Floromancy: The Oracular Garden
As the Wheel of the Year turns, spring gives way to summer, and roses return to the gardens and wild places. In their oracular gardens, Witches and Pagans engage with flower magick. Flower divination is known as Floromancy, and we’ve been talking with the roses since childhood - remember finding a flower and announcing, 'they love me, they love me not,' each time you removed a petal? This game is a form of Floromany and only ends when you get down to the last petal and discover how your crush feels about you - according to the flower.
Spotting specific flowers on certain days of the week is also a form of flower divination. Just like bees and birds, in the old world, people saw flowers as oracles.
Floromancy & Flower Divination
In the Victorian Era, flower scrying or flower gazing was also a common form of divination. With flower scrying, people meditated with a living plant and intuited shapes, patterns, and peculiarities as messages. Another form of flower scrying involves asking a question and then sprinkling a handful of petals into a bowl of water. Beneath a soft light (the moon, a candle), people gazed into the bowl of flowers, looking for answers amidst the floating petals.
Flormancy might involve tending to a small garden, adding dried flowers to your grimoire, or inviting live flowers indoors to encourage our seasonal unfolding alongside theirs. Today, we know that flowers possess unique, subtle vibrations that interact with humans on a cellular level, plus, May is a beautiful time to work with flowers. Just ask the moon.
Nicknamed the Flower Moon, Planting Moon, Budding Moon, and Egg Laying Moon, traditionally, this month is dedicated to blossoming plants and the humans who care for them. May's moon is also known as the Mother Moon.
In much of the Northern Hemisphere, wildflowers are springing up, seeds are being sown, and gardens are kept. We're reminded that, like the garden, our growth does not follow a linear path but a 'spiral dance.' In the words of Starhawk, the use of language to shape consciousness is an important branch of magick.
During this month, the Month of Flowers, it might be helpful to take note of how you care for what's rooted in the outside world but also internally. Do we speak in flowers or thistles? Are our thorns in need of trimming and boundaries redrawn?
A Flower Moon Blessing to plant this month: Beneath the light of this Flower Moon, may we recognize that we are more than our to-do lists, job titles, and our capitalist responsibilities. Like Mother Earth and her flowers, we are infinite, fruitful beings,with the capacity to bloom again and again.
