I am not much of a researcher. My training and most of my career was spent as a middle school teacher, not a high-level academic. Not for me, the quiet of a rare book library; but the hustle bustle of a room full of 13 or 14 year-olds. And it must be admitted that, for that age group, it is far more important that we entertain and develop curiosity in our students, then that we wait to provide them with perfectly accurate information that brooks no contradiction.
Case in point, I was talking to my father, recently, who had read an article about detecting earthquakes, and could distinctly remember being taught that plate tectonics wasn’t a thing. “The continents never fit together, even though it looks like they do.“ now in his 80s, he is both a little shocked, and amused, that something that he remembers from grammar school in the late 40s has been so thoroughly consigned to the dustbin of science.
It’s this with some trepidation that I embarked on this current project, to make 25 sets of Greek alphabet tiles (digamma, or F, included) for an upcoming workshop on using the Greek letters for divination, based on the work of Dr. John Opsopaus in The Oracles of Apollo: Practical Ancient Greek Divination for Today. (Llewellyn Press, 2022).
As I said, I’m not a researcher. Rather, I’m something of a bard who brings entertaining and potentially useful resources into the light. I’m going to be attending a “Pagan-friendly conference” near the end of January. Increasingly my astrological practice relies upon a foundation of Greco Roman myth. So it makes sense to bring forth this kind of programming — which has the potential to bring a system of divination rather like runes into the public consciousness.
But there’s only a few ways to make this kind of tradition available: bring people a lot of dice or a lot of coins or a lot of dominoes with which to experiment; or provide them with an existing set of letter-tiles during the workshop. As it so happened, I had a bag of 500 wooden disks, and a lot of scrap fabric available. So I found myself writing out the Greek alphabet twenty times and manufacturing these little (and medium-sized) bags with drawstrings to hold the bags.
Twenty writings of the Greek alphabet (including digamma) equals 500 tokens. Guess I’m not getting 25 sets of these, just twenty. Yikes. And, as I said to someone last night, “you know how there’s that phrase, don’t take any wooden nickels? Well, apparently I have 500 of these wooden disks. That I bought. With my own money. I’m not just the sort of person who would willingly take wooden nickels… I actually buy them.”
The thing about production work, of course, is that you often do the same step over and over, to save time and attention. So I had twenty sets of Greek letter tiles stacked all over my office, and all these mostly-completed bags that just needed drawstrings… and then I thought, these would take much less space if I just put a set of tiles into each bag and added the drawstrings later.
This worked about as well as you might think — because no sooner had I put each set of the letter tiles into each bag, than I thought to myself, “OK, but what about putting the drawstrings in?” And I got out some ribbon to put in the drawstrings, and I picked up the bag to move it to my worktable… and three or four of the bags fell over and dumped the tiles into the bottom of the larger bag. Ooops.
I managed to get all the letters sorted out, eventually — but I had to dump all the letters back into one pile, sort them out into twenty-five piles of the individual letters, and then sort them back into single sets of alphabet tiles one at a time. Along the way, I found that I’d made all sorts of mistakes — leaving out a tau or a phi here or an omicron or xi there… from a quality control point of view, it was a good idea. From the perspective of doing the work, it sucked.
But it’s done now. And now I get to think about the content of this 1 1/2 hour workshop, in which I want to present both the divination systems in Opsopaus’ book — this Greek alphabet oracle, and the “Sayings of the Seven Sages.” More on that, anon, as I develop my materials.
This workshop will be offered at A Feast of Lights, a winter gathering of the EarthSpirit Community.
