┌─╷─┐ ╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub ╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes └─╵─┘
───╢※╟───
On occasion, I'll see someone make a claim like:
we shouldn't use divination to predict the future and anyone who does so for others is being unethical
To me, this has a lot of the same, if not the exact same, vibes as saying:
yes I'm a witch, no I don't do magic, we exist
This is especially the case if one's sense of "ethics" is tied up with what happens to be legal in one's given jurisdiction in a given time period. Like, witchcraft, magic, divination, and most forms of non-dominant religion have been outlawed time and again—but is that really going to stop us?
It's all well and good that some take a psychological approach to divination as a means of wrestling with ourselves internally, but it should be understood and made clear to everyone that that's an extremely modern, extremely secularized, extremely woogity-denying stance that does not agree with any historical or traditional approach. If you don't think divination can actually predict things, okay, that's on you, regardless of your actual ability to do so. But saying that others cannot actually do so, or that they should not do so because it's somehow "unethical", is more of a stretch than what most contortionists could ever attain. Sure, there are laws in many places that prohibit divination and fortune-telling—but many of those same laws are also infringements against the right to the free practice of religion. Whether or not those laws stand, breaking an unjust law is not unjust, because legality is not the same thing as justice. There are, after all, also laws against malpractice or fraud in general; we don't see laws against professions of medicine or law just because people get swindled there, too. What's unethical is fraud, not breaking an overreaching and improperly-written law. (At least for medicine and law, there are ethics boards that can remove fraudulent practitioners; there's no such protection or regulation for diviners or magicians out there, which does lead to there being fraudulent practitioners in these fields, so as ever, caveat emptor.)
But also, like, let's be honest: witchcraft is about transgression (which is the big difference as I see it from magic in general), and there are as many laws against witchcraft as there are against fortune-telling and divination. If you're not willing to transgress those…well, what are you willing to actually do, then?
Anyway. The secularization and psychologization of spiritual works like divination in our modern day isn't surprising, not really, not after a long trend of people saying "astrology is about psychology" and that it can't predict the future (starting with Alan Leo in a courtroom setting) or that goetic demons aren't independent from the conjuror but a part of their own internal psyches. This same kind of approach can be taken for divination, too, but it strips divination of the whole element of the divine in the process leading to…I dunno, freeform image association to calm one's nerves? The equivalent of drawing options out of a hat to make a decision? I think it's boring, but hey, if some people want to go through the hassle of learning an elaborate symbolic art to do that, good for them. There's indisputably more to it, though, and throughout history people have turned to (and responsibly paid) diviners because diviners have the power of divination, and divination has the power of prediction. It just works—and no law saying otherwise will ever change that.
Also, I should add that there is indeed value in using divination, or at least the symbols thereof, for meditative and contemplative works; I do it all the time. My problem is with the claim that that's the only legitimate, significant, or proper use, for them.