One of my favourite areas of Web exploration is foreign languages. Google Logos Languages to find hundreds of sites and hundreds of dictionaries and language aids. From those sites I offer this little list, which could be increased in size many times. See you again next year. For those who are into the old magickal language:

Aragones - Goyosa Nadal y millor año nuebo
Asturian - Bon Nadal y feliz añu nuevu
Basque - Zorionak eta urte berri on

One of my favorite fantasy movies, in which just about all of it is unhistorical and quite fantastic is The 13th Warrior. It’s a great adventure yarn if you can forget everything you know about history except the fact that an Arab writer did once encounter the Vikings, and wrote about these amazing people, ‘tall as palm trees’ for the Arabs. The number thirteen has an archetypal ring to it. Viewing the movie for about the fifth time started a train of thought about a real thirteen that has been ignored in favor of a mentally constructed twelve. Here’s the train.

We’ve all been brought up on the 12 signs of the Zodiac. The one thing common in any audience of people, whatever their profession or work is that they all know their birth sign. The Twelve have been used to develop astrology and provide analogies for all kinds of observed phenomena. Most people take them for granted. Unexamined assumptions are the causes of many human problems, particularly religious fanaticism.

Many people know about using the rosary to keep count of prayers. Indian swamis are frequently pictured using what looks like a necklace of beads, running it through the fingers of one hand. What looks like a necklace is called a japa mala. You can buy them now all over the Web made of everything from sandalwood beads through every kind of semi precious and precious stone. But even the cheapest one is a very efficient machine to enable the seeker who meditates to get on with seeking. My first one was a loop of cord with 27 knots in it.

Japa means ‘ repetition.” A japa mala then is an instrument designed to help you repeat prayers, mantras, or sacred scriptures using beads or seeds to do the automatic keeping of the totals. The important thing is that it gets the body involved in what might otherwise be a purely mental activity.

I recently had a question about using a pendulum from someone who was fed up with nearly all her friends being able to talk to guides, totem animals or the more popular angels. She was in dire need of something to talk to in the non material world and had heard about the possibilities of communicating with the extensive data bank of the subconscious using a simple pendulum.

Taking it for granted that there are other people out there who have heard of pendulum work but have never done it, I thought to go through some basics that always seem to work well so that an investigator has something to go on, and can continue to walk the path if it seems interesting.