r/Divination

As the context of the message states, I’m wanting to use my divination/tarots to better understand a situation. One where someone else inflicted hurt/pain after using me — I mentally feel stable but I’m inching towards baneful magic and I really should see what the cards may give in guidance as far as what the outcomes could be.

Does anyone have any tips or spreads they use when they face uncertainty when how to deal with a situation?

If you've ever tried to book movers in Korea, you might have been told a date is full, or costs more, because it's a "son eomneun nal". It means a day without son, and son here is a spirit (short for sonnim, guest) that moves around the four directions on a ten day loop and gets in the way of anything you start in its direction.

The rule runs on the lunar calendar and it's simple enough that most Korean adults can do it in their head. On lunar days ending in 1 or 2 it sits in the east. 3 and 4 put it in the south, 5 and 6 in the west, 7 and 8 in the north. On days ending in 9 or 0 it has gone up to the sky, so there's no direction to avoid at all, and those six days a month are the ones people mean.

Strictly speaking you only have to dodge the direction you're moving in. Moving west on a day ending in 1 is technically fine. Almost nobody bothers with that part anymore, people just go for the 9 and 0 days, which is why a weekend that also lands on one gets booked out early. Moving firms and wedding halls price those days higher, so a belief a lot of people say they don't hold still shows up on the invoice.

There's a second explanation for the name that I find more interesting. The National Folk Museum's folk encyclopedia mentions that some trace it to 巽, the wind trigram, which carries the sense of going in and out. I'm not sure that one holds up historically, the ghost version is what grandparents tell you, but it's a neat overlap given the whole thing is about entering a new place.

Date picking here kind of works in layers, and this shows it pretty well. Son eomneun nal is the folk layer anyone can check with a lunar calendar. The more formal version, taegil, has someone look at the saju of the people involved and pick a day that fits them, and plenty of families still do that for weddings while also checking for son.

Anyone have something like this where they live? A day you'd avoid moving on even if you don't really buy it?