n peasant girls using
chickens for divination; 19th-century
lubok.
Antiquity The
eternal fire at Nymphaion in southern
Illyria (present-day
Albania) also functioned as an oracle. The forms of divination practiced in this natural fire sanctuary with peculiar physical properties were widely known to the ancient Greek and Roman authors. The Oracle of
Amun at the
Siwa Oasis was made famous when
Alexander the Great visited it after conquering Egypt from Persia in 332 BC. or can be interpreted as categorically forbidding divination but some biblical practices, such as
Urim and Thummim,
casting lots and
prayer, are considered to be divination. Trevan G. Hatch disputes these comparisons because divination did not consult the "one true God" and manipulated the divine for the diviner's self-interest. One of the earliest known divination artifacts, a book called the Sortes Sanctorum, is believed to be of Christian roots, and utilizes dice to provide insight into the future. Uri Gabbay states that divination was associated with sacrificial rituals in the ancient Near East, including Mesopotamia and Israel. Extispicy was a common example, where diviners would pray to their god(s) before
vivisecting a sacrificial animal. Their abdominal organs would reveal a divine message, which aligned with
cardiocentric views of the mind.
Oracles and Greek divination Both oracles and seers in ancient Greece practiced divination.
Oracles were the conduits for the gods on earth; their prophecies were understood to be the will of the gods, verbatim. Because of the high demand for oracle consultations and the oracles’ limited work schedule, they were not the main source of divination for the ancient Greeks. That role fell to the seers (). Seers were not in direct contact with the gods; instead, they were interpreters of signs provided by the gods. Seers used many methods to explicate the will of the gods including
extispicy,
ornithomancy, etc. They were more numerous than the oracles and did not keep a limited schedule; thus, they were highly valued by all Greeks, not just those with the capacity to travel to
Delphi or other such distant sites. The means of divining affected what questions could be asked, and the quality of the answer that could be provided. For example, sacrificial divination, a common practice of seers, may have been considered to only give yes or no answers. However, there are examples of seers being asked open-ended questions. During battle, generals would frequently ask seers at both the
campground (a process called the
hiera) and at the
battlefield (called the
sphagia). The hiera entailed the seer slaughtering a sheep and examining its liver for answers regarding a more generic question; the sphagia involved killing a young female goat by slitting its throat and noting the animal's last movements and blood flow. The battlefield sacrifice only occurred when two armies prepared for battle against each other. Neither force would advance until the seer revealed appropriate
omens. Because the seers had such power over influential individuals in ancient Greece, many were skeptical of the accuracy and honesty of the seers. The degree to which seers were honest depended entirely on the individual seers. Despite the doubt surrounding individual seers, the craft as a whole was well regarded and trusted by the Greeks, and the
Stoics accounted for the validity of divination in their
physics. Several legends exist about Greeks who tested oracles and got punished; some stories about foreigners like Egyptians and Persians who tested oracles by asking multiple questions and getting away with it also exist.
Middle Ages and Early Modern period The divination method of casting lots (
Cleromancy) was used by the remaining eleven disciples of Jesus in to select a replacement for
Judas Iscariot. Given the earlier prohibition on divination, it is likely that the casting of lots was being used to discern God's will, rather than to foretell the future. The Apostle Paul's disapproval of such practices is clear from his handling of his encounter with the clairvoyant slave girl in Acts 16:16-19. This is consistent with the fact that divination was viewed as a pagan practice by Christian
emperors during
ancient Rome. It may also be significant that this method of discernment was used prior to the Holy Spirit's descent upon the church (Acts 2:1-12), since wisdom and knowledge are gifts of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:8), thus rendering the use of lots redundant. In 692, the
Quinisext Council, also known as the "Council in Trullo" in the
Eastern Orthodox Church, passed canons to eliminate pagan and divination practices.
Fortune-telling and other forms of divination were widespread through the
Middle Ages. In the constitution of 1572 and public regulations of 1661 of the
Electorate of Saxony, capital punishment was used on those predicting the future. Laws forbidding divination practice continue to this day. The
Waldensians sect was accused of practicing divination.
Småland is famous for
Årsgång, a practice which occurred until the early 19th century in some parts of Småland. Generally occurring on Christmas and New Year's Eve, it is a practice in which one would fast and keep themselves away from light in a room until midnight to then complete a set of complex events to interpret symbols encountered throughout the journey to foresee the coming year. In
Islam,
astrology (
‘ilm ahkam al-nujum), the most widespread divinatory science, is the study of how celestial entities could be applied to the daily lives of people on earth. It is important to emphasize the practical nature of divinatory sciences because people from all socioeconomic levels and pedigrees sought the advice of astrologers to make important decisions in their lives.
