Divination
Divination is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of a magic ritual or practice. Using various methods, throughout history, diviners have been providing answers to by reading signs, events, or omens, often receiving insight through supernatural agencies such as spirits, gods, god-like-beings or the "will of the universe".
File:Divination display at the Pitt Rivers Museum.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|Display on divination, featuring a cross-cultural range of items, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England
Divination can be seen as an attempt to organize what appears to be random, so that it provides insight into a problem or issue at hand. Some practices of divination include astrology, Tarot card reading, rune casting, tea-leaf reading, Ouija boards, automatic writing, water scrying, numerology, pendulum divination and countless more. If a distinction is made between divination and fortune-telling, divination has a more formal or ritualistic element and often contains a more social character, usually in a religious context, as seen in traditional African medicine. Fortune-telling, on the other hand, is a more everyday practice for personal purposes. Particular divination methods vary by culture and religion.
In its functional relation to magic in general, divination can have a preliminary and investigative role:
the diagnosis or prognosis achieved through divination is both temporarily and logically related to the manipulative, protective or alleviative function of magic rituals. In divination one finds the cause of an ailment or a potential danger, in magic one subsequently acts upon this knowledge.
Divination has long attracted criticism. In the modern era, it has been dismissed by the scientific community and by skeptics as being superstitious; experiments do not support the idea that divination techniques can actually predict the future more reliably or precisely than would be possible without it. In antiquity, divination came under attack from philosophers such as the Academic skeptic, Cicero in De Divinatione and the Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus in Against the Astrologers. The satirist Lucian devoted an essay to Alexander the false prophet.
History
Antiquity
The eternal fire at Nymphaion in southern Illyria 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 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 disadvantage of seers was that only direct yes-or-no questions could be answered. Oracles could answer more generalized questions, and seers often had to perform several sacrifices in order to get the most consistent answer. For example, if a general wanted to know if the omens were proper for him to advance on the enemy, he would ask his seer both that question and if it were better for him to remain on the defensive. If the seer gave consistent answers, the advice was considered valid.
During battle, generals would frequently ask seers at both the campground and at the battlefield. 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 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, since wisdom and knowledge are gifts of the Holy Spirit, 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, 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.
File:Safavid Dynasty, Joseph Enthroned from a Falnama, circa 1550 AD.jpg|thumb|Joseph Enthroned. Folio from the "Book of Omens", 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. 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”, 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, 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 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” 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 , 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" , 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, 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 still a vigorous debate about whether or not such practices were actually permissible under Islam,” with some scholars like Abu-Hamid al Ghazili 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."