We here in the Canadian northwest are in need of some serious rain magic. Withies of drooping brackets hang from the cedar trees, the depleted leaves of the maples form tents as they rustle in the constant afternoon wind. Each intake of hot air and fine dust feels more arid as my gaze turns repeatedly toward the blue-white August sky. It becomes each day more difficult to remember that once the garden pond looked like this.
And yet as a white person of European descent, I understand that drought is, as Laurens van der Post writes in The Voice of the Thunder, “a fear no European can know or understand, because it is a compound of horror, dread and hopelessness which is more of the blood than the mind, for those…born of Africa.”Certainly the Oracle of Delphi, the Dodona Oracle in Greece, and the Ammon Oracle in Libya were asked to bring their divination art to the predicting of rain. What spirit-directed divination story will the Journey Oracle tell about how and when the rains will come? How will we interpret these messages and find revelation? What training of shamanic vision will call into dreams for a way to call the rain?
