Divination tools and oracles have always fascinated me.
I use them regularly in my artistic practice. I am fascinated by their randomness, their rituals, their ability to reveal something hidden, and by the possibility of receiving an answer from somewhere outside of myself. Most of all, I am fascinated by the stories they generate.

There is something seemingly chaotic about consulting an oracle: handing over the choice, introducing chance, allowing something outside our conscious will to interfere. And yet, somehow, this encounter with chance can create a different relationship to chaos. What initially appears arbitrary can suddenly begin to form a pattern. Perhaps what we call chaos is not always a threat, or even chaos at all, but something we have simply not yet found a way of relating to.

I think oracles can predict something — but only insofar as what they reveal can become true. They open up another version of the story we are already looking at, another narrative that was previously out of reach. In this sense, they widen the stories at our disposal. They make them more complex, more contradictory, more nuanced. They introduce facets and possibilities we might not have considered, and with them a certain kind of freedom.
The fateful truth of an oracle lies not necessarily in the answer itself, but in the opening of this other storyline. A possibility, once articulated, can acquire the power to become a truth about the future. Like a novel written by a stranger about a stranger, an oracle can somehow tell us a story about ourselves that we did not consciously write — perhaps even one we did not know was available to us. Our identification with a story, our empathy with a character, the feeling of being gripped by a particular image or sentence can reveal hidden desires, fears and longings. It can even free us from shame. Fiction has this power, and so do oracles.

It starts with a question.
To formulate a question for a set of tarot cards requires a small suspension of disbelief — much like the transformative encounter with a work of art. There is something hopelessly romantic and hopeful in the act of trusting that a question might be worth asking, even without knowing what kind of answer could possibly come.
A good question is a question we do not have an answer to. (Unlike most questions we dare to ask in our daily lives.)
Rilke famously wrote about learning to “love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.” In a world in which answers often seem to be the only valuable currency, there is something tender and radical about giving our questions value in themselves. The question is where the magic starts.

The answer is the second half.
As arbitrary as an answer may seem, its significance does not lie in the card or sentence itself, but in what happens between us and the answer. What images does it produce? What memories? What associations? What makes us reluctant to identify with it? And, perhaps more importantly, which part of it are we reluctant to identify with?
There is always something truthful in our emotional response. Not necessarily because the answer is objectively true, but because something happens within us when we encounter it. The resistance, the recognition, the fascination, the rejection — all of these responses become material.

This is where the magic unfolds.

We allow something outside of our active will to speak to us. And in doing so, we might discover that the boundaries between inside and outside, between our own will and what happens to us, are less stable than we imagine. Perhaps there is no entirely separate “outside” at all. Perhaps surrendering to chance, to contingency, to influence, to life itself can be another way of understanding our own agency.
This is what I mean by ordinary magic. It does not have to be wholly esoteric. It can be the magic of entering into a dialogue with something beyond our control. It can be playful. It can be fictional. We do not even have to believe in it for it to produce meaning.

I use these tools in my artistic practice to generate ideas, to approach questions from unexpected angles, to overcome creative blocks, to create structures and to open up associations that I might not have reached through conscious thinking alone. I use them seriously, but I also use them for fun.

This page is a collection of some of the divination tools and oracles I return to most frequently.
Consider it an invitation to be curious, to play, to follow a strange link and see what happens.
I hope you have as much fun with them as I do.