RECOMMENDATIONS
So from my brief experiment with libanomancy and different kinds of incense, I will state:
- The better your fuel/smoke source, the better the smoke. You don’t want to be straining your eyes to see a barely-discernable amount of smoke.
- Select a scent you enjoy smelling for your smoke-source as it burns. A scent you personally find unpleasant or even revolting will make smoke divination an endurance test, creating an adverse energy which could interfere with good divination.
- Getting into a meditative state of mind and asking for assistance and inspiration, particularly from fire spirits/elementals, is a good idea before commencing smoke divination. With as intangible a divination method as this is, your answers just may come from a sudden, intuitive thought, as much as from what the smoke is doing.
- Some of the old rules of thumb about smoke divination from the various sources seem to hold true. Straight smoke heading skyward is a good sign. Agitated smoke as it rises indicates disturbances in the energy and/or near-future, but still moving forward. Smoke that doesn’t rise, but instead stays low and curls around the place of burning before dissipating is a fundamentally-negative sign. Based on my own experience, an interruption to the smoke in response to an audible yes-or-no question can be taken as a no, while a straight stream of smoke in response to a yes-or-no question can be seen as a yes.
- Try asking the smoke out loud to show you what both a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ answer looks like. Your yes and no responses could look different from mine.
- Experiment with thought and smoke divination. I have found sometimes, when burning incense, that I can think at the smoke and it will react. But if you have a series of questions or issues, it can be interesting to go through each one in your mind and see the smoke react accordingly.
CONCLUSION
Obviously, smoke divination is contraindicated for those individuals with respiratory issues, such as asthma, or Covid long-haulers whose lungs are still recovering from the ordeal. One of the good uses of smoke divination is, if you are in a group around a fire, the behavior of the smoke might be able to tell you things which the others gathered around the fire will totally-miss. If the smoke rises straight up, the energy of the group is good. If both the group and the atmosphere seems to be calm, but the smoke is acting up—churning around the fire, or wafting toward one person in particular, then there are disturbed energies at work under the surface.
Smoke divination is a classic illustration of artomancy—that category of divination method I define as ‘discerning messages from things in your environment.’ The divination methods I categorize under the terms simpleomancy and chartomancy are fairly straightforward. They have a defined procedure, a specific tool or set of tools, a finite number of possible answers, and are fairly-simple to master. All that is required with them, really, is an ability to follow instructions.