Divination

Russian peasant girls using chickens for divination; 19th century lubok.

Display on divination, featuring a cross-cultural range of items, in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England.

Divination (from Latin divinare "to foresee, to be inspired by a god", related to divinus, divine) is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual.

Quotes

• (About demons) Sometimes, however, they predict beforehand, not things they themselves are doing, but things which they know by natural signs are going to take place. [...] Sometimes also they learn with complete ease the dispositions of human beings not only as they are expressed in speech, but also as they are conceived in thought, when certain signs from the mind are expressed in the body, and on this basis predict even many things that will come to pass, things wondrous to others, who have not known these things which were so disposed.
  • Saint Augustine of Hippo, On the divination od demons, § 4.8, p. 6.

• Divination has always embraced strange, ultimately disproved customs.
  • Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin, The Sound of Seas (2016), ISBN 978-1-4767-7659-0, p. 129

• DIVINATION, n. The art of nosing out the occult. Divination is of as many kinds as there are fruit-bearing varieties of the flowering dunce and the early fool.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• There is a deep, ancient connection between gambling and divination.
  • Aaron C. Brown, The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006), Chapter 6, Son of a Soft Money Bank, p. 167

• The purpose of the I Ching or the tarot […] is to help you get access to yourself, by providing ambiguity for you to interpret. And this quality of ambiguity is shared with nearly all forms of divination — cast artifacts, or entrails, or weather formations, or events such as the flight of birds, that one could choose either to see as "omens" or to ignore.
  The very thing that makes these divination techniques seem so unscientific is what makes it possible for them to work.
  • Michael Crichton, in Travels (1988)

• The songs of a city are its diviners.
  • Sumerian proverb, Collection I at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE.

• [A]spiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision.
  • Leo Strauss, Commenting upon the Aleinu prayer, in "Why We Remain Jews" (1962).

• Criticism is properly the rod of divination.
  • Arthur Symons, An Introduction to the Study of Browning, preface (1906).

See also

• Causality
• Destiny
• Determinism
• Fate
• Fortune
• Luck
• Magic
• Mercury (mythology)
• Prediction
• Prophesy
• Omen
• Oracle
• Spiritism

External links

• Greek Divination: a study of its methods and principles, William Reginald Halliday, Macmillan, 1913, 309pp - a complete scanned edition of a general treatment of Greek divination (at Google Books)
• David Zeitlyn and others on African Divination systems: Africa Divination: Mambila and others
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Divination" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

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