The Way of the Oracle
Biography The Self Created Oracle
About this Site
The Way of the Oracle is
a website dedicated to the research, study and experience of oracles
and oracular methods in ancient and contemporary times. Still in its infancy, the current focus of this site is the
sharing of The Self Created Oracle, a method for creating one's own
oracle, being a deck of cards created for oneself
from the landscape of psyche and life experience. This
method was
inspired by the now famous and oft-quoted words of the Pythia, a
priestess of the Oracle of Apollo at
Delphi in ancient Greece: know thyself in true proportion.
It is a tool whose simple purpose is to help you know
yourself through the development and anchoring of self-knowledge, in turn
gifting you with self-empowerment.
Feedback and experience with
creating your own oracle is most welcome. If you use the
method in any way, please be courteous and footnote me as its creatrix.
Correspondence can
be sent to mercuria67@gmail.com.
Biography
Narelle
Bouthillier is a writer, poet, collage artist and spiritual
practitioner. She is a dedicated student in the field of oracular
studies and was called to this unfolding path over many years through
study of the Tarot, I-ching
and Runes, as well as through oneiric work, shamanic
practice and
various forms of healing with extraordinary teachers and
healing practitioners. Through academic study she was
inspired to learn
more about the
oracles of the ancient world, specifically the ancient
religious office of the Pythia. Her work with oracles has
deepened
through training with The Sacred Trust, a UK-based educational
organisation dedicated to the training of women and men in
contemporary shamanism. Through her training in the ways of the
Melissae, the distaff members of the Path of Pollen who work the
honeybee and the hive, she has been inspired by the Moirae,
better known as the Fates (Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos), and by
their Norse sisters,
the Norns (Urdhr,Verdhandi, Skuld).
Narelle holds a Bachelor's degree in the study of religion
from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and a Master of
Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. She currently resides in England with her
husband, Simon Snaize, a musician and producer.
The Self-Created Oracle: Giving Place to Your Oracular Wisdom in Everyday Life
oracle 1.a: a person (as
a priestess of ancient Greece) through whom a deity is believed to
speak. b: a shrine in which a deity reveals hidden
knowledge or the divine purpose through such a person. c:
an answer or decision given by an oracle.
~Webster’s Dictionary
I know I was hanged on the windy tree
For nine full nights,
stabbed by a spear, offered to Odin
Sworn by myself to myself,
Upon that tree that no man knows
From what root it rises.
No bread did they bear to me nor horn handed,
Into the deep I gazed--
I took up the runes, took them up, screaming,
Then fell back again.
~Havamal: 138-39
The way is not without danger. Everything good is costly, and the
development of the personality is one of the most costly of all
things. It is a matter of saying yes to oneself, of taking
oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything
one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its
dubious aspects – truly a task that taxes us to the utmost.
~Carl G. Jung
From commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s
The Secret of the Golden Flower
Table of Contents
Introduction
Know Thyself
Creating Your Own Oracle
Finding Your Oracle or Catching the Symbol
Giving Place to Your Oracle
The Oracle Book
The Work
Questions to Ask Your Oracle
On the Passing of Oracles
Conclusion: Oracular Studies in Our Time
Bibliography, Influences and Further Reading
Introduction
By divination we mean the attempt to
elicit from some higher power or supernatural being the answers to
questions beyond the range of ordinary human understanding.
Questions about future events, about past disasters whose causes cannot
be explained, about things hidden from sight or removed in space, about
the right conduct in a critical situation, about the time and mode of
religious worship and the choice of persons for a particular task
– all these have from ancient times and in all parts of the world
been the subject of divinatory enquiry.
~Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacker
Whether the medium is a priestess, priest, smoke, birds, stones, bones,
cards, clouds, or dreams, oracles have existed throughout human history
as a means of communication with the numinous and mysterious force or
energy woven into all that exists. This communication, known in
the English language as divination, has always provided knowledge,
wisdom, guidance, and inspiration to those who seek it. Even in
our own time divination continues to be one of many ways in which we
can communicate with and be in relationship to spiritual reality as we
understand it. It is a medium through which we can come to know
ourselves and our life purpose.
