Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic - Peter J. Carroll 2000
Magick IX Null Path Divinations
Null Path Divinations in Six-Dimensional Psispacetime
The figure below shows the three dimensions of time with circles of unit radius in the plane of ab.
Divinations performed by a magickian at t0 to scry events at t2 or t -2 can only succeed if the magickian can identify a dominant probability amongst the plethora of information in either circle. Only divinations which reveal unexpectedly high probabilities tend to count as successes.
Note that you can only scry the imaginary past of an event at t2, not the event itself.1, 2
Commentary 12
The very act of ’looking’ in divination can tend to distort the probability of what you look at. Divination can thus act as enchantment in a way quite beyond the mere effect of self-fulfilling prophecy in the ordinary sense.
Divination also becomes progressively more difficult with time, as circles of probability in imaginary time enlarge.
We have never met anyone who could consistently divine accurately; although a huge market exists for those who divine poorly or merely pretend to. Oddly, the market for those who can enchant reasonably well seems hardly to exist, probably because only those who cannot, regularly advertise, and those who can, use it more directly to their own advantage.
Perhaps the same applies to divination, but we doubt it, on account of the foregoing technical difficulties.
If in doubt, always attempt to force the hand of chance.
1 Note that you can only scry the imaginary future of t-2 as well.
2 Note that the whole idea of past and future ’events’ as phenomena that really did or really will occur remains a convention of speech, memory and expectation. From the standpoint of any moment of the present all pasts and futures have only a probability of occurrence.