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There is a version of this account in which the tofu experiment never happened. In which a more cautious practitioner looked at a block of supermarket silken, considered the theoretical basis, and quietly put the kettle on instead. That practitioner would have saved themselves a Wednesday afternoon and a certain amount of professional embarrassment. Unfortunately, that practitioner was not me.
What follows is an honest account of an attempt to use tofu as a medium for haruspicy — its rationale, its execution, and the rather flat conclusion it arrived at. If it prevents even one colleague from repeating the same exercise, it will have served its purpose.
Why Tofu: The Case As It Appeared at the Time
The question of alternative media in haruspicy is not a new one. The growing interest in vegetarian haruspicy and energetic substitution has, over the past several years, prompted serious practitioners to consider whether the divinatory properties we associate with animal tissue are intrinsic to that tissue, or whether they arise from something more fundamental — a structural or energetic quality that might, in principle, be replicated elsewhere.
Tofu, it must be said, presents a superficially plausible candidate. Firm tofu has a degree of internal structure. It responds to pressure and cutting in ways that are at least faintly reminiscent of softer organ tissue. It is available in consistent grades, which would theoretically support reproducible experimental conditions. And for practitioners who, for ethical or dietary reasons, find working with animal material difficult, there is a clear practical motivation to explore whether a plant-based medium might carry sufficient energetic weight to be of divinatory use.
The theoretical basis I was drawing on relates to the question explored at length in whether organs hold memory — specifically, whether the informational content of a reading resides in the biological structure of the tissue, or in something that accumulates through lived experience and energetic exposure. If the latter, then a substance with no such history would be expected to yield nothing. I acknowledged this as a genuine risk going in. I proceeded anyway.
Method
I used a 400g block of firm tofu — not silken, which lacks sufficient structural integrity for tray work, and not extra-firm, which I suspected might be too dense to admit any subtle surface variation. The block was of a standard commercial grade, purchased the same morning to ensure freshness, and brought to room temperature before preparation.
I followed the same preparatory sequence I use for conventional organ material: a salt-and-light cleanse of the tray and instruments, a period of meditative settling, and a brief orientation ritual before handling the medium. I have written elsewhere about cleansing the tray with salt and light, and I applied those procedures without modification. If the experiment was to fail, I wanted it to fail on the medium’s merits, not on a shortcut in preparation.
The tofu was sectioned into five pieces of roughly equal size and placed on the tray in the standard orientation pattern. I then conducted a full reading sequence, working through the surface, the cut faces, and what would correspond, in conventional liver work, to the lobar margins.
I repeated this across three sessions, separated by twenty-four hours each, with a fresh block each time.
What the Tofu Did Not Do
Nothing. Or rather — and this is worth being precise about — nothing that rose above the level of noise.
There was surface variation, as there always is with tofu: minor compression marks, occasional small voids in the structure, the faint impressions left by packaging. None of it cohered. In conventional reading, even a difficult organ presents some degree of orientation — a sense, however faint, that the material is organised in relation to something. The tofu offered no such quality. It sat on the tray with the complete indifference of a substance that had never been organised around anything at all.
I attempted, during the second session, to work with the fat layer equivalent — in tofu, this is loosely approximated by the surface film that forms after pressing. The results were no more illuminating. Practitioners interested in scrying in the fat layer will know that even a modest lipid surface usually offers something to work with. The pressed tofu surface offered the visual interest of a damp flannel.
By the third session I was, if I am honest, going through the motions. The experiment had already reached its conclusion. I completed it for the sake of the record.
What This Likely Means
I want to resist the temptation to draw sweeping conclusions from three sessions with a single medium. Science — and haruspicy, where it wishes to be taken seriously, must at least gesture towards scientific discipline — does not run on anecdote. It is possible that a different grade of tofu, a different preparation method, or a different practitioner might yield different results. I would not discourage a colleague from attempting the experiment, provided they approach it with appropriate rigour and, frankly, modest expectations.
What I think the experiment does suggest, provisionally, is that the energetic content of a reading is not purely structural — it is not simply a matter of having a substance with the right texture or the right dimensions on a tray. The organs we work with in conventional haruspicy carry something that tofu, whatever its other qualities, does not appear to possess. Whether that something is biological, historical, or of an order we do not yet have adequate language for is a question worth continued investigation. The organ-memory hypothesis, in particular, seems to me to gain modest support from this result, though I hold that view lightly.
The broader question of what makes a medium viable — and whether any plant-based material might one day meet that threshold — remains genuinely open. Those interested in following that line of inquiry might find the discussion of cross-cultural energetic liver maps useful as a comparative framework: if different cultures, working with the same biological material, arrive at structurally similar divinatory patterns, that convergence tells us something about where the meaningful content actually lives.
A Note on Documentation
One thing this experiment did usefully reinforce is the value of recording null results. The field of haruspicy — and I say this as someone who has been practising for long enough to have strong opinions about it — suffers from an understandable but counterproductive tendency to publish only successes. Ambiguous readings get tidied up in retrospect. Failed sessions go unmentioned. The result is a body of practitioner literature that skews towards confirmation and tells us less than it should about the actual limits of the practice.
A failed experiment, properly documented, is not an embarrassment. It is data. If the tofu result discourages a single colleague from spending their afternoon the way I spent mine, it has contributed more to the field than a modest positive reading that could equally have been noise.
I have returned to working with conventional material and do not plan to revisit tofu in the near future. The soy milk, however, remains a subject of idle curiosity. I am not ready to rule anything out entirely.
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