EXERCISES
Unlike the divination lessons up until now, where the exercises came at the end of the lesson, in Psychomancy, the exercises are incorporated into the lesson itself.
Exercise 1a: Holding Color to Your Midsection
For this exercise, hold colored pieces of cloth against your mid-section without looking, and say what the color of the cloth feels to you to be. Craft stores often sell pre-cut, multi-colored, uniformly pre-folded, bundled squares of cloth for quilters. These squares are all from the same kind of fabric, which would be ideal for this exercise, because there’s no textural difference. If you don’t want to go to the expense and you have a container of cloth remnants, these can be pressed into service. But you’re encouraged to cut them into roughly the same size and shape, so you can’t easily connect a particular remnant’s shape with it’s color.
It’s best with this exercise if you can enlist another person to assist you. Then they can hand you each cloth and fill in the record sheet with your guesses and the actual color while you stand there with your eyes closed. The PDF of the record sheet is below:
There’s no rule about whether you hold the cloth to your bare skin or your clothed midsection, so it’s up to you. Try it both ways. If there’s a limited number of colored cloths, your assistant can hand you the same square of cloth more than once, just to give you more practice. Have a trustworthy assistant who will take their role seriously. You don’t want a joker handing you the same cloth twenty times, just to see you guess differently every time and laugh about it when it’s time to review your results.
If you have to do this exercise alone, I recommend positioning yourself in front of a table, with the untried cloths behind and to the side of you, and placing the already-prognosticated cloths on the other side. This will keep them out of your line of sight when you open your eyes, which you’ll have to, in order to record your guesses on the sheet.
Exercise 1b: Holding Zener & Tattva Cards to Your Midsection
For this exercise, you may want to print out another copy of the Color to the Belly Test sheet to record your answers. Below is a PDF of the classic Zener Cards and the Tattva symbols, brought together in one document. Zener Cards were developed in the early 1930s by perceptual psychologist Karl Zener for use in ESP experiments by his colleague, parapsychologist J.B. Rhine. The Tattva Cards come from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which they derived from Hindu and specifically Vedic philosophy. The Zener Cards were developed in order to help Rhine test the existence of psychic ability. The Tattva symbols were created to illustrate the concepts of Spirit, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. Both symbol sets are simple and their colors basic, so sensing them shouldn’t be too hard.
Print them out on cardstock, cut them out, shuffle them around in the hand-over-hand style, then back together in a stack, still face-down, and without looking, hold each one in turn to your midsection and say what it is. Page 3 of the PDF is a card-back design if you want to make sure you can’t see what the symbol on the front is. Page 4 is a sheet of blank cards, if you want to try your hand at creating your own designs.
Each symbol has a particular color and shape, so you’ll be trying to detect both. First what does your gut tell you about the color; is it red, green, black, blue, purple, yellow, or grey? Second, what does the shape feel like? Is it a square, a crescent, wavy lines, a box, a crescent moon, or something else?
These two exercises are intended to familiarize you with how the psychic feeling ability operates, and to strengthen it in preparation for the next exercises.