Opening the door between our ordinary reality and the realm of the divine has always been, although not exclusively,
the provenance of oracles. For oracles carry the ability to show
us something we may not yet be able to fully and completely see on our
own. They carry the ability to provide us with insight, depth,
clarity, and most importantly, knowledge, all of which give us the
opportunity to more fully and completely know ourselves, our inner and
outer landscapes of soul, psyche, and ordinary life. Oracles are
in the business of making us conscious. They reveal, hence they deal in revelations,
often enigmatic and symbolic. To work with
oracles is to be in direct contact with the numinous aspect of divine knowledge.
I developed The Self-Created Oracle in the late winter of 2005 during a
time when, in the immortal words of
Dante, “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In
dark woods, the right road lost." It was a dark time where the
struggle to simply stay with life was the order of the day.
It would not be an imaginative stretch to say that it was very
much like Odin hanging from Yggdrasil. In an effort to throw
out a line to the flow of life, I asked myself,
“What is really full of heart and meaning for me? What has
life been teaching me? What am I learning? How do I
heal? How do I live?” Through the veil of tears, the answers that came
were the words and symbols
that would become my personal oracle. Odin taking up the
runes
after his nine nights of sacrifice was akin to my own experience and to
a depressed body and psyche, it felt that heavy. In the days
that followed, I
began to craft an oracle in word and image, an oracle I could
continue to use as one way to connect with my inner guidance, to
communicate with my story, my spiritual allies and guides, my intuitive
knowing, with the divinity in me, with Life Itself.
The oracle I made was founded upon and composed of my life experience
and personal symbol system -- my inner language, my mythos. I
came home to those symbols that arose from and spoke directly to my
experience, symbols I discovered I am called to work with as I journey through
life. By using my personal oracle as guide and teacher, I am
beginning to know my self more deeply. It is my continual hope
that I will be able to discern what wisdom life is gifting to me at any
time, a wisdom born of and through my direct experience. It is in this spirit that I share this method with you.
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Know Thyself
. . . life, the condition for becoming conscious.
~Marie-Louise von Franz
You must understand that taking the path of self-knowledge means facing
problems like cramps, depressions, deaths, and the misunderstandings
and anger of those around you, as if all of these were your own
potential power.
~Arnold Mindell
Why know ourselves?
The call to self-knowledge may arise throughout our lives at
different stages, most often during the times where we turn--transitional,
betwixt and between times. It is at
these times we may feel we are not living up to our potential, not
fully
breathing life into our gifts, not birthing them, not following and
living our heart's desire, not doing what we really and truly want to
be doing, staying on the surface, not diving deep, not fulfilling our
dreams, repeating the same patterns. Many of us may feel that something is missing or we
have really and truly lost the Center on every level of our
being.
Perhaps we are experiencing depression, grief, illness, despair, or misery, all of
which are valid experiences and in themselves a call to awakening, a call to know
the self more deeply at the most intimate levels of being. It is
nature itself who calls to us through these feelings,
calls
us to something deeper. It is also the inevitability of our death
that catalyzes us to choose: will I live or die?
The path of self-knowledge is an important one to follow in our lives
if we can stick with it and The Self-Created Oracle is only one of many
methods that can help us do that. It is a method in which one has
a choice to raise up the shadows of despair, depression, meaningless,
and misery, to name a few, as teachers and guides right alongside joy, hope, light, and meaning.
Why not know ourselves while we have the opportunity? After
all, as Jung stated, "Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life; it is real only when it is known. Only a unified personality can experience life, not that bundle of odds and ends which also calls itself 'man' (Psychology and Alchemy, 81).
Jung also noted "that which we do not bring to consciousness
appears in our lives as fate." Even so, the Fates have a role to
play in our lives and by creating our own oracle we are called to
develop relationship with them. For the Fates are in the
business of helping us to awaken, to become distinctly conscious of the
quality of our spin, our measure, and our discernment. They ask:
What is
the quality of your weave? What is the life are you weaving?
What do you need to see that you refuse to see? What needs
to change?
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Creating Your Own Oracle
The whole life span of a man or woman
is a journey. That is our belief. Ajo l'aye . . .
