Divination
W ho will I marry? How long will I live? What’s the winning number? Will
this product sell? Will this plane crash? Will we win the war? Everyone
from lovestruck teenagers to world leaders wants to know what lies
ahead. That’s why divination—the art of foretelling the future—has
existed in some form in every culture in recorded history. Today,
one can find practitioners of the most popular forms of divination—
astrology, tarot card reading, crystal-ball gazing, palm reading, numerology,
and tea-leaf reading—in most any city. And these examples
are only a tiny sample of hundreds of divinatory systems that have been
developed over the centuries.
Many methods of divination began in ancient Mesopotamia more
than 4,000 years ago. There, the divinatory arts were practiced by the priests,
who studied the movements of the stars and planets and examined the entrails
of sacrificed animals for clues to the welfare of the king and community.
Some diviners sought clues to future events by going into a trance
and seeking guidance from the spirit world. Others looked for omens in
nature. An eclipse, a hailstorm, the birth of twins, or the way smoke drifted
through the air—almost anything might be interpreted as a sign of
things to come. In ancient Greece and Rome, there were two levels of divination:
Professional,
highly trained diviners worked for the government, while ordinary
fortune-tellers worked for anyone who could afford them. Of the
official diviners, the most esteemed in Greece was the Oracle of Delphi,
to whom petitioners would bring their questions (which were often
multiple choice) and receive an answer directly from the god Apollo, as channeled
through a priestess. Royal emissaries from neighboring lands consulted
the Oracle on such important matters as where to construct a new
temple or whether to go to war. In Rome, the state-appointed diviners were
known as “augurs,” from the Latin avis, meaning “bird” and garrire, meaning
“to chatter.” Indeed, their highly regarded counsel to the empire was
based on bird watching. Of all earth’s creatures, birds were the closest to
the heavens, so it’s understandable that they were regarded as good indicators
of what might or might not please the gods. Interpretations were
based on many kinds of observations, including the number and species
of birds and their flight patterns, calls and songs, direction, and speed. Julius
Caesar, Cicero, Mark Anthony, and other eminent Romans all served as
augurs.
Less noteworthy diviners were available to most everyone (even slaves
were sometimes permitted a consultation), and fortune-telling was a booming
business throughout the ancient world. Dream interpretation and
astrology were the most venerable systems, but also popular were arithmancy,
scrying (a relative of crystal-ball gazing), and palmistry, as well
as systems involving birds, dice, books, arrows, axes, and other surprising
items. Popular fortune-tellers, many of whom also sold talismans and
amulets, were not afforded the respect given official diviners. They were
more likely to be deliberate frauds, and humorists enjoyed poking fun at
those who flocked to them for advice on every trivial matter.
Many ancient divinatory systems survived into the Middle Ages,
despite opposition in Europe from the Church. Professional seers con-tinued to work in
major cities, traveling fortune-tellers moved from
town to town, and village wizards and wise women served as diviners
for their communities. Village wizards, it should be noted, were expected
to look toward the past as well as the future. They were frequently asked
to find lost objects, identify thieves, discover the whereabouts of missing
persons, and locate buried treasure (centuries ago, when banks were
few and far between, many people buried their valuables in a hole in
the ground, a practice which led others to try to locate them and dig
them up). Ordinary folks were also able to practice some do-it-yourself
divination, which they learned from the cheap illustrated booklets on
palmistry, astrology, and other subjects that could be purchased as early
as the sixteenth century. For the most part, however, divination remained
in the hands of professionals who claimed to have information,
training, and “a gift” not available to others.
