Customer Reviews

The Oracle of the Bones/Book With Casting Bones and Casting Map Cloth

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This is a great book, as others have said, and I recommend it. There are a couple of points that require some clarification, though.

First, the bones included, while perfectly functional, are not bones. They're polyresin replicas of bones. They are very well made, and only someone who has worked with real bones would be likely to notice. Like I said, they're completely usable, but buyers should be aware of what they're getting.

Second, there isn't much here on actually interpreting the casts, which I found a little disappointing. I want to be able to take a set of bones with me and cast when away from home - say, when camping. The design of this system is looking at the bones as they fall and using them to figure out which page to turn to in the book where you read an in-depth description of what it means. If bone A falls in section 1, bone B in section 3, bone C in section 1, and bone D in section 2, you'd open the entry on 1-3-1-2 and read that page. I was hoping for something that focused more on what the bones themselves meant in relation to each other and the cloth (what it means when two bones are parallel or at right angles to each other, or when one bone lands off by itself, for instance.) With this set that CAN be done, but you'd have to extrapolate the method for doing so yourself by reverse engineering the author's interpretations.

Again, that isn't a criticism of the book so much as it is a clarification so that people will know exactly what they're getting. The set does its job well.

This is one of those slender works that is all meat and
no fat. The book comes with a set of bones and a casting cloth. The
introduction to the history of bone casting for divination is
short and concise. I personally prefer a short history. Then
it's into the art of bone casting and divination using bones.
I highly recommend this work to anyone interested in the shamanic divinatory
arts of primitive peoples. This book is also a great addition to the
occult library and a must for the serious occult student.