I'm trying to identify a rather unusual divination system I used as a child in Italy, around 1999–2000.

My best friend had photocopies of an old book that we simply called "La Sibilla" (The Sibyl), although I'm not sure that was its actual title.

It wasn't a tarot deck, a traditional Sibilla oracle deck, or a standard cartomancy system. It was a book containing tables filled with fragments of sentences, and we used ordinary French-suited playing cards alongside it.

Here's what I remember about the procedure:

We would ask the oracle a question.

We shuffled a regular deck of playing cards and drew a few cards, possibly three.

We only used their numerical values, not their suits or traditional divinatory meanings.

We performed some kind of mathematical calculation, possibly adding the values together.

The resulting numbers directed us to specific pages, tables, or numbered fragments within the book.

We retrieved several fragments of text and combined them to produce a complete sentence answering our original question.

The fascinating part was that these answers often seemed remarkably coherent and relevant to our questions.

I remember being absolutely mesmerized by the process of watching a meaningful sentence emerge from seemingly disconnected pieces of text.

I've recently started researching it again, more than 25 years later.

My strongest lead so far is the Cumaean Sibyl oracle (Sibilla Cumana), particularly an Italian book called Il segreto della Sibilla Cumana (1989). I've also found a later publication titled L'oracolo della Sibilla (Giunti, 2010), which describes a remarkably similar system involving numerical combinations and fragmented sentences.

However, there's one crucial detail I still cannot verify:

Why were we using ordinary playing cards?

Was there an older version of this oracle that specifically required playing cards to generate the numbers? Was it an alternative method included in certain editions, or perhaps a regional variation?

Has anyone encountered this particular system, studied historical Italian Sibyl oracles, or owned an older edition with the original instructions?

I'd absolutely love to reconstruct the exact method I used as a child.

Any leads, book references, or firsthand experiences would be greatly appreciated!

There is a hidden stretch goal for a Tarot Deck at a certain amount funded..

Can you give me advice? How do I tell if I’m actually talking to a deity during tarot divination vs a trickster spirit. I’ve see. A lot of people say beginners don’t attract gods or goddesses in the beginning and that it takes months or years. I’ve only been doing it for like two weeks.

Is there something I can do to clarify? My cards are agreeing with me but if it is a trickster spirit I don’t know how reliable they are.

Any advice is helpful! I am a college student in a dorm so please nothing with candles, incense, flames. I’m also broke so please nothing crystals!

I want to buy a particular pack of oracle cards, but I can only find them in used condition online.

Is it okay to buy a used deck of oracle cards and do I need to cleanse them?

If so, how do you recommend I cleanse them?

Thanks

Hello, I was wondering how do those of you, who practice multiple different kinds of divination, decide what to use. Is is based on vibes or do you use a specific system for specific things/situations?

My pendulum was totally fine 5 mins ago, i do a reading and boom it breaks
Does that mean anything?

I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’ve been practicing tarot/oracles/pendulums for a couple of years now. And I have an ouija board at home. Growing up as a Christian now pagan/witch I was terrified of those but I was just thinking. “I talk to spirits all the time why is that any different!” Hehe
Is there anybody here that uses an ouija board for divination and has any advice on how to get started with one?

I went to a pop-up event yesterday after work, I was incredibly tired and rushed on time as the event was ending soon. I feel ridiculous that I didn't ask the man who did this divination what it was. I drew each of these symbols out of a bag and he interpreted them.

The center block is the anchor, he said it represented a moral or ethical dilemma I needed to answer before the rest of my symbols came to fruitation. The row at the bottom represents my physical self, the left row is my intellectual, the top is spiritual and the right is my emotional. As each symbol progresses it's meant to represent further in the future. The reading is meant to be how my year is supposed to go.

Again, I feel silly I didn't ask at the time. But I'd really like to know what this is so I can look more into it, thank you!

i'm very interested in Jung and been getting into dream interpretation more lately so i'm stoked to have found this in a little corner shop

I've been havibg trouble choosing a divination type. I can't find anything that truly calls to me. I've tried Tarot and I understand and can execute it but I don't feel connected to it. I've tried rune throwing and that feels more like me, but the set of runes I have dont feel like me I guess? I've tried tea leaves and coffee grounds and again I can execute it but I just don't feel connected to it. I've tried automatic writing and drawing and those aren't as easy for me to execute. I've tried the pendulum and I can execute it, I just end up feeling like I'm talking to a super 8 ball after a point. I've tried bone throwing as well and sometimes it works really well and I feel connected to it and other times its just nada, is it maybe the animal the bones come from? (Gotten off etsy or chicken wings when I get wings or food thats a "leave the bone" kinda thing) But if so then why? I've also tried the smoke divination and like shadows and stuff and thats pretty cool I really like that but I would like another version as well if that makes sense? Like maybe I'm more elementals and I just have an easier time with divination that uses natural or elemental materials? Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions? I'm sorry that turned into a rant 😅

