Cultrimancy - Knife Divination
I was going crazy once (for the purposes of expelling the colonizer in my mind) and wondered whether there was an established method of divination based on throwing knives. A quick google-roni reveled that as far as the internet knows, no there is not. So I made up Cultrimancy.
I will be upfront and say the purpose of this is deep shadow work, trauma work, emotional work - It is not always comfortable, it is at times activating, and that is its purpose. Please do not sign up for a reading if you do not want to begin the decompartmentalization part of your healing journey. You won’t be pleased, I can tell you that.
The name is a bit of a play on words - It is derived from the latin prefix Cultri- meaning knives and the suffix -mancy meaning divination, and that has the lovely effect of sounding like Culture-mancy, which is its purpose. A way of reflecting on how we’ve been influenced by the culture(s) we were raised in, on our thought patterns, emotional patterns, biases, relationships, mental framework, self, and the world at large. A chaos driven prompt that lets us approach the shadowy parts of ourselves from a direction unanticipated and gently framed by the thrower reflecting with you. Fertile soil to grow more creative thoughts about ourselves, how we exist in and navigate the world, how we’ve gotten where we are and what that means, to heal from the wounds of colonization, capitalism, and white hegemony.
And holy fuck has it evolved since then. It started out as a fairly simplistic, generalized symbol system meant to prompt the biases of the reflector so we can have the chance to examine them. The issue was I was trying to do this predominantly on TikTok itself which as you can imagine is very one sided. Additionally, the nature of that app is very entertainment focused - and I do believe that, in trying to curate this system for that platform, it became something more shallow and limited than it was intended to be. So I off-lined it for a bit while I expanded the system, iterated its purpose further (though it is still far from complete) and figured out a strategy to make it possible to sustain full time.
Enter this site so I can begin scheduling personal sessions 1 on 1 and really get at the depth encompassed in yourself reflected through the knives and the block. If what I’ve described so far sounds intriguing to you, please feel free to book a reflection to try it out yourself! Certified more affordable than therapy and rooted in the principal that the mental health struggles we face as people are predominantly systemic; that they stem from the mental stress of the cognitive dissonance. From the trauma of internalizing white supremacy, ableism, queerphobia, to reinforce social hierarchy.
A lifetime of experienced exploitation, indoctrination, daily tacit expected revocation of consent, agency and autonomy really does a number on peoples neurological pathways. What’s apparent is that most people (In the US, living under white hegemony) have to some extent or another been trained socially to react in various adverse ways to their own emotions, to fear them, get furious at them, numb out from them, as though the emotions themselves were the threat and not the complex amalgam of trauma were are each exposed to, made accustomed to in this country. The exploitation, lack of material support, constant punishments or social degradation for those who don’t or can’t conform to whatever standard they are being judged by which then creates the crazymaking social projection that in experiencing the pressures of being treated as less than ON A SOCIETY WIDE LEVEL the people who suffer most mentally from the impact of that are then treated as further less than, but I digress - what MOST PEOPLE IN AMERICA need is tools to heal their relationship to their emotions, their communities, themselves and to change the material systems that refuse to adequately support them. Many of us are not helped by being pathologized based on a white defined book of ailments. We need to be taught how to change the world we’re in and our perceptions of ourselves, while we cope within abusive systems.
This is not to dismiss the reality of mental illness, I know from my experience of the inside of my own brain that it is very real. What I’m trying to do is set up a social, cultural context to examine our habits, our harmful internalized beliefs, our relationships to our emotions, thoughts, selves, loved ones and hated ones in broad messy community. To examine and reflect on society at large and how living on an alarmingly quickly dying planet has impacted us.
Thank you for reading, more to come,
Piper Barber
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