The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I once witnessed a natural phenomena that was so statistically unlikely to ever happen it's just outright ridiculous. My curiosity could never fully move on from it, and I feel a need to start looking into omens and how to divine them to see if I can make any sense of this statistical madness.

I will happily devour any book, blog or resource on the subject, although I am especially interested in astronomical events and, if there are any, Heathen books on it.

 
First thing to note is, What were you thinking about when the omen occurred? A better way to say that is, What was pressing most heavily on your mind at that moment? Of course you probably don't remember it now in that particular case, but that's the basic principle for interpreting spontaneous omens -- what the ancients called "oblative" omens. (Asked-for omens, in response to a conscious question, are "impetrative" omens.) The answer the omen is giving you depends on your (conscious or unconscious) question.

There's much more to learn about omens and portents, as you can read in The Goodly Spellbook: Olde Spells for Modern Problems.

And yes, there are all kinds of traditional Germanic, Celtic, Etruscan, etc. systems for interpreting things like the number of times a crow caws (that's Tibetan), or counting crows (English, and the origin of the band name). But having experimented with many of them -- like those two examples -- I find they tend to be very culture-specific and not nearly as helpful as simply learning to pay close attention to your environment at the same time as you are paying close attention to your thoughts and feelings -- i.e. tracking your outer and your inner world simultaneously, noting their correspondences, and then testing what happens when you obey or disobey various omens. You also have to maintain a certain impartiality to avoid reading into an omen what you want it or don't want it to mean.

Well, there are also universal "superstitious" omens, like what happens when you cross the threshold of a building for the first time -- e.g. if you stumble when you first walk in the door of a new job, that does not portend well, regardless of what you were thinking at that moment! But those are discussed in the book.