WAYS OF PRACTICING THIS DIVINATION METHOD
The easiest way is to find a place with a lot of things your eyeballs can land on. You could try this at an outdoor cafe or on a walk through a park, but one of my favorite locations for this is this is the jewelry-findings section of a craft store, especially the necklace pendants and charm-bracelet charms. You’ll find a wide variety of symbolic things there. Another good location for this is a gift shop, especially a museum shop or a tourist-trade shop. Gift shops have a wide variety of tchotchkes to fix your eyeballs on.
The drawback is, these places are intended for commerce, not thoughtful contemplation. Over-the-shoulder divination calls for the practitioner to be still for a moment, park the mind in neutral, and simply observe what’s behind them. Other shoppers may think you’re an obstacle and shop employees may think you need assistance. The benefit of this approach is its spur-of-the-moment-ness. It can be done anywhere, any time and instantly. And if your eye lands on something which would actually solve your problem, you’re right there to purchase it.
The second way is assembling a variety of objects behind you, either laid out on a table, pinned to a bulletin board, taped to a wall, or propped-up on shelves. This is where all the cards we’ve gone over in the symbolomancy section and all the small objects divination in the simpleomancy section would come in handy. But to get you started, I’ve devised a set of over-the-should divination cards which you’re free to use, or not. The PDF for this appears below:
As always, I recommend spraying these sheets on both sides with a couple coats of acrylic sealer, to keep the ink from smearing, and to protect the cards from much damage if you’re sticking them up on a wall with tape or some other adhesive. I’ve included a printable box for you to keep these in. Hang onto these cards, because we’ll be using them for two more divination lessons later on. Of course, you needn’t restrict yourself to just these cards. You could develop your own card set with emojis, Internet memes, family pictures, travel pictures, or just random words. Let your imagination run free.
Your over-the-shoulder tableau can be an assortment of either 2D images, such as the card decks we covered in Symbolomancy, or 3D tchotchkes, such as the small-objects divination set we covered in Simpleomancy, assembled on a table. But I would say strive for consistency in whatever you choose for the tableau. You can have an admixture, but stick mainly with one or the other.