'journey of life.' When you are going to start your life, you go
through a journey . . . And if you want to develop on the life, it is a
journey. So it is just journey, journey, journey all the while .
. . All movements are journeys. We are progressing, we are moving.
~Ositola to Margaret Drewal
Yoruba Ritual
To make an oracle is to take a journey. In The
Self-Created Oracle method, this is an inner journey through the map
and terrain of your consciousness. What you find there will
provide the materials out of which you create and work with your oracle. By creating
a personal oracle out of the most charged symbols of our life, we
acknowledge our desire to be in deeper, more conscious communication and communion with the
numinous within ourselves. We acknowledge that what
we love, what we find heartful and meaningful, and what recurs for us
all hold keys to who we are as well as to the purpose and praxis of our lives.
Listed below are the steps or stages, the “how to,” if you
will, for creating your own oracle. These steps are further
elaborated in the sections that follow.
Finding Your Oracle or Catching the Symbol.
At this first stage of your journey you set out to find and record the
symbols of your life that will become your oracle, the words and/or
images that are uniquely your own and special to you.
Giving Place to Your Oracle.
On this second stage of your journey you create your oracle. Here
is where you write, draw and decorate your oracle, give place to it in
physical reality.
The Oracle Book. Once
you have created your oracle, the third stage of your journey is to
create your oracle book, the place where you will record your
experiences with the oracle.
The Work. Now that you
have created your oracle and your oracle book, you are ready to begin
work with your oracle on a daily basis.
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Finding Your Oracle or Catching the Symbol
. . . the rules and the truths must
be personal to you. Truth must always be individual, and you will
find it from your own experiences and your interpretation of these.
~Simon Buxton
And to find out what we are, we must
enter back into the ideas and the dreams of worlds that bore and dreamt
us and there find, waiting within worn mouths, the speech that is ours
. . . For all that is lost yearns to be found again, remade and given
back through the finder to itself, speech found for what is not spoken.
~William Goyen
In The Self-Created Oracle method each oracle card you
create originates from the symbols of your life that you find
personally meaningful,
symbols that have heightened meaning for you. The symbols you
choose become oracles when you make them into oracles, in other words,
when you decide or realize that a particular energy has been at work in
your life, has heightened meaning for you, carries important
information or has deeper lessons for you. You know energy is at
work in your life when, whether positive or negative, the same symbols
repeat themselves or you are continually drawn to
them. For example: you find that a pattern of experience repeats
itself, shows up in daily life and dreams. You have dreamt the
same dream all your life. You have an interest in something that has
stayed with you all your life and to which you constantly return (and
you continually experience synchronicities in connection with this
symbol). Symbols can be people, spiritual beings,
animals, things, places, weather patterns, seasons, sigils, sacred
symbols, scents, feelings, moments, concepts. They are not simply
words on paper. They are living expressions of the visible face
of Spirit.
You know when something has meaning for you. Whatever it is has
something to teach you about yourself and your experience of
life. When you make this symbol an oracle, you raise it up in
your awareness, decide that it will be a more conscious presence in
your life. By working with an oracle composed of your personal
symbol system, you embrace what is very meaningful to you and that you
know has more to teach you.
When we make an oracle using the most important symbols of our life, we
are taking the step to consciously open a dialogue with the force of
divination. Whether an oracle is a tarot deck, a set of runes, a
particular set of stones or bones used by a divinatory priest or
priestess from the many divination practices present in our world, all
oracles are based upon a symbol system and are embedded with many
layers of meaning. By choosing symbols from our personal symbol
system to make our own oracles, we acknowledge our inherent seer, our
oracular and intuitive abilities and skills and allow them to open the
door for us to a place where we can learn and discover what our soul
and the divine want to communicate to us. Our ancient ancestors
worked with oracles, often through certain individuals
known to have a connection with Spirit, for example shamans in Siberian
culture, volvas in the Norse tradition and the priestesses of ancient
Greece and the Mediterranean,
such as the Pythia. Some of these persons may also have
worked with physical oracles--stones, bones,
twigs and so on--and may have been tasked
during their initiation rituals to discern the materials that
would themselves choose to become their divinatory tools and
allies. It is in this spirit that you are encouraged to catch the
symbols of what will become your oracle.
