This is a project I’ve sat on long enough, I think, and it’s high time I get it out to people’s hands in at least one form I can manage.

While it’s been a long time since I’ve bothered—I fell out of it after it started feeling like a slog and a drain—I recall how my now-defunct CuriousCat account got quite a lot of attention, and was a great way to come up with post topics or other points for discussion and research.  Starting around May 2019, I think, people really started asking me about dominoes in quick succession, as if it were some sort of joke picking up speed on the way to be a running one or something.  It all started, I think, when someone asked about a connection between geomancy and dominoes.  After all, the geomantic figures are combinations of dots, and so are the pips on dominoes, so are they perhaps related? I mean, people can do divination with dominoes, too, right?

The answer was, and still is, a clear and flat “no”; there is no historical connection between dominoes and geomancy, or at least none that I have ever found in any text or discussion in any medium whatsoever.  If there ever was a connection, it’s long been forgotten or was never developed in a way that was preserved.  However, just to make sure, I did some simple research on the history of dominoes, and it turns out that dominoes were just coming onto the scene in Europe around the time geomancy was pushed off to the side in the 1700s CE.  Dice (which are in many ways similar to dominoes) are old, to be sure, and geomancy is also old, but Western-style dominoes are a relatively young thing, whether they arose from six-sided dice or were somehow descended from Chinese dominoes (骨牌 gǔpái, 牙牌 yápái, or 蒱牌 púpái).  And, just to be even more sure, I started some very brief research into reading about domino divination, just enough to confirm my suspicions; as I suspected, there was no connection between geomantic divination and domino divination.

But in the process of that research, something snagged my interest, and hard.  Maybe it was a spirit of mine, maybe it was just some latent desire to get good at this thing I had never before considered or even knew much about, but for the entirety of that summer I became obsessed with learning how to do domino reading and divination. What few books I could find—heck, most of the information was just a few pages in a handful of books.  I did as much research as I could, going back as far as I could with what resources I had available to me, a combination of using digitized records or buying antique copies of books barely held together anymore from the 1800s and scrounging around on websites in a variety of languages and crosschecking it all together to see what matched and what didn’t.  I ended up compiling dozens upon dozens of pages of notes on technique and interpretations, sorting out what seemed useful and what seemed to be coming out of left field.  Heck, I even ended up coming across the supposed connections between domino reading and orisha divination—which is very much not a thing, as I’ve mentioned before in the strongest of terms (that post came out of this research).

It was out of these notes and this research that I ended up putting together a whole book’s worth of knowledge, lore, and technique on how to read the dominoes as a form of divination and fortune-telling (which I immediately put to practice for myself, and whew does it work better and clearer than I thought it would).  I’ve been sitting on releasing this for a while, I admit, but I figured that I may as well just push it to PDF ebook format, since I know I’m not likely to get involved in formal publishing anytime soon (if ever).  After all, the more people who learn domino reading and take it seriously, the better off we’ll all be, I think, whether someone takes it as their one-and-done system or as an adjunct to other systems like card reading or geomancy.

To that end, I present to you my newest ebook: The Oracle of the Dominios, available through my Etsy store or my Ko-fi store for only US$10!

The Oracle of the Dominos (a title that isn’t in Latin for once!) is a 178-page (US Letter-sized) PDF text in English that summarizes basically all the research I was able to do on domino divination, combining what I could gleam from over 50 different texts going back to 1862 across five languages.  A combination of both technique and reference, there’s over 100 pages alone of just details on what each of the individual bones of a traditional set of double-six dominoes means, split out into areas like work and career, money and finances, love and romance, family and friends, health issues, spiritual guidance, general advice, and other notes.  In addition to detailing the traditional approach of reading the dominoes, I’ve also included much more modern ways like using spreads or alternative ways that use the dominoes for specific situations like determining names, numbers, times, and the like, as well as introducing a little astrological symbolism to the dominoes (which I’ve never otherwise encountered) to expand the meanings to also include predictions regarding people’s temperament, character, appearance, and the like.  Having learned and practiced this form of divination since I started learning about it, I can personally attest to how brilliant this lore is when it comes together under the bones—if not outright punchy and blunt at times just to make a point!

Not gonna lie, I did originally intend to find a publisher for this and have it go to press, but honestly, that’s a lot more headache and hassle than I want to deal with (on top of my own personal thoughts and opinions regarding the state of occult publishing as well as perceptions around publishing in general), and that was frankly an impediment to me getting this sort of project out at all.  For those who wanted something like this in print, I apologize; I’d rather self-publish through PDF ebooks than keep this as a file that I’d never otherwise get out publicly.  Still, I’m fully aware that there are those who, despite the increasing popularity of e-readers and the like, still prefer to have an offline and non-digital copy of such things; for those purposes, as with all my other ebooks, I highly encourage my readers to please print these things off on their own for their own private and personal use, either just on plain printer paper shoved into a binder or whether done more professionally through something like Lulu or CreateSpace.  It’s also one of the reasons why, despite the time and resources I poured into a text like this, I’m pricing it how I am—and, for that matter, why I’ve priced my other ebooks how I have, because it’s just a digital file that I’m providing, which (I hope) allows those who wish for something more tangible to spend a few extra dollars on their own to have things printed out in a format and style they themselves prefer.

To that end, I’ve also dropped the prices of three of my older ebooks (Secreti Geomantici, Preces Castri, and Preces Templi) from US$18 or US$16 down to US$10.  I consider the two Preces books to be some of my crowning achievements when it comes to some of my prayer-writing and research, and Secreti Geomantici a fantastic text about a nascent field of magic in Western practice that stands to be developed greatly by the geomantic community, and I also consider this new ebook on domino divination to also be up there, especially given the time and resources I had to pour into it to get it researched and written.  It’s not that I don’t want to make money—money, though it isn’t everything, is damn useful to anyone—but I also want to be fair to people while also not wanting to be unfair to myself, especially in this time when there are so many people out there going through such hard times when something as simple as learning domino reading or having a new set of prayers for ritual practice could give them a necessary edge to make things so much better for themselves and others.  Given how printing things out on one’s own is an extra cost, I figured I may as well just standardize my ebook price to US$10 across the board rather than having things that are comparatively more expensive, especially since US$10 is already a fairly reasonable price for many print books already out there—and authors of such books in print generally get much less of that total cut than what I get (which is almost everything after a few fees towards PayPal, Etsy, or the like).    For those who have already bought these ebooks at the previous price, I give you my sincere thanks and hope you have found them useful enough to be worth the cost; for those who have not yet bought these ebooks, I hope the new price will encourage you to buy them and get some use out of them!

Anyway, what are you waiting for?  Head over to my Etsy store or my Ko-fi store and get yourself a copy of The Oracle of the Dominoes (or my other ebooks!) today, and learn a new predictive skill for yourself that can give you an edge in life!