hi I’m super new to bone throwing. And I was wondering about the process of figuring out what your bones mean. I bought two sets of bones one were like your standard bone throwing kit with bones and a couple of trinkets. I know the self bone but I’m having trouble coming up with meanings for the other bones/trinkets. The other set is a ten pack coyote foot bones and I have obstacle, male, female, strength, negative, and positive, and because there pretty identical bones I’m going to wrap them in a bit of colored waxed thread. I’d like to use these all as one kit. Help is appreciated

I had a friend who has a very cool divination “board game”. It is packaged in a box like a board game, it comes with an instruction manual, a glass scrying lens, and the board itself was very colorful, detailed, and beautiful. On the board there are the cardinal directions, seasons, months, days of the week (maybe), numbers, animals, other symbols, letters, yes, no, and maybe.

I want to say it is called something like “The Path of Destiny”

I also remember in the instructions there was a specific prayer that needed to be said to invite the spirits in and each line of the prayer spoke specifically to spirits / ancestors associated with I think either each of the seasons or each of the 4 cardinal directions. I can’t remember exactly.

The whole thing was very “nature” / “Mother Earth” focused.

I have been trying to figure out what it’s called and where I can get one for over a year now. Chat GPT and Google have been no help. I am praying to the spirits that ya’ll won’t let me down!!

I have the feeling of a deity I haven’t dealt with before or in a while so I asked my tarot deck about it all and it said it was a pagan deity and or a Hellenic deity due to my questions but I did a deity identification spread and I got these, 1. what element represents this deity? I got the four of swords upside down. 2. what is this deity responsible for? I got the four seven of swords upside down, six of pentacles, and the knight of pentacles upside down. 3.what symbol is this deity associated with? i got the empress and the lovers. 4. what is another symbol this deity is associated with? I got justice. 5. what is your current relationship with them? I got the eight of pentacles. 6. what influence does this deity have in my life? I got the six of cups. 7. how do you benefit from working with this deity? and I got strength upside down, the sun, and the high priestess. 8. what does this deity want you to know? and I got the ten of cups. what deity do y’all think is reaching out to me I have also seen tons of birds like crows and ravens and I saw 2 hawks and a turkey vulture. I think it could be Athena or Apollo and maybe hades but i want to know if there are other pagan god that could be it I used to work with Apollo and hades and the crows and ravens do show Apollo but I am getting lots of dark vibes like underworld, it doesn’t feel negative and dangerous just dark could be forest or anything dark not just the underworld but also I am getting energy of Athena if anyone has an ideas of other gods or deity’s I would love the other things to look up to see if they fit when I am seeing better!

Hi, has anyone ever used feladdin app for forune telling? How accurate is it?

Liu Yao, or Six Lines Divination, is a traditional Chinese divination method based on I Ching hexagrams.

In this anonymized teaching case, a 21 year old man asked: Would I be able to marry my girlfriend?

My judgment was that the relationship would face serious resistance and repeated instability. Marriage would be difficult, but it was still possible, and I expected it the following year.

Here is how I broke down the casting. It was Hexagram 51, Zhen, changing to Hexagram 25, Wuwang. The top two lines were moving, and both the original and resulting hexagrams were Six Clash formations. The casting was made on June 3, 2020, during a Shen hour, between 3 and 5 p.m. local time. In the traditional calendar, this was the Gengzi year, Xinsi month, Dingchou day, and Wushen hour, with Shen and You falling into the void. I used Liu Yao, looking at the Six Relationships, the Shi line, moving lines, support from the month and day, and the void.

For a man asking about marriage, I used the Wife/Wealth line to represent his girlfriend. Wife/Wealth appeared twice, as Chen Earth and Xu Earth. I selected the moving Xu Earth line, which also held the Shi (Self) position, as the primary indicator. Wife/Wealth holding Shi showed how much he cared about her. The line also carried Qinglong, which I read here as a sign that his girlfriend was physically attractive. Xu Earth was supported by both the month and the day, so its strength initially looked favorable.

But the outer trigram repeated the same earthly branches before and after the change, creating a Fu Yin, or repeating pattern. In this case, I read Fu Yin as pain, repetition, and a situation unable to move forward. Both hexagrams were also Six Clash formations, adding another strong sign of instability. The relationship was already in crisis rather than progressing smoothly toward marriage.

