Giselle Duell
April 23, 2021 6:22 PM
Can you feel the heat? [Advanced Divinations] by Giselle Duell
Giselle thought that that this year was going better than last year, not that it had been hard to top. Classes were going well enough, but she still wasn't making any headway on whatever this 'Dark' and 'Power' thing was and that was annoying her greatly. She should most likely talk to Professor Skies about it again, perhaps she had come up with some good ideas. Maybe some of the other professors might have some ideas? But, then she would have to talk to them. Looking back over the term so far, she may have become a bit of a recluse again. She really should do something about that. Sometime.For now, she had her class to teach. The room had been rearranged again for this unit, the tables had all been removed and cushions had been placed on the floor in a circle around the blazing fire in the center of the room. It was cold outside and the fire here made the room toasty and comfortable. They had been studying fire omens for a few weeks now and it was time to wrap up the unit. Like crystal gazing, this subject had been more difficult for her than most, but she had managed in her own way by focusing more on the sounds the fire made as it popped and crackled rather than the images one could supposedly see within. Like ghosts, fire only showed up very faintly to her imaging charm.
This is where her students found her when they entered the classroom. She was sitting on her cushion, absorbed in the secrets it was telling her through it's own special voice, the flames reflecting off of her mirrored glasses. Unfortunately, the fire knew little about 'darkness'.
Giselle greeted the students as they entered and invited them to take a seat around the fire. Once they had all arrived, she began. "Today we will be wrapping up Fire Omens, and you have all done well. So, this lesson will be more of a chance for you to discuss the subject with each other, to go over what you have learned and what you have experienced, and..." She paused for a moment letting the sound of the fire fill the otherwise silent room.
"Remember what I taught you at the beginning of the lesson, fire omens are one of the earliest and most primal forms of divination. Mankind has been staring into the flames since their inception, and properly attuned witches and wizards have been seeking answers from them." There was a shorter pause this time, "However, fire is not the best medium to tell us what is to come, fire excels at encouraging our own introspection and allowing us to see and hear what lies within ourselves. Those insights, along with the symbolism.. the language of the fire give this practice it's most powerful form. Storytelling."
"So, your main task for this final lesson is to do just that. Tell us the story that the fire is helping you to tell. It need not be one of your own... it may not even be a 'true' story, but fire stories can always be insightful and meaningful." Giselle gestured to the small containers circling the fire in front of the students. "If you would like to use sage, mallowsweet, or any of the other herbs or spices to enhance the fire, feel free." Then after saying that, a small grin crossed Professor Duell's face. "There are also some less.. effective but perhaps more 'traditional' story telling enhancers available if anyone would like them." A wave of her wand brought out a few containers floating out from behind her desk, the circled slowly overhead and then landed with the others. These however were filled with marshmallows. "Now, who would like to go first?"
Subthreads: Dancers in orange and blue. by Katerina Vorontsov
We think of the key, each in his prison/Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison. by Jessica Hayles
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Giselle Duell
Can you feel the heat? [Advanced Divinations]
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Katerina Vorontsov
May 03, 2021 7:27 PM
Dancers in orange and blue. by Katerina Vorontsov
Katya paused before she entered the Divinations classroom and reached up behind her head, muttering a complaint in Russian as she began to wrestle with the pins holding her hair up and pull them out. Thankfully, her everyday hairstyle was simple enough that there were only usually four or five, so while there was some unpleasant pulling and poking, it only took her about a minute to have them all in her hand. Her hair fell down slowly, as though not quite certain that it wanted to do that or that the pins were really gone, and she gave it a shake to speed it on its way, running her free fingers through the ends to smooth them out a bit.It felt very odd to take her hair down in the middle of the day like this, but they were working on fire omens, and one of the things Katya knew about such things from home was that they were said not to work properly unless one loosened one’s hair. Knots of any kind were advised against; indeed, the oldest babushkas back home would have advised simply approaching the whole business stark naked, but there were limits, and she restrained herself to unbuckling her shoes and taking off her necklace and bracelets, clasps being close cousins to knots, before she went into the room and, walking carefully, chose a cushion to sit on, hoping that she didn’t look too strange to the others. If one was going to do a thing, one ought to do it properly, but Americans so rarely knew this that she was afraid they’d just think her silly – or worse, superstitious.
Am I?
The textbooks all asserted that the way they did things here was the only way, but Katya had seen a practical obstacle to this long before either society had deemed her old enough to try her hand at casting spells. There were entire sounds in English – which had clearly at least somewhat corrupted the Latin of the incantations they learned here – and Latin both which simply didn’t exist in Russian. Therefore, either Russian wizards were for some reason unable to ever access their full potential (even after years of speaking mostly English, Katya still struggled with the aitch sound, and the letter ‘doubloo’) or there was more than one way to do things, and she had not noticed that any of her relations were particularly incompetent. It seemed that was another case of westerners simply thinking their way was best – which it could well be, the concept of point-say spellcasting was much more efficient than spells that took several days to prepare and relied on precise astrological conditions, but that wasn’t the point at hand. The point at hand was whether it really mattered if she had her hair bound up and her shoes buckled, or if that really was just…babushkas being babushkas, clinging to old ways just to be difficult, without evaluating if they were really necessary or how Katya might look in front of her western classmates for taking these measures.
She ought, she supposed, to ask Professor Duell about it. Later.
For the present, she tilted her head, listening closely to the instructions. They sounded strange to her – she’d never heard a fire give her instructions in her life, and if one ever did, she’d run out of the room. So, it was a metaphor; they were just to relax their minds, try to allow the flame to lead them into a trance state or something like it, and let the words flow. Well, she supposed she could do that….
