Magpie Oracle: Divine with your junk!
Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?
I love random crap. A single earring found on a bus seat, a bottle cap with an absurd message, a hag stone I found on the beach — I’m a magpie. I like trinkets so much I now collect bowls to HOLD said trinkets.
But the tendency to collect small things and put them inside a slightly larger thing has its utilities. Namely - a magpie oracle. A divination system where you use symbolic objects to analyze the past, present or future.
I actually made a Tiktok about this but the reason I keep coming back to junk drawer oracles is that I believe that a good witch is cheap.
Want to make your own? Let’s do it together.
So throwing oracles generally mimic games of chance and patterns determined by the tosser, either by intuition or experience. I started with a throwing mat.
I cut this out of some fabric that I got from my Facebook Buy Nothing pile, and it’s sun bleached from its previous home. I cut a section of it because the light and the dark, which is bad for general projects, gives me a light and dark section to toss on. An “above” and a “below.” I tend to be the sort of thrower who believes that my mat should reflect the things the querent knows and doesn’t know. I use darker section as the “shadow” section of someone’s situation, but your oracle is your oracle. Choose it based on texture and pattern and symbols that mean something to you.
I’m a fairly mediocre seamstress but I find that hand making my projects connects them more to me, so if you’re cutting your own mat, I hand stitched this one with a simple whip stitch around the edges.
Now, let’s talk trinkets.
I recommend if you’ve never done something like this before to start with a planetary guide.
I like to assign each of my objects the planetary body it reminds me of and its role in the sky.
Sun - ego, aspirations, the self, purpose, vitality, prophecy
Moon - emotions, the tides, ebb and flow, nurturing, desperation, hunting
Mercury - messages, travel, tricksters, the mind, communication, protection
Venus - romance, lust, values, beauty, enthusiasm
Mars - strength, temper, passion, war, hostility, impulsivity
Saturn - boundaries, frameworks, limits, depression
Neptune - dreams, delusion, idealism, fantasy, dissolution, empathy
Jupiter - luck (good or bad), expansion, growth, higher education, religion
Uranus - revolution, disquiet, change, freedom, originality
Pluto - secrets, fate, metamorphosis, intensity, death, rebirth
To represent the planets I’ve collected the following trinkets:
A filigree locket charm - Sun
A crab claw - Moon
Fountain pen nib - Mercury
A single pink earring - Venus
Shotgun shell head - Mars
Half a compact mirror - Neptune
A bluebird feather - Jupiter
A black button - Saturn
A match stick - Uranus
A single metal Muni token - Pluto
I think divination gets divided into two parts, like dough cut for bread loaves, one is where you are and one is where you are going.
I’m currently going through a day-job transition, my dad recently passed, and there’s just been a lot of upheaval in my life, or as I keep describing it “life is very plot-heavy at the moment.” I’d like to see where that’s all going for me and what I need to see.
Okay, let’s throw. Put on your favorite ~spooky~ song, I like Wardruna, and toss them on your mat.
Things I immediately notice. Let’s talk quadrants. In the darker sections is Venus, the Moon, Mars, Saturn, Pluto, Mercury, and Jupiter. The lighter sections have Neptune, the Sun, and Uranus is kinda straddling.
Mars is on its side and waaaaaay out of range of the others. That says to me that Mars is uncertain and even immobilized. Passion and certainty are on edge and suspended in the recesses of the unseen. Lost. Saturn is also way off on its lonesome. Closer to the seen realms, but largely off by herself. The “limits” are suspended but the depression and rigidity are closer to the surface. Like they are being pushed to the back of the mind.
Venus is pinning the moon, and Mercury is pinning Pluto. Mercury and Venus are touching. I see that as my values are trying to team up with my mind and my communication, overpowering the sharper points of emotions to try to keep everything contained. Venus is teaming up with Mercury to try to keep the Plutonian despair under wraps. I’m feeling fucked up internally but Mercury is tap dancing on top of it trying to find the words. So I’m unable to talk myself out of that experience but I sure can talk around it. Venus is holding my feelings tight and Mercury won’t let me talk about anything else. Pluto also rules money so there might be the understanding that I am putting my money where my mouth is.
Jupiter is close to everything but alone. Also in shadow, meaning it’s sorting out what it needs to bring and it’s hard to bet on or remember that luck is neither good nor bad.
The Sun and Neptune are in my consciousness, but the sun is landed with the open heart down, which I interpret as overall being disheartened. Neptune is reflecting the situation back to me, the mirror is up but it’s a foggy mirror, which means what I’m seeing has a dreamy quality that can be hopeful and also nightmarish. The uncertainty of opening a locked door in a dream.
Uranus is just over there straddling the dark and the light going “predict what I do, I dare you.”
So that’s where I am, so where am I going?
Venus feels protective in that it’s keeping my most “dangerous” emotions under wraps, and that feels like it’s actually a warning. Keep the dangerous self wrapped up in the goal and goodness. Be shiny. Wear lipstick.
With Saturn all the way in the shadow but the past, that means to me that all the self control tendencies I generally exert are actually not that useful in the present and future. The limits are farther out than I have given them credit for.
The Sun being flipped means my ego and purpose are hurting. And the proximity of Neptune is a dream of escape. It’s the desire to fake my death and never be found.
If I see the reading as linear, Uranus is coming, and is going to hit the seen and the unseen. It’s coming over the horizon for a revolution of the self. Uranus is the Fool in Tarot, it’s the great restart. The head of the match is furthest away and is in the shadow, meaning the fire of my revolution starts in the unseen and moves to the present and seen.
Overall, I see this reading as the dissociation I feel right now is necessary and not eternal. In all of this plot I’ve been living through, there is not the promise of good but the promise of new and revolution. Which doesn’t mean bad. It’s the perpetual again.
Reflection feels like a bad idea in a crisis. But the feeling is necessary.
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