A uniquely portable magic
I have a sort of joke with a friend, that I want to be successful enough as a writer to run away to a witch cottage. A small house, where I could have a little garden that was mostly flowers and herbs, where I could get a dog to hang out with me and the cats, and where I could be the eccentric neighborhood lady who writes. Where I could just write, and not have to engage with the public-facing parts of writing (social media in particular, which still feels far more necessary than I would like it be) unless I wanted to.
I mention this, because I pulled my collected Yeats off the shelf yesterday, and the book opened to “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” I would like, very much, right now, to dwell alone in a bee-loud glade and find some peace there.
I’ve been reading a lot about various small organizational magics recently – tarot, the zodiac, oracles, that sort of thing. Yeats himself (Yeats, who was fascinated by mediums and spiritualism and automatic writing) telling me that he understood my desire to retreat to a witch cottage made me also think of bibliomancy, the idea of predicting or interpreting things through books.
We see small examples of this all the time – the page 69 test, or the variants of the “go to any shelf in your house, pick the third book from the left and open to the seventh line on the ninth page” memes that circulate around the internet. Books have been used in divination and dream interpretation for literally hundreds of years. I’ve even started to see a combination of bibliomancy and tarot, such as this literary witches oracle deck.
As a reader and writer, I kind of love this idea – that we use words as a way to find meaning in our lives, to help us understand ourselves better, to see the possibilities of our futures. In a way, I feel like this is what books and stories do already, and bibliomancy just focuses that down in a more specific sense. And it’s hard to be anywhere in the book-loving world and not be familiar with the Stephen King quote that I borrowed for the title to this essay (though I’d argue that an oracle deck is probably easier to throw in your purse than The Stand.)
I also think poetry in particular, with its inherent flexibility of language, lends itself well to magic (there is a reason, I think, that so many spells that we see in fiction are written in verse.) Open the book, turn the page, and see what lies deep in your heart’s core.
Thank you for your patience with this week’s essay. I plan to be back to regular Wednesday posting next week. The above link is an affiliate one, which means if you order the oracle deck through it, I may make a small amount of money.