Bones & Divination

In the summer of 2023, I came across an old story from East Anglia which tells of rural dance floors being underpinned by a hundred horse skulls—to improve the acoustics. It was, presumably a kind of dreaming emergent from the widespread reliance on workhorses. I realised industrial vehicles have replaced the death of horses with the death of millions of wild creatures on our roads. Witnessing their disregarded bodies strewn across the network of roads around where I live, I felt compelled to do something about it, so began documenting, burying and honouring various roadkill bodies: badger, fox, deer, squirrel and hare.

Without a preconceived idea where this work would lead, I have attempted to let the exploration unfold in me, and soon found myself dreaming of developing a divination practice in collaboration with the bones of the buried animals. This idea presented itself to my imagination having worked with Colin Campbell, a Sangoma (tranditional healer) from Southern Africa and whose healing work includes ‘Throwing the Bones’. This is a divination practice emergent from the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and which offers ways of understanding and contextualising the events of one’s life within the fabric of the wild’s primary text. It offers insights into how to rebalance oneself, and the wider territories one is living within.

Fortuitously, Colin now offers a course, ‘Cultivating the Diviner Within’, through Animate Earth, which I am now studying. Among many things, this course offers pathways to activate the diviner within, and supports the re-imagination of this practice within the fragmented cultural and ecological landscapes we all now inhabit. Or to phrase it another way, the task at hand is to close the circle.

Rather than post lots of pictures of dead animals on here, I plan to develop a map of bodies I bury while providing updates on the work and learning I am doing with Animate Earth.