I'm not gonna lie, the cover's so bright and gorgeous it attracted my magpie self regardless of content. And in all fairness I have to say that I was biased going into this. I mean, I'm making an effort to try and read more widely, to try and read new things (or things that are at least new to me) and this is... not my usual reading material. I'm not religious, not at all, and I think divination is frankly bunkum so clearly I am not the target audience here. But for all my scepticism when it comes to divination, I do accept that people can use meditation as a way to explore their own problems and to assess the probable usefulness of future actions. If that meditation works best for them when guided by religious or mythological symbolism, then whatever floats their boat. And looking at it from that perspective, this book took on a new value of sorts - some of the systems and symbolisms used were genuinely interesting. There seemed to be, in some of the methods described, an implication that the diviner already knew the answers and/or future likelihoods subconsciously, and the divination methods merely gave a means of accessing them. This isn't true in all cases, I think, but the example of the Druid's Wand struck me as particularly apt. Basically, you decorate a stick of wood with symbols and use it to make astronomical measurements; the measurement corresponds to a symbol and that gives the answer. But the measurement in question - between the moon and Polaris - is a repetitive pattern deriving from orbital movement, essentially, and it wouldn't take doing this too many times to, at least subconsciously, choose the night and time of observation that would give the most appropriate answer. It's not the way I'd figure out a problem, but as a meditative means of accepting something you already know... eh, there are worse things you could do I suppose.

It helps that the book's underlined - as much of Wicca is, at least so says my very slim exposure - by a robust sort of practicality. If you're sick, don't go divining for medical advice, but get thee to a doctor. If your relationship's failing, take a good hard look at yourself and how your actions contribute. And so on. That, at least for me, balances out the, um, less convincing bits. I mean, I'm still not going to try any of it, but I am interested regardless as to how people think about things I don't believe in, so it was worth the read for that. And the cover's still gorgeous.