Divination for Kids

Before beginning divination lessons, you can be fostering your child’s intuition by paying heed to their “hunches” or “gut feelings” when they arise, and creating a safe environment for your child to express such feelings of knowing. There are also games you can use to build intuition, one of them being Zener ESP cards like the Royal Magic deck. You could also have your child start a dream journal.

The next step in the process could be learning about symbolism and interpreting dreams. It is relatively easy to find Pagan correspondence charts for interpreting symbols. You could help your child make her/his own divination correspondence chart with poster board, markers, and magazine pictures. Often symbol interpretation is an individual thing, especially when signs and visions are meant for one person. A person’s symbol associations may change throughout one’s lifetime. The initial thoughts and feelings that arise when making interpretations are usually the truest, so you can see why trusting your intuition is so important. But there is a greater importance for honing a child’s intuition than just for learning divination- a child who trusts her/his own thoughts and feelings have a greater sense of self worth, self love, and connectedness.

Nature Gazing
There is a category of divination that consists of mostly gazing at something and interpreting the symbols that arise. Scrying in a crystal ball or bowl of water are the best known of these. This can also be done with a natural body of water such as a pond. The same principle is used for fire gazing (with adult supervision only, of course), and cloud gazing. Cloud gazing is my favorite introduction to divination for children. You can even lie under a tree and look up at the patterns in the leaves and branches and find signs. Anything in nature can be used for “gazing” and some kind of meaning drawn from it. This kind of divination is open ended; the interpretation is comes to you completely from your intuition. Ever have that feeling that you want to zone-out and stare into space? Don’t reach for the TV remote, do some nature gazing divination instead, and teach your child to do the same.

Simple “Yes or No” Answers
Whereas scrying/gazing leads to very open ended results, there are a number of simple divination methods to use when a straight-forward answer is desired. One simple method that can be used in nature is “Water Rings”; ask a question and throw a pebble into a pond. An odd number of ripples means yes, an even number is no.

• Serpent Stones make a good first divination tool, and all that is needed is three colored stones and a pouch to put it in.

• A pendulum is a very good tool too start with and can be homemade with found objects.

More Advanced Methods
After mastering the simpler divination methods mentioned above, your child may want to move on to something more complex…

• Runes: Kids Runes by Jordsvin is an excellent website for teaching kids the meanings of the runes, for later use in divination and magic. A first rune set can be made with salt dough or painted on rocks.

• Tarot (& more): one of my daughters recieved the Wise Gal Tarot book when she was about ten, and really loved it. It serves as a beginners guide book to eight kinds of divination methods; tarot, palmistry, dowsing, tasseography, Chinese zodiac, pyromancy, bibliomancy, and ceromancy. It has a simple, yet colorful tear-out tarot card set in the back. Speaking of tarot, there are a number of decks made especially for kids. The Aeclectic Tarot website has reviews of tarot cards and decks suitable for use by children or young adults. It’s fine to play games with the cards to become familiar with their feel in one’s hands, learn the meanings, and use for spiritual growth in a playful way.  Tarot Games by Cait Johnson has a number of fun and meaningful ideas geared mainly toward goddess-centered tradition.

• More divination methods your child may enjoy include wyrdstones, crowstones, or Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Cards, or cartomancy with regular playing cards. Your child may even want to make up his/her own divination system!