A dust storm blankets Texas houses, 1935 in a photograph by George Everett Marsh Jr – public domain image used in Wikipedia article “Dust”
(11) ABACOMANCY
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”
“Ah what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life”
I could do these dusty quotes all day, although apparently dusty answer has become a term used for unsatisfactory reply, which does not bode well for abacomancy or divination by dust. However, I just couldn’t resist special mention for it and not just because it was literally the first entry in alphabetical order in Wikipedia’s list of methods of divination.
Disappointingly, it didn’t involve oracles in temples full of dust and cobwebs, but apparently something akin to geomancy – divining patterns in dust, dirt, sand, silt or ashes after being thrown or dropped on a flat surface. Also, Jackson Pollack was into it, doing a series of paintings for it.
Of course, I prefer to cite abacomancy as my go-to excuse for not cleaning my home.
As a method of divination or school of magic, abacomancy seems a little, well, dusty. Although I’d like to imagine abacomancy as a school of magic in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting – magic powered by dust and detritus, flotsam and jetsam, rust and ruins. Essentially, necromancy but for objects instead of living things (although the two could overlap), a Magic of Broken Things along the lines of the God of the Lost in Stephen King’s The Girl of Who Loved Tom Gordon (although again those could overlap).
Come to think of it, a Magic of the Wasteland – both in terms of the form and style of T.S. Eliot’s poem of that name, the source of my handful of dust quote.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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