Oracular Session – April 2014.

I remember the day I thought about oracular sessions for the first time. I was driving on my way to work, still trying to parse out how to go about and offer services in Sekhmet’s name. I can remember that drive because, one moment, I was in the state of Massachusetts and then the next minute, I was about five minutes away from work. I got very heavily in an internal debate with myself, the first moment I started thinking about it. I knew that this was something beyond my skill set, beyond anything I could possibly offer. But the worst part about it was the approval I felt coming from Sekhmet the moment I had the thought. It made sense, in a way, to offer the service. I had been seeing, for some time, many people doing the oracular session thing for their gods, but I had hardly ever seen the case with ancient Egyptian deities and their recon/revival/whatever devotees. So, in that way, it made sense to me: I was offering a niche and I like to shove myself into tight, claustrophobic niches that leave me panicking.

Evidently.

Accurate representation of me about 95% of the time.

But the main reason why I wasn’t really interested in doing so was because I didn’t know what the fuck that shit was about. All of those people offering those services – how do? It was like some mystical puzzle that had no pieces and there was no picture reference, anyway, to build that puzzle. I definitely had no idea how in the world they had done those things. I didn’t understand how they offered this thing, this mystical and weird and foreign thing, and then made words make sense to the people they were talking to. None of this made any sense to me, whatsoever. But it was the one thing that Sekhmet seemed very keen on. I could have decided, then and there, that my confusion outweighed her approval in the matter. But there’s something that most people may not realize about me or maybe they do and it’s just shocking to me: I always want approval. I especially want the approval of my deities.

I spent a lot of my rides into work worrying about how to do this. I decided that, no matter what, I was going to use cartomancy. But I have to admit that Sekhmet was giving me yet more odd emotive reactions regarding this. I couldn’t tell if that’s what she had in mind. I had, accidently and on purpose channeled deities before. I didn’t like it. I found the whole experience very painful and very confusing and very, very horrific each time. I found that the whole thing left me shaky, tired, aggravated, nauseated, and without any fucking spoons whatsoever. But Sekhmet has this thing where she likes to just have me do something. This should be quite clear, considering the fact that she never once explained to me the whole initiation process or what it was even for, but left me guessing. She doesn’t even to “go into the details,” I guess, and that drives me fucking insane. So, while I was willing to do the thing for people who may be interested, I was terrified about how I was going to actually do it.

I didn’t really do anything at all to prepare myself for what was going to happen. I didn’t know how to prepare myself. I could have napped all day. I could have lazed around. But I honestly don’t think anything I could have done in order to prep would have really helped. As I have made quite clear, I didn’t know what to expect since Sekhmet isn’t fond of details and I didn’t know what I would need to do in order to prepare myself. Did I meditate? Did I get really drunk? Did I get high as a kite (not that I’m into that sort of thing)? Did I try to reach a higher level of consciousness? Did I twiddle my thumbs? Did I read a book and hope that everything just suddenly fit into place? Like, what do people do to prepare themselves to do readings on behalf of people who want to reach out to a specific deity? I don’t know if what I did, at all, was really preparation but I had a pretty good day.

When it finally came time to do it, I realized that I was really fucking tired. I tend to think that I do my best card readings when my eyes are bleary and everything starts to blur at the edges because all I want to do is close my eyes. I’m not sure if I’m weird here, but I assume I am. Maybe it’s just because being tired allows me to relax the rigid, asshole-like control I have over everything and gives me a better ability to interpret what the cards are seeing. Or, maybe it’s just, simply, that I am able to zone out really well when I’m tired and I’m not so good at relinquishing control when I’m not tired. Whatever the case may be, I felt like shuffling cards and zoning out long enough to pull cards while mulling over whatever the request was about and then writing down whatever impressions I got from what I was seeing.

Sometimes, I got like little emotional impressions. Without getting into specifics: my first reading asked a personal query, specifically in relation to Sekhmet. I felt very much as though she were sighing and rolling her eyes. I got exasperation, aggravation, irritation, and put upon when I asked her the question. The amount of emotional overload I went through when I was asking for advice on behalf of another Sekhmet kid was made ten times worse because whatever shields I may have normally were completely gone. As I said, probably because of how tired I was, I was better able to give up my rigid, asshole-like control and get into the swing of things easier. Unfortunately, this meant that I was also able to get impressions that were in conjunction with my own impressions or complete opposite of my own impressions. Things that I knew I was feeling in relation to some of the requests were magnified beyond what they would normally be if I had been as tired as I was.

I’ve thought about this, trying to discern what the fuck was going on here.