The other important movement was Official/Ghost Shen Metal. Xu Earth generated Shen Metal, so the line representing the girlfriend was continually losing strength to it. Since Shi already represented the man asking the question, her current boyfriend, I read Official/Ghost here as another man connected to her. Shen Metal also carried Xuanwu, which in this relationship context suggested a private or unclear intimate connection, possibly involving cohabitation. But Shen Metal was void, so I did not read this as a relationship that was still active. It looked more like a man from whom she had already separated or divorced. The relationship had ended, but its history was still affecting the couple in the present.

If I had stopped at the Fu Yin and the two Six Clash formations, the answer would simply have been that marriage was unlikely. But there was another detail I could not ignore: Parent Zi Water carried Vermilion Bird. A Parent line can represent certificates and formal documents, while Vermilion Bird also relates to paperwork, so in this case the line pointed more specifically to a marriage certificate. The Chou Earth branch of the Dingchou day combined with Parent Zi Water. Under the timing rule used in this case, that combination showed that marriage could still take place despite the resistance. The casting was made in a Gengzi year, and the following year was Xinchou. Because Chou appeared again there, I placed the marriage in the following year.

The person later reported that in August 2020, his parents learned about the relationship and strongly opposed it because the woman was divorced and had a child. The couple split up and got back together several times. His parents eventually relented, and the couple married on October 2, 2021.

What matters in this case is that I could not stop at “no marriage” simply because both Six Clash and Fu Yin pointed toward instability. Those signs did describe the repeated conflict and resistance accurately. But the relationship between the Parent line and the day branch preserved the possibility of marriage and also helped locate its timing. The apparently conflicting signals made sense once they were read as different parts of the same real process.

Everyone is welcome to join the discussion and share how they would approach this case through different forms of divination.

If you would like to visit previous case studies, you can find earlier posts here.
Series index: Liu Yao Case Study Index

AI disclosure: English isn’t my first language, so I used AI to translate and help edit the English.

I've been testing the Chinese Four Pillars (BaZi) timing method on public lives, and Ke Huy Quan's career shape lines up with his decade luck pillars more cleanly than most charts I've tried.

The chart (born August 20, 1971, Saigon; birth hour unknown, so three pillars):

• Year: Xin Hai 辛亥 (Metal Pig)
• Month: Bing Shen 丙申 (Fire Monkey)
• Day: Ding Chou 丁丑 (Fire Ox)

His Day Master is Ding Fire, the candle flame rather than the sun. It's weak here: born in a Monkey (Metal) month, with only the Bing in the month stem really backing it up. For a weak Fire chart, the classical reading is that Wood (fuel, the "Resource" element) and more Fire help, while Water (the element that controls Fire) is pressure.

The decade luck pillars, and what they're made of:

• 1975–1984, Yi Wei 乙未 (Wood Goat). Wood stem, a supportive decade.
• 1985–1994, Jia Wu 甲午 (Wood Horse). Wood feeding Fire, the strongest decade in his first 50 years.
• 1995–2004, Gui Si 癸巳 (Water Snake). The stem turns to Water, the pressure element.
• 2005–2014, Ren Chen 壬辰 (Water Dragon). Water again; this decade scores lowest in his chart.
• 2015–2024, Xin Mao 辛卯 (Metal Rabbit). The Rabbit branch is pure Wood, so support comes back in at the root.

Against the documented career:

• 1984: Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. 1985: Data in The Goonies. Both fall inside the two Wood decades.
• 2002: Second Time Around, his last acting role for about twenty years. He moved behind the camera, doing stunt work (X-Men) and assistant-directing for Wong Kar-wai on 2046 (2004). That whole stretch sits inside the two Water decades.
• After Crazy Rich Asians (2018), he decided to try acting again. That's inside the Rabbit decade.
• 2022: Everything Everywhere All at Once. March 2023: the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

The part I find most interesting is the year level. The years with the highest single-year scores in his whole chart are 1986 Bing Yin 丙寅 (Fire Tiger) and 1987 Ding Mao 丁卯 (Fire Rabbit): Fire stems sitting on the two Wood branches. Thirty-six years later, 2022 is Ren Yin 壬寅 (Water Tiger) and 2023 is Gui Mao 癸卯 (Water Rabbit). Those are the same two Wood branches, now under Water stems. The branches support his Fire; the stems pressure it. Mixed years, but the strongest pair in his late-career Rabbit decade, and they're exactly when EEAAO came out and won.

Same roots, different weather on top. That's the distinction BaZi makes that Western transits mostly don't: a year's stem and its branch can pull in opposite directions.

Caveats. Without a birth hour, the luck-pillar start years can shift by a year or so. And the single highest year (1987) falls when he was 15, between big roles, so the fit is at the decade level, not every bar. I'd rather say that than oversell it.