Astronomy was made a distinct science by intellectuals who did not agree with the former, although distinction may not have been made in daily practice, where astrology was technically outlawed and only tolerated if it was employed in public. Astrologers, trained as scientists and astronomers, were able to interpret the celestial forces that ruled the "sub-lunar" to predict a variety of information from
lunar phases and drought to times of prayer and the foundation of cities. The courtly sanction and elite patronage of
Muslim rulers benefited astrologers’ intellectual statures. ''),
Safavid dynasty. 1550.
Freer Gallery of Art. This painting would have been positioned alongside a prognostic description of the meaning of this image on the page opposite (conventionally to the left). The reader would flip randomly to a place in the book and digest the text having first viewed the image. The “science of the sand” (
‘ilm al-raml), otherwise translated as
geomancy, is “based on the interpretation of figures traced on sand or other surface known as
geomantic figures.” It is a good example of Islamic divination at a popular level. The core principle that meaning derives from a unique occupied position is identical to the core principle of astrology. Like astronomy, geomancy used deduction and computation to uncover significant
prophecies as opposed to
omens (
‘ilm al-fa’l), which were processes of “reading” visible random events to decipher the invisible realities from which they originated. It was upheld by
prophetic tradition and relied almost exclusively on text, specifically the
Qur’an (which carried a table for guidance) and poetry, as a development of
bibliomancy. One example for this is this Qur'an from Gwalior, India, which includes a set of instructions to use the Qur’an as a divinatory text. It is the earliest known example of its kind. The practice culminated in the appearance of the illustrated “Books of Omens” (
Falnama) in the early 16th century, an embodiment of the apocalyptic fears as the end of the millennium in the
Islamic calendar approached. Dream interpretation, or
oneiromancy (‘ilm ta’bir al-ru’ya), is more specific to Islam than other divinatory science, largely because of the Qur’an’s emphasis on the predictive dreams of
Abraham,
Yusuf, and
Muhammad. The important delineation within the practice lies between "incoherent dreams" and "sound dreams," which were "a part of prophecy" or heavenly messages.
Dream interpretation was always tied to Islamic religious texts, providing a moral compass to those seeking advice. The practitioner needed to be skilled enough to apply the individual dream to general precedent while appraising the singular circumstances. The power of text held significant weight in the "
science of letters"
(‘ilm al-huruf), the foundational principle being "God created the world through His speech." The science began with the concept of language, specifically
Arabic, as the expression of "the essence of what it signifies." Once the believer understood this, while remaining obedient to God’s will, they could uncover the essence and divine truth of the objects inscribed with Arabic like
amulets and
talismans through the study of the letters of the Qur’an with alphanumeric computations. In Islamic practices in
Senegal and
Gambia, just like many other
West African countries, diviners and religious leaders and
healers were interchangeable because Islam was closely related with esoteric practices (like divination), which were responsible for the regional spread of Islam. As scholars learned esoteric sciences, they joined local non-Islamic aristocratic courts, who quickly aligned divination and amulets with the "proof of the power of Islamic religion." So strong was the idea of esoteric knowledge in West African Islam, diviners and
magicians uneducated in Islamic texts and Arabic bore the same titles as those who did. From the beginning of Islam, there "was (and is) still a vigorous debate about whether or not such [divinatory] practices were actually permissible under Islam,” with some scholars like
Abu-Hamid al Ghazili (d. 1111) objecting to the science of divination because he believed it bore too much similarity to
pagan practices of invoking spiritual entities that were not God. Other scholars justified esoteric sciences by comparing a practitioner to "a physician trying to heal the sick with the help of the same natural principles."
Mesoamerica Divination was a central component of ancient
Mesoamerican religious life. Many
Aztec gods, including central
creator gods, were described as diviners and were closely associated with
sorcery.
Tezcatlipoca was the patron of sorcerers and practitioners of
magic. His name means "smoking mirror," a reference to a device used for divinatory
scrying. In the
Mayan Popol Vuh, the creator gods
Xmucane and Xpiacoc performed divinatory hand casting during the creation of people. The Aztec
Codex Borbonicus shows the original human couple,
Oxomoco and
Cipactonal, engaged in divining with kernels of maize. This primordial pair is associated with the ritual calendar, and the Aztecs considered them to be the first diviners. Every civilization that developed in
pre-Columbian Mexico, from the
Olmecs to the
Aztecs, practiced divination in daily life, both public and private. Scrying through the use of reflective water surfaces,
mirrors, or the
casting of lots were among the most widespread forms of divinatory practice.
Visions derived from
hallucinogens were another important form of divination, and are still widely used among contemporary diviners of Mexico. Among the more common
hallucinogenic plants used in divination are
morning glory,
jimson weed, and
peyote. ==Contemporary divination in Asia==