#bead throwing

(”What? Jes, what even is that? Is that just like... Bone Throwing? But with beads?”)

Well yes. Kind of.

The short background is that I was cleaning out some old boxes in my room and I found an old spell book from when I was 15 years old and just making witch shit up because I didn’t have access to Real Proper Witchcraft. (Flash forward to now, where Adult Jes is still making shit up and hand making everything just like Teen Jes had to, except that Adult Jes now does it voluntarily and finds it much more fulfilling than just buying Proper Witch Stuff).

Anyway.

Flipping through that old spell book, I found this little divination system that I had made up using some beads I had. I made jewelry a lot as a teen, so I just had a lot of beads around, so it made sense to use them for divination when I wasn’t able to access the Usual divination methods because of Family Reasons.

What kind of beads? Well, of course they were super mystical crystal beads!! Super pretty hand made fancy... crystal...

Yeah, bullshit. They were funky plastic beads.

Seriously.

Anyway, since these beads came in a bunch of different colors (seven, actually), I decided to pull two of each color and assign them ~*~meaning~*~*. Then I’d throw them onto a surface and interpret how they fell.

(”Yeah. Jes. That’s Bone Throwing.”)

Yes, okay, shh. Adult Jes can see that now, but Teen Jes didn’t know what bone throwing was. Hush up, this isn’t so much a ‘how-to’ guide as it is a trip down memory lane.

I actually forgot all about these until I found a page in that found spell book where I’d been journaling about some bead readings I did. And Adult Jes thought “Oh wow. This looks like it was really cool. Damn, I wish I could remember what each of those beads meant...” And then I turned a few more pages and found that Teen Jes actually HAD bothered to write down the bead meanings.

So, I guess lesson #1 of this whole thing is: Don’t dismiss anything in your craft as Too Stupid To Write About, because maybe fourteen years into your future you’ll look back and go “Wait, that was a GREAT idea!”

So anyway, I’d toss this handful of beads onto a surface, and then start interpreting how they landed. Having two of each color was key to this whole thing, because the first thing I’d do is start looking at the pairs. See how they fall.

For example... the red beads are Passion. Not like, romance-novel-passion, but like ‘powerful emotion and/or intense focus’. They’re pretty far apart in this toss. And what’s in between them? The black beads (Conflict) and the blue bead (Peace).

This is the part where the journaling would happen. Example: I haven’t been writing as much as I used to, even though it was something I was really Passionate about. I stopped after numerous conflicts with a friend (yaaaay abusive and manipulative friendships...) and it tore down my confidence. These days, I haven’t picked it up again because of Peace, but peace to the point of complacency. I’m comfortable and I don’t like rocking my own boat. Picking up a pen again would force me to face those old traumas. And I don’t want to because ugh.

More things to consider: There’s a green Wealth bead hanging out by the two Love beads, but the other Wealth bead is hanging out with both Uncertainty beads. Peace, Passion, and Spirituality are making a little wall between those two groupings.

Anyway, you get me? The main idea was to look at the pairings and see how close together they were, or if there was anything in their way. It was a lot of introspection and thought.

But like... also I found the entry in the spell book where I threw the beads for a high school friend and her boyfriend, and I couldn’t make sense of it because it definitely looked like their future had lots and lots of pain and heartbreak and that couldn’t be because they were like totally perf? And then as I was looking at it as an adult like “Oh that abusive lying psychopathic asshole got CALLED TF OUT by my FUNKY PLASTIC BEADS!”

So. Yeah. Bead throwing. Like bone throwing, but more plastic.