Meditation
Choose a time and place where you will not be disturbed. Enter a
meditative state through whatever means works for you (breathwork,
drumming, movement, night-time dreamwork, Buddhist style meditation,
chanting, prayer,
silence). The idea is to enter an altered state of consciousness
that is not your everyday ordinary state, a state Diane
Skafte calls
"oracular consciousness" and what Dr. Michael Harner, the founder and
developer of contemporary shamanism, calls the Shamanic State of
Consciousness or SSC. It is important to note, as one of my teachers recently explained to me, that one enters the
shamanic journey once one has fully entered into the SSC. Your
oracle may be born of tears, joy, ecstasy, nighttime oneiric or
dreaming work, shamanic journey
or a calm and peaceful mind.
Once you have entered a state that feels right to you, set off in your
inner vision or into dreaming on a journey to find your oracle. Remember, you are
seeking the symbols of your personal symbol system that have proven
truly meaningful for you in your life. Symbols embodied as words
and/or images may arise. These symbols originate from the place(s)
in you that hold the knowledge of who you are. We can call this
place your soul, your Self, your inner oracular wisdom. It is the
place where the divine speaks to you. You may return to this
place many times to catch the symbols that truly have heart and meaning
for you.
Record what arises. If at first a word appears, an image might
arise later. Likewise, if at first an image appears, a word
may
arise that captures the image. Initially, a word might be the
easier symbol with which to catch the image, experience, feeling, or
representation of what is arising in inner vision. Scents,
colors, feelings, insights, memories may arise. If you perform a
shamanic journey, every aspect of your experience with your allies in
the SSC is important. Record them all.
My
understanding of this stage of the work is that you are calling your
life symbols to you. You are calling who you are to you.
You are calling to you what is, in your present awareness, most
meaningful to you
—and your inner oracle answers. The oracles that arise from
consciousness are personal symbols of your inner landscape, your inner
language. They are powerful allies for you on your journey toward
self-knowledge. Trust what comes. Give yourself permission
to know yourself in all of your depth, grace and beauty.
If you experience difficulty connecting with your inner vision or
entering an altered state of consciousness, here are some questions you
can ask yourself that might help:
What are the themes, patterns, or dominant symbols of my life?
What has had the most heart and meaning for me throughout my
life? What is truly my own? What do I know? Where am
I called to be working at this stage in my life, or in any stage of my
life? What symbols do I live by? What is my inner language? What is the personal myth by which I live?
To discover the most meaningful symbols in your life can be a profound
experience of excavation. There are no right and wrong oracles. There is only
what is personally true, heartful, and meaningful to you.
As you discover your oracles, take notes on why a particular symbol is
coming up for you, how you relate to it, life stories associated with
it, and sketch any images that accompany it. The original reasons
for your discovery of a meaningful oracle will become important as you
work more deeply with it on a daily basis. Also, these first
notes are important for your oracle book, which you will create later.
It is also at this stage of your journey that you intuit how many
oracles you want in your deck. You may know when you have
found the number of oracles that work for you. You may also
discover more oracles after you begin to work with the oracle you
create. For example, in my deck, I have 49 oracles. The
number 49 is meaningful to me from my studies of Tibetan Buddhism,
where it is believed that the newly departed soul spends 49 days in the
bardo or “the place between” before it is reborn into
another body. For me the bardo symbolizes the soul’s
journey through life and represents metaphorically the place
between the death of one way of being and the birth of another.
It is a number representative of a crossroads, a liminal space, a turning place, a place
betwixt and between and therefore deeply sacred. One of my
teachers also explained to me that in her experience, 49 days or 7
weeks is the shortest amount of time to effect a change in
consciousness, which I have personally experienced as true.
What number is most meaningful to you? There are 64 I-ching
hexagrams, 52 playing cards in a deck, 78 cards in a tarot deck.
In this method I recommend limiting the number of oracles so that you
can create a congruent space for your ongoing self-work. Limiting
the number also gives you room to travel deeply into your personal
mythological landscape and helps you to avoid scattering your
energies. Of course, the number of oracles you create is entirely
up to you.
