Yes, no, maybe so?

So I find myself with a bit of a divination dilemma.  I’ve been dutifully practicing coin divination, and to make sure that I’m actually paying attention to meanings rather than assigning significance after the fact, I’m thus far being very careful to do so in a manner that I can test and verify.  Silly me, I thought that would make things easier.

Coins readily lend themselves to yes/no questions, which are often best avoided for divination, so I was willing to use one for these tests.  Because I’m a little money obsessed anyway, the question I have been asking each morning is a simple one:

Will I have more cash in hand at the end of today?

Count the cash at the beginning and the end of the day, and bam! an answer.  Put the results for a selection of coins in a spread sheet, and after awhile I should be able to see if any of those coins are better at answering the question.  Simple, testable process.  Easy peasy.

My problem stems from having multiple money-focused activities going on at once.  Today (yesterday, in some time zones), one of those came into conflict with my coin divination, and I think it won.

Herm encircled by ribbons and wreath for Hermaia Agoraia.

What I did today was celebrate the Hermaia Agoraia, a festival of the opening of the markets for the holiday season.  It was a fun time, replete with:

• decorating my herm (upright stone used as a shrine to Hermes), which somehow made it seem more phallic than ever;
• buying stocking stuffers for the people in my household;
• making some tasty no-cook mints as an offering to Hermes; and
• ensuring that my family’s anonymous gift jar got to its recipient.

It’s that last one — the gift jar — that screwed me up.  You see, we’ve been putting cash in this jar for almost a year, a little at a time, whenever the mood strikes us.  For me, whenever I had a stroke of luck or some extra change, it went into the jar, which was then wrapped up like a present and delivered.

So I have no clue how much money was in it.  That didn’t matter to me one whit — I knew it was going to a family that could use the money — until I started on this divination project.  I chose my daily question because it’s easy to measure how much cash goes in an out, if you just pay attention, but the jar defied that attention.  I know cash left my possession today, but by the very design of the thing, I don’t know how much.  It’s supposed to work that way, and it did.

So now I’m stuck, because I was clever.  I know that if you don’t understand that the results to divination, you can look for a sign or ask another question to clarify the result, but that still won’t give me the dry, academic datum point that I was hoping for.  I’m fairly certain there’s a lesson in this, and absolutely sure that I deserve it, but the best thing that came of it was a topic to use for the letter “Y.”

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project, a yearlong exploration of spirituality.  This specific post is brought to you by the letter Y.

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• coins
• divination
• festivals
• Hermes