I often wonder how much knowledge has become lost due to the unholy destructive nature of man. Known libraries of Timbuktu, Alexandria, and indigenous Americas all plundered and destroyed in the name of jealousy, arrogance, and ignorance. Instead of having privilege to drink from a vast abyss of observation and experience documented in those ancient texts, what we have left are broken, tainted, and painted pieces of “history”, ill fitted together in attempt to understand and heal our world as well as ourselves. For me, the act of divination (my strange affix to the craft most preferable for this blog with a tarot deck) goes deeper than service parlor tricks. It is a way of life and has been for many women (and men) since time innumerable.
While reading Mami Wata by Mama Zogbe (Vivian Hunter-Hindrew M. Ed.), I 
learned of the seemingly forgotten, hidden history of diviners or better stated Oracles of olden days. The tale recorded in known history is that the spreading of this lineage into European countries occurred after priestesses were took as slaves from the city of Thebes, in the African country of Egypt, to a temple of Zeus in Dodona, Greece and another temple in Libya. Shadows of these women preserved in history books are under pseudonyms such as doves or black pigeons.
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, these women from Africa were referred to as doves or pigeons due to their deemed unintelligible dialect by their captors. The Oracle(s) at Dodona were well known for their ability to speak of past, present and future events by way of wind (or spirit) rustling through leaves of sacred oak trees. Even the oral poet Homer spoke of Dodona’s fame and expertise in the epic The Odyssey.
“The man himself had gone up to Dodona
To ask the spelling leaves of the old oak
What Zeus would have him to do – how to return to Ithaka
After so many years – by stealth or openly…”
The Odyssey, Book XIX
In Mythology, Myths, Legends, and Fantasies published by Global Book Publishing, of this particular temple it is written that the Oracles of Dodona were accustomed to walking barefoot and sleeping on the ground to strengthen their connection to seeing the subtle. It is also noted too that another form of divination at the temple in Dodona occurred by birdsong. This bird in question is the nightingale that is also mentioned in Book XIX of The Odyssey. It too has connection to Africa’s Egyptian city of Thebes by way of Zethos, a king of Thebes and his unfortunate Cretan wife.
The featured picture is my artistic interpretation of a Dove or Black Pigeon.
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