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Giving Place to Your Oracle
. . . put energy into finding out who you are.
~Marion Woodman
Now that you have found your personal oracles, give place to them in
physical form. To give place to your oracle is a spiritual concept in
which you make room in your life for this work. It also means to
create your oracle using pen and paper or any material you want.
You are not limited to pen and paper but the medium is useful at the
beginning. Give yourself permission to be as creative as you
want. Be as elaborate or simple as you want. Play!
Indulge! Make the oracle with your own hands, your own
energy, infusing it with your life force. There is power in this type of creativity. Your deck can
be round, square, triangular, every card a different shape and
color. Collage is also a profound medium for creating your personal
oracle deck. The only limit is you. This is your oracle,
your personal work of art, your gift to yourself. Bring
attention, reverence and love to what you are creating.
When I first created my oracle, I used blank academic study
cards. You can also use blank business cards, cardboard
that you cut, or even 3 x 5 index cards. I wrote my oracle words
on one side and drew a design on the other, which I repeated on all the
other cards. I finished by laminating the card with clear contact
paper because I wanted them to be protected and last me a while.
Cards are an old medium and travel well. How do you want to
create your oracle?
Set a time frame for completing the deck. It can take days or
weeks but setting a deadline is important so that you can continue on
your journey and begin to work with your oracle.
Once you have completed your deck, you may want to pause and reflect
upon what you have created. You have given birth to your personal
mandala or sacred circle of meaning and inner life. Perhaps you
put your all into it, added pictures, colors, glitter, gave each card
depth and meaning that will increase the oracle’s medicine in
your life as you work with it. Express gratitude toward yourself
and your allies and honor what you have created.
At this stage you might consider creating a more traditional altar to
hold your oracle and be the sacred space in which you will work with it.
To take counsel with the oracle at the temple is an old and revered practice.
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The Oracle Book
If you choose to explore your own
inner landscape, peopled from your own cultural background and
tradition, you should seek to know all that you can about those you may
meet along the way, what they will say to you, what symbols they will
show you. You need to know the words that will open certain doors
and how to address those who guard them. You will need maps.
~Caitlín & John Matthews
Now that you have given place to your oracle, the next stage on your
journey through The Self-Created Oracle method is to create a book
where you can record your oracular wisdom.
Your oracle book is the place where you will record your experiences
with your oracle as you journey with it through life. It is your
map. It
can be a file on your computer, pages within a ring binder, a spiral
notebook or fancy journal. If you already keep a journal, you can
incorporate oracle work into it. It can be as simple or elaborate
as you want.
The only suggested requirement of this method is that there be space
for you to record the insights you gain from working with your oracle
and that there be room for it to change because this is a living
oracle. Also, if you want your oracle book to be portable, take
that into consideration as well. Allow your creativity to
guide you on how you want to make your book. Put thought into
what you are creating and what will work best for
you.
We now turn to The Work.
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The Work
… divination… makes
visible one’s destiny, the configuration of sacred powers
governing one’s ceaseless transformations.
~Lawrence Sullivan
Now that you have created your oracle and your oracle book, you can
begin to work with the oracle in any way you want. Choose one or
more cards every day. You can also use well-known tarot layouts
with your oracle, such as the Celtic Cross, to gain deeper and
different insights. Feel free to make up your own layouts as
well. Given will and imagination, your oracle will bless you with
experiences, synchronicities, answers, lessons, dreams, and more
questions. It challenges you to pay attention.
Pay attention to the oracles you choose and how they manifest in your
life. Oracles are energy and working with oracles is working with
energy and how it moves in your life. It shows what energy might
be “up” on a given day and has a deep relationship to the
kind of knowledge and communication that usually appears through
synchronicities. Use your oracle as a helpful
guide and friend in all aspects of your life. Use it to record
thoughts, experiences, pictures or photographs, dreams, doodles,
quotes, favorite books, things you overheard that you find striking or
meaningful, poems, songs, anything that comes up in your life that may
be related to the oracle with which you are working. By being in
close touch with your oracle you are in close touch with your
soul. In this way the oracle will continually give you more and
more intimate and direct information about your purpose, your soulwork,
and your
location on the map that is the journey of your life. Where and
how much you choose to “tune in” is up to you.