Think nothing. Only look. The flash of blue – that is the hottest part of the fire. The wood goes orange, so easy to see – then it is grey, even in the fire. Up and down and up and down and together…
“To watch the flames, they are like dancers,” she volunteered. “The orange and blue – bright – those are their best dresses. It makes different sounds – that is the songs, the girls and boys singing. This wood – this is the edge of the circles. There is more than one here – they will dance in and out…it is good if they dance in the direction the sun goes. In the springtime, in old times, the dances…they can come together, go apart, but always move around the sun while they sing spells. To go the other way – that is bad. That is a curse. Even during the long days, you do not go backward, you do not banish the sun, or you may be banished too. These…they move in and out, back and forth, but do not go forward or backward. Perhaps they are taking turns tossing birch wreaths into the flames on Ivan Kupala - “ she realized she had started speaking Russian and blushed. “I am sorry – I do not know all the words in English,” she said. “They burn…circles of wood, throw them in the fire during a summer festival, it is called Ivan Kupala, it is…when you do the midsummer activity, around,” she explained, and then stopped talking before she got any further from doing the assignment properly.
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Katerina Vorontsov
Dancers in orange and blue.
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Jessica Hayles
May 04, 2021 3:33 PM
We think of the key, each in his prison/Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison. by Jessica Hayles
”Can you imagine what we could do when we grow up, if we get the hang of this stuff?” Mara had said when arguing with Jessica about whether they ought to take Divination. ”Corporate espionage without so much as an email. Impossible to trace it back to us. And being able to predict which products will be successful – can you imagine how much money we’d save that way, never having a failed launch again? We’d be stupid not to see if it works.”Mara’s logic was sound enough, but Jessica had remained pessimistic. For one thing, wizards did indeed have spells and stuff that would have made the NSA weep to see, stuff that would be invaluable if it could be adjusted for business usage, but they swore they didn’t use them very effectively, which was hard to believe. Jessica wouldn’t take it on good faith that she wouldn’t cheat the system, so why should the wizards? The only sensible course of action they could possibly take would be to lie to her and then continue their surveillance against any time she used magic outside, and then to swoop down on her if she put a toe out of line. Since she assumed they would object to her putting an Entrancing Enchantment on a business rival as much after February as they did at present, she didn’t imagine she’d have much luck exploiting her powers in any way for profit. For another thing, Jessica spent most of her free time reading these days, and in a different way than Mara read things, and different subjects from those her sister favored. She’d read wizarding history, wizard novels, and had noticed a distinct lack of people using divination to plan their lives, unless it was like a Greek tragedy, where their own actions trying to prevent things were the actions which brought the predicted end about. It was possible, of course, that wizards were just…kind of stupid, or at least had a significant blind spot there, but it also seemed possible that it just didn’t work like that.
In the class itself, she was leaning toward the latter option, her pessimism more or less fully justified. Most of this stuff was well-known in the outside world, too, and didn’t amount to much. Apparently there were genuine Seers who had visions and stuff (Jessica wondered herself if they just…got too high on their own supplies of incense, but…), but everyone else was just…playing at it, really. She was surprised, though, by how openly Professor Duell seemed to admit that today – that they were just engaging in a sort of self-hypnosis, where their minds would (possibly with the aid of mild hallucinogens, if that was diviner’s sage and not just…cooking sage, which wouldn’t, she’d read, do much besides give her a headache if she tried to inhale smoke from it) create patterns, because that was what human brains did. This was closer to Freudian or Jungian analysis than science, really.
Still, Jessica found herself somewhat attracted to this unit. How could she not be? Narrative poetry wasn’t her particular forte, at least beyond very sharp, short slices of life that sounded kind of like metaphors but were really just things she’d seen, but she was a poet. Fire, trances, inhaling slightly questionable substances, tapping into the subconscious, blatant use and abuse of symbolism…these were things that made sense to her, even if she’d never had anything to do with trances or inhalation of even remotely questionable substances outside of this class. Taking her place on one cushion, she scattered herbs into a bit of fire and tried to stare into the flames and breathe in slow, deliberate patterns, to force her consciousness to be less directly tied to her surroundings, as it very much wanted to be whenever she was around other people.
“I see an old man,” she said when it was her turn. “His shoulders are bent, so his head sticks up a bit like a turtle’s when it’s looking out of its shell…the flame he’s in, he thinks it’s the roof of his house, but it’s killing him – and he can’t even notice it. He doesn’t notice that his shoulders are crumbling, so it’s not so easy to make out the outline of his head anymore…the fire steals all the air, and he is neither living nor dead – and he needs water to live, and fire needs water to die, but they both need air, and he’d curse the rain if it came, because he didn’t hear what the thunder said.”
She blinked, then, wondering where that had come from and suddenly understanding why Katerina had seemed embarrassed after telling her story about dancers performing primitive rituals to welcome in spring. She flushed red, and didn’t want to do the same, but for one thing, she was worried about sounding crazy, and for another, she did remember where some of it had come from, and thought she ought to properly cite it…
“T.S. Eliot,” she said to nobody in particular. “Some of that, I think I was half-remembering Waste Land. That stick there does look like a man with a roof on his back, though," she added, pointing. Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, must have told him to fear death by water, so that he ignored the fire drawing all his out. Dry bones could harm no-one, but they couldn't do a lot else, either...well, at least Jessica hoped not. It was impossible to say much with that kind of certainty after five and a half years here.
OOC: The phrases "neither living nor dead," "Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante," "fear death by water," "dry bones can harm no-one", and "what the thunder said" - along with the lines in the title - are, as Jessica indicates, from the poem The Waste Land. I have (despite the, er, frequency with which I use this one) read other poems, but this one was just too perfect to not use again here, especially since divination and visions are important parts of the poem's narrative, to the extent it has one.
16
Jessica Hayles
We think of the key, each in his prison/Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
1442
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5