was today, if only by the slightest amount.  

 

In this strange dialogue with gods, I have apologized for my pathological fondness for dad jokes (I simply must be reincarnated as a father, because I have WAY too many dad jokes to work out of my system) and I have heard birds singing in the middle of the night in winter, which is also known as clairaudience.  I have had conversations with dead people before they moved on to the next cycle of reincarnation.  I have discovered my past life as a traveling musician in an era of bards and my past life as an alcoholic Scottish laird.  I have felt my tensions drain away as I walked through a forest where the beings patiently wait for me to visit.  I had the privilege of talking to a few Greek gods (they seem to be the same as the Roman ones, for what it’s worth) as I arrange melodies and harmonies I’ve composed to flesh out the Orphic Hymns. What a fantastic journey it has been.  I certainly look forward to the remainder.