By recording your thoughts and experiences in your oracle book you give
place to your awareness of your life, the direction in which you are
moving, how you are living the symbols that have heart and meaning for
you, and the nature of your relationship with Divinity. The
purpose of keeping track of how the oracle works in your life is so
that you can create your own book of wisdom, which, over time, will be
composed of your self-knowledge, soul-knowledge, life experience, and
communication with the Divine. As you choose your oracles over
and over again, you build your oracle book, drawing upon and adding to
this map or well of knowledge, in this
way coming to know yourself at a much deeper level. The oracle book
is more than a journal or a book of reflections. It is a book of
wisdom and knowledge that you create through the symbols that have
heart and meaning for you. The oracle book tracks your
“ceaseless transformations.”
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Questions to Ask Your Oracle
As you begin your oracle work you may find these questions useful in
deepening your relationship to your oracle, your soul and the
divine. I encourage you to find and explore questions that are meaningful to
you but I share these because they are helpful to me in my own oracle
work.
What is the meaning and association for me in this oracle?
What is my relationship to this oracle and my experience of it?
Where is this appearing in my life? Where and when has this appeared before?
Where does this oracle appear in comparative mythology and religion?
This question is about amplifying the symbol in your life in order to
know how it has manifested in the collective, or, how people over time
have experienced it. Amplification is a concept developed by C.G.
Jung. Jungian analyst and scholar Daryl Sharp defines
amplification as “A method of association based on the
comparative study of mythology, religion and fairy tales, used in the
interpretation of images in dreams and drawings” (15). By
asking this question of your oracles you are using amplification to
interpret them and deepen your understanding of their presence in your
life.
What is this oracle’s message to me?
What is my body’s relationship to this oracle?
What is my mind’s relationship to this oracle?
What is my soul’s relationship to this oracle?
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On the Passing of Oracles
Some oracles will remain
powerful in your life forever. Some will
die and others will be born. The Self-Created Oracle is a living
oracle: because you change, your oracle changes. As one of
my teachers once expressed to me, when you
do your inner work and remain yoked to the discipline it requires, you
know when you have stirred a symbol or pattern so deeply in the
cauldron of your being that you have fully integrated it. When
one oracle or the entire deck passes out of your life, or ceases to
have heart and meaning for
you, its cycle is complete. When this happens, you can choose to
let it go. This is not a static oracle; its capacity to be
changed is meant to reflect the cyclical nature of our lives.
Keep old oracle cards in a place separate from your living oracle or
dispose of them ritually by thanking them for the wisdom they have
brought you that has helped you know yourself more deeply. Notes
on this oracle made in your oracle book may be kept as part of your
wisdom-knowing or disposed of as lessons learned.
Conclusion: Oracular Studies in Our Time
… know thyself in true proportion.
~The Pythia of Apollo, Oracle of Delphi
...at every
instant, each thought and gesture modifies the invisible weft upon
which the Fates weave patterns of our destiny, which we, knowingly or
unknowingly, prepare.
~Bridge, The Shamanic Way of the Bee
The Self-Created Oracle method is unique from other oracles only in
that you are the oracle and the maker of the oracle. The oracle
is not made for you--only the method and the method is simple.
The oracle you create using this method is entirely your own. You
are the diviner, the oracular priest or priestess working in
partnership with your higher knowing and perhaps your spiritual
teachers to find the symbols that have heart and meaning for you. Once created, you have set the intention that the
oracle will be the medium through which the Divine speaks to you and
dialogues with you. When you work with your oracle, you journey
to your inner temple of self-knowing to find knowledge, answers,
sanctuary, understanding, purification, healing, wisdom, guidance, and
more. This work is a sacred way in which you give yourself to
yourself and do your self-work, your soul-work, on a daily basis.
When one works within the sanctum of one's own patterns, symbols, and
experience, one continually brings what is unconscious to light.