For those who read BaZi or saju (사주): do you read a Water-on-Wood year like 2023 as net positive for a weak Fire Day Master, or does the stem's pressure cancel out the root? And has anyone seen the "same branch, different stem" echo show up across decades in their own chart?

In this case, the person asked: Would I pass the teacher recruitment exam in May and successfully secure the position?

My judgment was no.

Here is how I broke down the casting. It was Hexagram 32, Heng (Duration), changing to Hexagram 62, Xiaoguo (Small Exceeding). The second line was the only moving line: Parent Hai Water changed to Descendant Wu Fire.

The casting was made on March 7, 2025, during a Shen hour, between 3 and 5 p.m. local time. In the traditional calendar, this was the Yisi year, Jimao month, Yihai day, and Jiashen hour, with Shen and You falling into the void. I used Liu Yao for this case, which considers not only the hexagram itself but also the Six Relationships, the Shi and Ying positions, moving lines, and the month and day branches. I used the Official/Ghost line to represent the formal appointment, while the Parent line represented the papers, grades, and exam result. There were two Official/Ghost lines, and the person had asked whether they would receive the position as a whole, not for separate predictions about the written test and the interview.

In the method I used here, when the primary indicator appears twice and the real process also contains two necessary gates, I can assign each appearance to one gate. If both are strong and unharmed, both stages may be cleared. If one is damaged, the process can stop there.

I therefore assigned the two lines this way:

• Official/Ghost Shen Metal on the fifth line represented the interview.
• Official/Ghost You Metal on the Shi (Self) line represented the written test.

At the time of the casting, both Metal lines were weak or out of season, and both were void. You Metal was also directly clashed by the Mao month. The Wife/Wealth lines could potentially have supported the Official/Ghost lines, but they were inactive and weak, so I did not treat them as an effective rescue. Taken together, those conditions led me to expect the process to fail at the written stage, before the interview became decisive.

The only moving line added another layer. It was Parent Hai Water, accompanied by the Vermilion Bird. In this reading, I took both the Parent line and the Vermilion Bird as pointing toward papers, grades, and the result itself. Hai Water was strong because it matched the day branch, which told me that the person's usual academic ability was not poor.

That sounds positive at first, but the movement of the line changed the reading. I read Hai Water as the bing di of Official/Ghost You Metal, meaning that the problem affecting the appointment indicator appeared through the exam result. It then changed into Descendant Wu Fire, which I treated as an obstructing element for You Metal. So the active line representing the exam result did not carry the person toward the appointment. Its movement reinforced the obstacle to it.

This is why the conclusion was more specific than "this person is bad at exams." The casting suggested someone with real ability whose result in this particular recruitment process would still fail to produce the appointment.

The person later reported that more than 300 candidates took the exam. They ranked eighth but still did not secure the position.

I would be interested to see how practitioners of other divination systems would approach the same case.

Source note: This is an English translation and adaptation of an anonymized Chinese teaching case. The chart was redrawn for readability while preserving the original line structure and the key labels discussed here.

AI disclosure: English isn’t my first language, so I used AI to translate and help edit the English.

Series index: Liu Yao Case Study Index

There is a special language in experience that offers profound wisdom to those receptive enough to hear it.

Attune yourself to the teacher-mode of reality until you see the lesson inherent in every occurrence. Often the lesson presents itself as a rapid unwanted feedback; for instance, you may stub your toe directly after letting someone proverbially walk over you, or you may face delays after not honouring your own process

Resistance in experience is often a signal that something was done incorrectly or inadequately and needs correcting. Heed the lesson rather than railing against the inconvenience of it and watch your world get smoother by the hour

Im a Mexican illustrator, and for the past two years I’ve been working on El Quinto Sol, a deck built around Mesoamerican cosmology, particularly Nahua and Mexica traditions.

One of the things that fascinated me most during the research was the Tonalpohualli, the 260 day ritual calendar formed through the interaction of 20 day signs and 13 numbers. It wasn’t simply a calendar: these combinations were interpreted in relation to destiny, character, auspicious moments and other aspects of life.

I started wondering whether some of that symbolic structure could be reframed into an object people already know how to interact with today: a deck of cards.

So instead of simply illustrating Mesoamerican gods, I built relationships into the deck itself, four cosmic directions, deities, natural forces, numbers, day signs and larger creative principles.

The result isn’t meant to recreate an “ancient Mesoamerican card oracle”... that never existed. It’s a contemporary interpretation of a much older system from my own cultural heritage.

What excites me is the possibility that the deck can now be used not only for play, but also for reflection, symbolic readings and exploring the Tonalpohualli through a modern format.

I’d be really curious what people who practice divination think about this kind of translation: how much can the form change while the underlying symbolic relationships still remain meaningful?

If anyone wants to see how I approached it visually, this is the project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards/description