THE TEST
Surely, it wasn’t necessary to follow all these old rules to the letter, I thought. Fancying myself a divination scientist, I decided to put this divination method to the test, using six different kinds of candles, five of which appear in the picture below:
I wanted to know what sort of results different varieties of candles would give me. Filling a larger-than-normal white bowl with water, and placing it in the refrigerator for twenty minutes to get good and cold, I hunted-down my test-set of candles. The question I decided to go with was, “What is the most important event, feature, or focus of the next seven days?”
I lit a decorative pillar candle from which to light the other candles. The first tested was the light-blue, striped birthday cake candle. The wax came off in pellets, and the first few pellets were triangular in shape, then became more rounded. These wax pellets seemed to want to stick together. I only burned down the birthday candle half-way, as the flame was starting to get closer to my hand than I felt comfortable with. The end result looked to me like a blue fish with a rather jagged, pointed tail.
The second candle I tested was the purple chime/personal altar candle, approximately 4 in/10 cm long. The drippings from this candle were more loose, blotchy, feathery, and seemed to want to go their own way. I dripped this for about a minute or two, and tried to keep the drippings on one another, so they didn’t drift away from each other. The end result was interesting. It could’ve been a stuffed teddy bear that had seen better days. Or a rocky outcropping with two feathery trees protruding from its plateau. Most intriguing was what looked like a face, peering out from behind the main structure of the dripping, in the upper left-hand corner.