Snake Pendulum Divination Decision Maker

A desktop decision maker: a bob hanging from a metal arm over a printed base, with a snake coiled around the answers. You set it swinging, it slows, and it stops over one of them. Twenty-two dollars.

This is not a dowsing pendulum and we would rather say so than have you open the box expecting one. You do not hold it and you do not have to learn its yes and no. It sits on a desk and it settles where it settles, which is a different tool for a different problem.

What it is actually good for is the stuck decision. Not the important ones, though it will take those too. The ones where you have weighed it eight times and the weighing is the problem: whether to send the email tonight, whether to go out, which of two perfectly fine options. There is a well-known trick where you flip a coin not to obey it but to notice how you feel while it is in the air, and this does the same job more slowly and with better staging. Half the time you will find you are willing it toward one answer before it lands. That is the answer.

The snake is the right animal on the base. It is one of the few creatures that carries renewal and danger at once, and for the same reason in both cases: it sheds. A snake goes cloudy-eyed and half blind for days beforehand, comes out brighter, and leaves the whole shape of its former self on the ground, eye caps and all. Plenty of traditions read it only as the enemy, from Genesis to Apep, but the ones that went the other way went a long way. The snake on the rod of Asclepius is still on the side of an ambulance.

It is also, frankly, a good object. It does something when people walk past it, which is most of what a desk ornament is for.

Good to Know

Plastic base and bob with a metal arm. Roughly 8.5 inches tall with the frame. It stands on its own; nothing to hold and nothing to assemble. Keep it somewhere it will not get knocked, because the arm is the part that bends.

Try It With

If what you actually wanted was a pendulum you hold, we have those and they are a different practice: a chevron amethyst pendulum or a blue onyx one. More in pendulums and divination.