In this way one remains conscious, connected to soul and aligned with
life purpose. There is no better advisor for your life than You
(although from time to time of course we do need other guidance).
In this method, you have the opportunity, as one of my teachers once expressed eloquently to me, "to work out your own
salvation" with the guidance and assistance of the divine.
We will never know whether or not the Pythia, who spoke for Apollo at
the famous Oracle at Delphi, ever uttered the words know thyself.
We do know that many famous orators and wise people from the ancient
world were credited with uttering these words. What is important
is that the phrase had true meaning then and it has true meaning now,
which is to say that we can learn from it, gain good and helpful
knowledge from it as we journey through life. These words arose
from an ancient world in which oracles, their priestesses, personnel,
and institutions were as beloved and powerful as our own sacred
sanctuaries are today (and just as filled with intrigue!). Hence,
these words arose from people who accepted and truly knew the spiritual
reality of oracles and their capacity to give knowledge. Oracle
centers were places where the divine god or goddess dwelt in the forms
in which they were understood, perceived and accepted in the
heart-minds of our ancestors.
Like those ancient peoples, many of us also desire communication with
the divine and perhaps to know ourselves to the fullest extent possible
while we experience human life. The greater purpose of creating
an oracle that is truly your own is to create the space out of your own
personal experience where open communication with the deeper god or
goddess within can occur, a place where we are heard and where we
listen deeply. It is a way of giving place in physical form to
the Mystery, to that aspect of our being that knows and holds our
deeper meaning. By creating your own oracle out of the personal
symbols that have heart and meaning for you (in effect, from your own
body), you allow yourself to develop relationship to this Mystery, this
divine, your soul, the place in you that knows, and give yourself
permission to receive guidance and counsel as you journey through
life. This method was developed to help you take YOU as "the most
serious of tasks," as Jung once wrote.
The Self-Created Oracle is a method that can help you
come to know yourself. It is one way among many in which one can
study oracles and oracular methods in our own time through
personal experience. I hope you will benefit from it and find
your own oracle to be good medicine in your life, a powerful ally, and
a helpful, joyful, insightful, and practical tool.
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Bibliography, Influences and Further Reading
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Aswynn, Freya. Northern Mysteries and Magick: Runes, Gods, and Feminine Powers. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2006.
Aune, David. "Greco-Roman Prophecy: Oracular Places and Persons." Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983. 23-48.
-------. "The Form and Function of Greco-Roman Oracles." Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. 49-79.
Bouthillier, Narelle. "Reconstructing the Pythia through Plutarch's The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse and The Obsolescence of Oracles. Unpublished paper. Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, January 2004.
Bulkeley, Kelly and the Reverend Patricia Bulkeley. Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005.
Buxton, Simon. The Shamanic Way of the Bee. Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2005.
Collin, Rody. The Theory of Celestial Influence: Man, the Universe and Cosmic Mystery. London: Penguin Arkana, 1954.
Corbin, Henri. "Mundus Imaginalis: or, The Imaginary and the
Imaginal." Located at www.hermetic.com/bey/mundus_imaginalis.htm.
Danfulani, Umar Habila Dadem. "Pa Divination: Ritual
Performance among the Ngas, Mupun, and Mwaghawl of the Jos Plateau,
Nigeria." In African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions. Ed. by Jacob K. Olupona. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2000. 87-111.
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Hedsel, Mark, with David Ovason. The Zelator: A Modern Initiate Explores the Ancient Mysteries. London: Century Books, 1998.
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Jung, C.G. Psychology and Alchemy. Trans R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1992.
-------. "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams." In The Undiscovered Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
-------. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated from the
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-------. Mandala Symbolism. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Keller, Mary. The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Green, Gene L. "As For Prophecies, They Will Come to an End':
2 Peter, Paul and Plutarch on 'The Obsolescence of Oracles.'"
Journal for the Study of the New Testament 82 (2001). 107-122.
Loewe, Michael and Carmen Blacker, eds. Oracles and Divination. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1981.
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Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Roob, Alexander, Alchemy and Mysticism. Germany: Taschen, 2006.
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-------. Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. Boston and London: Shambhala, 1995.
©2008 Narelle Bouthillier All rights reserved
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