I found that I was reacting in an overly emotional way to some of these queries. It’s possible that these emotional outbursts – at one point, I ended up crying for no reason other than that I pulled a fucking card – were due to any number of things. I’m trying to be rational here and not jump on the “I totes was hand-in-hand with my goddess” bandwagon here. But the emotional outbursts that I felt are difficult to parse out and decide what could be from other and what could be from me. I don’t really have any reason to be over emotional about anything that I was asking, though. The answers don’t fucking matter to me; they don’t impact me at all. So, why was I crying because of the Sekhmet kid who got a slot this month? I’ve decided that there are a couple of legitimate reasons as to my reactions: I was over emotional due to ovulation (TMI, right?); I was over emotional due to lack of sleep; I was over emotional due to the stress levels of this past week; I was over emotional because Sekhmet just makes me emotional sometimes. I was over emotional because I was really connected to the god.

I honestly don’t know what the answer here is. Anything could be possible.

I found that, in some cases, I was staring eye-to-eye with the statue of Sekhmet on my altar to give a better indication of what was going on or what I needed to know to relate back to the people asking. This, actually, left me very disconcerted. I don’t normally make eye contact with the statue. Hell, when I dream and/or astral in regards to Sekhmet, I very rarely look her in the eye. I honestly don’t know if it’s because I still feel so much less than in comparison to her or if it’s just a habit that I can’t break. Whatever the case may be, I found that whenever I would look her, eye-to-eye as one would when having a conversation with someone, I found myself uncomfortable with the direct focus. I found it really fucking difficult to maintain that eye contact, but also, I found it difficult to break that eye contact. Talk about a really weird and confusing mess, right? Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, staring into her eyes, so to speak, helped to aid me and whenever I did, I found that I was very stressful to maintain that eye contact.

I did, also, find that the little square bauble that TH’s aunt made for me after Christmas calmed me after those moments. I tend to think of this bauble as the “Ma’at Bauble.” It is gold and glitzy and has glittery ostrich feathers inside. It’s actually really beautiful and the moment I saw it, I knew that this was going on Sekhmet’s altar. It’s a sort of sign post or reminder to maintain ma’at, to maintain balance, but also that one of Sekhmet’s main functions is to protect and maintain ma’at as well. Whatever it is to me doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that when I felt disconcerted or overly emotional about things, I found that just looking at it was very calming. I could go back to doing what it was I needed to complete before going to bed. I found that it was easier to look at that glittery, ritzy, over-the-top-yet-gorgeous bauble and keep on, keepin’ on.

I did also note that my body had strange reactions to some of the requests, as well. When I stopped and tried to ask questions for myself, I ended up getting deep blooms of pain at my third eye and at both temples. However, as I continued to ask questions for other people, the response was dizziness and vertigo. I also received strange muscle spasms the more I asked questions. I’ve decided that this is probably due to the fact that I was sitting, mostly, in a hard backed chair all day and I was using another hard-backed chair to sit in while doing the thing. But the headache and the physical reactions were definitely not caused by how I was sitting or anything. I had felt perfectly fine, though tired, prior to sitting down. I’m not sure if it was just that I was asking my body to do more than I usually do, in a religious or spiritual sense, and that was my body’s reaction or if I can just expect that to happen all the time.

Only time will tell, I suppose.

The emotional fall out is still ongoing, I have noted. I am not a very emotional person, demonstrative or otherwise. I am very rigid and very controlling regarding my emotions. I don’t think that people need to see them, at all, and I try very hard to maintain this sort of tin-women façade. Sometimes, I fail and other times, I don’t. However, I found that as I was sending out the interpretations to everyone this morning, I found that I continued to have an emotional reaction regarding some of the readings I had done. I did find that the more emotional a reaction I was having was directly related to how close to the person who was asking. As I thought back, I think that was the case with some of the emotional reactions I was having the previous evening, though not all of them. But that makes sense! I’m going to, you know, have some feels regarding people if I care about them especially if I’m telling them things of a personal nature. I mean, that’s how friendships work or something, I think. But I’ve also found that the emotional reactions are still happening, which is not something I was expecting at all.

I have to admit that I spent a lot of my time, leading up to this month’s session, freaking the fuck out. Now that I have at least one experience under my belt, I’m not as freaked out. It kind of helps that the people who have received their readings have mostly all commented and many of them have been positive responses. So, I think that is a major weight that has been lifted. I also discovered that actually interpreting what I was seeing was easier than I thought it would be. For some stupid reason, I didn’t see the whole “story writing” that I ended up doing as a possibility even though that’s what I do when it comes to other forms of cartomancy. So, it’s kind of a relief to discover that one type of cartomancy, even if being interpreted from an intuitive and historical standpoint versus what a book tells me it should mean, is kind of the same as other types of cartomancy.

I did discover a good deal of other things, but the most important discovery was that, well, I can do this.