Divination: Shufflemancy - A Modern Approach to an Ancient Form of Divination.

 Dear Reader,

In ancient Greece (and other parts of the world), there was a form of divination practice that involved going to the temple and asking the gods a question, after which one covered their ears and went out into the agora. When they uncovered their ears, the answer to their question was found in the first bit of speech that they encountered. (I forget the exact term for it, I apologize.)

Shufflemancy is the act of putting a very long playlist of random music (or turning on the radio to a random station) after asking a question of the gods. The first bit of music or speech that hit your ears after doing so is the answer to your question. It sound weird. But, it actually does work pretty well. I first encountered it in a psychiatric hospital of all places. A woman said to her that god talked to her through the radio. I was confused by this and unsure if this was a feature of her mental illness. (I was staying at a mental hospital at the time and people had a wide assortment of disorders they were dealing with. I, myself was struggling with a depressive episode that included psychotic features at the time. It made me cautious in my approach to everything because I was reality testing everything to tell the difference between what was my auditory hallucinations and what was legitimate input.)

I got out of the hospital and put the confusing thing from my mind. A few months later, I was highly exasperated with my being depressed and feeling worthless. I had the radio on and it was playing random music, as per usual. Within moments, a song came on that had the message that I was loved and I mattered. I was surprised. Looking back, I really shouldn't have been quite so surprised. But, it was a surprising experience and I tried it again and again over the span of that month. It consistently happened that a song of a bit of speech that related to what I was dealing with came up. There were times it took a bit of interpretation to figure out the connection, but it wasn't terribly difficult to assess. The lyrics were usually rather straight forward (at times brutally honest and blunt even).

The nice thing about shufflemancy is the fact that you can do it at anytime if you have an MP3 player with a huge play list (mine has about 2 days worth of music on it, it's astonishing how far tech has come) or if you are listening to music on a station that has a very long playlist set. Sometimes, even commercials will have the answer to your question. (That is when it gets weird, in my opinion. You don't expect those 30 second sound bites to have any real information in them but sometimes it happens.) And because it's fairly common to see people listening to music or using headphones/earbuds/headsets with their mobile devices, no one knows that you're up to a little magic when you do it. Because all you have to do is concentrate on your question and then release it to the universe to get your answer.