Types Of Divination That Aren’t Tarot:

I’m tired of tarot cards and tarot readers everywhere…it’s awesome but there’s just too many of ya’ll. I just want my friends list to be more diverse. If I am gonna be honest, tarot isn’t most of your forte. Most of you just aren’t good at it. And further, you set yourself up for failure doing the job that 1000 other blitches are already doing and excelling at! But the good news is there are other options!

TYPES OF DIVINATION THAT AREN’T TAROT:

☕🍷Tasseomancy: Divination from tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediment. Put that drinking or herb habit to good use!

🔮🍶🕯️ Scrying: Divination using a crystal ball (gastromancy), mirror/black mirror (catoptromancy), bowl of water (hydromancy) or other reflective surface. Can also use a flame or ashes from a spell (cineromancy/ceneromancy). Go get some full moon water and Git it.

📖 Stichomancy/Bibliomancy/Rhapsodomancy: Divination from sacred and spiritual texts. Yes, we have sacred and spiritual books that aren’t the Bible. Yes much of our oral tradition has been written down. No excuses.

✋🏾Chiromancy: Palmistry, divination through the study of the hand. There are hands all around you! You have two! Grab and go, fam, grab and go!

🌬️Capnomancy/Libanomancy: Divination through reading smoke. COME ON where my potheads at this isn’t hard. Where my cigar smokers, pipe smokers, roll a bleezy and let’s get to it!

💃🏾Pendulum Reading: Energy reading using an object or your body as the pendulum.

☠️ Osteomancy: Divination with bones, shells, and other parts of nature.

🗿💎Lithomancy: Divination with stones that have symbols drawn on them (runes, a popular British Isles practice but I’m down if you want to drawn indigenous symbols from your culture)

💰I Ching Divination: Utilizes coins and yarrow stalks. You should probably only bust out Chinese coins with holes if you are in some way Chinese FYI. But why not use coins from your hometown? We all have coins laying in the sofa cushions! We all have native twigs in the grass outside!

🏚️🔠 Spirit Boards: Divination with a talking board–the most commonly called a Ouija board. Used since Ancient times (China, Africa, Greece) and for much more than talking to demons. Like please just stop obsessing with the devil lmao.

⚕️Dowsing Rod: A spiritual stick used for fortelling and finding. I’ve seen a million crystal “wands” being sold by blitches, go get one and do this thing!

☁️🌨️Nephomancy: Divination of the clouds. They are beautiful. Best of all…they are free and you don’t have to store them. My husband just reminded me that an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender was based on a woman who read the clouds ⛅

🌌✨Sortilege: Also called casting lots, ancient form of divination that is quite mysterious and open for interpretation. Found in the Bible 70+ times (most notably to throw Jonah to the whale) it involves taking a group of relevant objects and casting them for the truth. The objects can range from items to paper with words or symbols written on them. Typically all items are placed in a bag and you draw them out one at a time.

☀️🌅🌦️Heliomancy/Solaromancy : Divination of the rays and movement of the sun. We can all see the sun, really this one sounds easy. Why is none of you with Rah on your name jumped on this?

🌓🌔🌕 Selenomancy: Step 1, go outside and look at the moon. Step 2, ______. Step 3, profit. But for real ya’ll love the moon, go read her!

👨🏾👩🏿Physiognomy: Divination through facial reading. You seen faces before! Read them!

😪😴Narcomancy: Divination while sleeping /dreaming.

🌿🍃Phylomancy: Divination of leaves. Your divination pics will never look the same twice! Plus this is another free one!

🛣️Symbolomancy: Divination of things found on the road. I’d follow an IG of someone who did THAT in a meaningful way!

I hope this list inspires you to just jump in and try something new. Stop waiting for a teacher and just PRACTICE. The same way you all are doing with tarot. Feel bold and like you can practice something else…hell make up your own pieces and ways. Blaze a goddamn trail.

Signed,

Tahtahme

A Blitch Who Wants Some Options Damnit

Neutron Stars Are Even Weirder Than We Thought

Let’s face it, it’s hard for rapidly-spinning, crushed cores of dead stars NOT to be weird. But we’re only beginning to understand how truly bizarre these objects — called neutron stars — are.

Neutron stars are the collapsed remains of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. In each explosion, the outer layers of the star are ejected into their surroundings. At the same time, the core collapses, smooshing more than the mass of our Sun into a sphere about as big as the island of Manhattan.

Our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope on the International Space Station is working to discover the nature of neutron stars by studying a specific type, called pulsars. Some recent results from NICER are showing that we might have to update how we think about pulsars!

Here are some things we think we know about neutron stars:

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars ✔︎

Pulsars get their name because they emit beams of light that we see as flashes. Those beams sweep in and out of our view as the star rotates, like the rays from a lighthouse.

Pulsars can spin ludicrously fast. The fastest known pulsar spins 43,000 times every minute. That’s as fast as blender blades! Our Sun is a bit of a slowpoke compared to that — it takes about a month to spin around once.

The beams come from the poles of their strong magnetic fields ✔︎

Pulsars also have magnetic fields, like the Earth and Sun. But like everything else with pulsars, theirs are super-strength. The magnetic field on a typical pulsar is billions to trillions of times stronger than Earth’s!

Near the magnetic poles, the pulsar’s powerful magnetic field rips charged particles from its surface. Some of these particles follow the magnetic field. They then return to strike the pulsar, heating the surface and causing some of the sweeping beams we see.

The beams come from two hot spots… ❌❓✔︎ 🤷🏽

Think of the Earth’s magnetic field — there are two poles, the North Pole and the South Pole. That’s standard for a magnetic field.

On a pulsar, the spinning magnetic field attracts charged particles to the two poles. That means there should be two hot spots, one at the pulsar’s north magnetic pole and the other at its south magnetic pole.

This is where things start to get weird. Two groups mapped a pulsar, known as J0030, using NICER data. One group found that there were two hot spots, as we might have expected. The other group, though, found that their model worked a little better with three (3!) hot spots. Not two.

… that are circular … ❌❓✔︎ 🤷🏽

The particles that cause the hot spots follow the magnetic field lines to the surface. This means they are concentrated at each of the magnetic poles. We expect the magnetic field to appear nearly the same in any direction when viewed from one of the poles. Such symmetry would produce circular hot spots.

In mapping J0030, one group found that one of the hot spots was circular, as expected. But the second spot may be a crescent. The second team found its three spots worked best as ovals.

… and lie directly across from each other on the pulsar ❌❓✔︎ 🤷🏽

Think back to Earth’s magnetic field again. The two poles are on opposite sides of the Earth from each other. When astronomers first modeled pulsar magnetic fields, they made them similar to Earth’s. That is, the magnetic poles would lie at opposite sides of the pulsar.

Since the hot spots happen where the magnetic poles cross the surface of the pulsar, we would expect the beams of light to come from opposite sides of the pulsar.

But, when those groups mapped J0030, they found another surprising characteristic of the spots. All of the hot spots appear in the southern half of the pulsar, whether there were two or three of them.

This also means that the pulsar’s magnetic field is more complicated than our initial models!

J0030 is the first pulsar where we’ve mapped details of the heated regions on its surface. Will others have similarly bizarre-looking hotspots? Will they bring even more surprises? We’ll have to stay tuned to NICER find out!

And check out the video below for more about how this measurement was done.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

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