Divination
Based on Wikipedia: Divination
Before the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE, two Greek armies stood frozen in place for eleven days. Not because of strategy. Not because of terrain. Because the sheep livers looked wrong.
Both the Spartans and the Athenians had seers traveling with them—professional interpreters of divine signs who would slaughter animals and examine their organs before any major military decision. For nearly two weeks, neither side's seers could find favorable omens for attack. Tens of thousands of soldiers waited, weapons ready, while men prodded at animal entrails and shook their heads.
This is divination at its most consequential: the practice of seeking knowledge—usually about the future, sometimes about hidden present truths—through rituals believed to tap into supernatural insight. It sounds like superstition from our modern vantage point, and skeptics have been saying exactly that for over two thousand years. But divination has shaped battles, crowned kings, guided marriages, and influenced countless personal decisions across every human civilization we know of.
What Divination Actually Is
At its core, divination is an attempt to find meaning in randomness. A diviner performs some ritual—casting lots, examining animal organs, watching bird flight patterns, dealing cards—and interprets the results as messages from gods, spirits, or the underlying structure of reality itself.
The key word is "ritual." This distinguishes divination from casual fortune-telling. When your friend reads your palm at a party, that's fortune-telling. When a priest in ancient Mesopotamia prays to the gods, sacrifices a sheep, carefully removes its liver, and interprets its shape according to centuries of accumulated tradition? That's divination.
The distinction matters because divination has almost always carried religious weight. It wasn't entertainment. It was technology—a way of accessing information that humans couldn't obtain through ordinary means.
Think of it this way: if you believed that gods or spirits actually existed and actually cared about human affairs, wouldn't you want to ask them questions? Divination was the asking.
A Catalog of Methods
The sheer variety of divination techniques across human cultures is staggering. Some of the more familiar ones include astrology (interpreting celestial movements), tarot card reading, and the I Ching (the ancient Chinese "Book of Changes"). But the list goes much further.
There's scrying—gazing into reflective surfaces like water, mirrors, or crystal balls to receive visions. Tea leaf reading, where the patterns left by tea leaves in a cup are interpreted. Rune casting, using ancient Germanic alphabet symbols. Pendulum divination, where a hanging weight's movements are read as yes-or-no answers. Automatic writing, where the diviner writes without conscious control. Ouija boards, those alphabet-covered boards with a moving pointer that became a Victorian parlor sensation and have never quite gone away.
Then there are the methods that seem stranger to modern sensibilities. Extispicy is the examination of animal entrails, particularly the liver. Ornithomancy means reading omens from bird behavior—their flight patterns, their calls, which direction they came from. Pyromancy involves interpreting flames. Geomancy reads patterns made in sand or earth.
The ancient Greeks alone had dozens of specialized terms for different divination methods, each with its own practitioners and traditions.
Ancient Greece: Oracles and Seers
The Greeks maintained two distinct divination systems that operated almost like different tiers of service.
At the top were the oracles—the most famous being the Oracle at Delphi, where the Pythia (a priestess) would enter a trance state and speak prophecies believed to come directly from Apollo. These were considered the literal voice of the gods, verbatim divine messages. But oracles were hard to access. Delphi wasn't exactly on the corner. The Oracle had a limited schedule. The demand for consultations far exceeded the supply.
So for everyday divine guidance, Greeks relied on seers.
Seers weren't channels for divine voices. They were interpreters of divine signs. They would sacrifice an animal, examine its liver, watch how birds flew, or observe other phenomena, and then explain what the gods were communicating through these signs. They were more numerous than oracles, didn't require long journeys to consult, and didn't keep bankers' hours.
The tradeoff? Seers could only reliably answer yes-or-no questions.
This limitation mattered. If a general wanted to know whether to attack, he couldn't just ask once and trust the answer. The standard practice was to ask the question both ways: "Should I attack?" and "Should I stay defensive?" If the seer got consistent answers to both, the guidance was considered valid. If the signs contradicted each other, you kept sacrificing animals until they agreed.
Divination in Battle
Greek military commanders didn't just consult seers before campaigns. They consulted them constantly, at multiple stages of any engagement.
The hiera was performed at the campground before battle, involving a sheep sacrifice and liver examination for general strategic questions. The sphagia happened at the battlefield itself—a young female goat had her throat slit, and the seer would interpret her final movements and blood flow. This battlefield sacrifice only occurred when two armies were actually facing each other, ready to fight.
Here's the remarkable part: neither side would advance until their seer declared the omens favorable.
Imagine the scene. Two armies, weapons drawn, watching their respective religious functionaries kill goats and study the results. Everyone waiting for divine permission to start killing each other.
This gave seers enormous power. A seer who wanted to prevent a battle—or who had been bribed, or who simply got cold feet—could keep declaring unfavorable omens. A seer who wanted glory could find positive signs in anything. The Greeks were aware of this problem. Many people were skeptical of individual seers' honesty or accuracy. But the institution of divination itself remained trusted. The idea that the gods sent signs, and that trained interpreters could read them, was simply part of how the world worked.
The Eternal Fire and Other Famous Oracles
Not all oracular sites looked like Delphi. In southern Illyria—modern-day Albania—there was a place called Nymphaion where natural gas vented from the earth and burned perpetually. This "eternal fire" became a divination site, its strange physical properties lending it an aura of otherworldly connection.
The Oracle of Amun at Siwa Oasis, in the Egyptian desert, gained particular fame when Alexander the Great visited after conquering Egypt from Persia in 332 BCE. The oracle reportedly confirmed Alexander as the son of Zeus-Ammon, a legitimization that helped cement his claim to divine status. Whether Alexander believed this or simply found it politically useful has been debated for millennia.
The ancient world was dotted with such sites—places where the barrier between human and divine seemed thinner, where questions might receive supernatural answers.
The Abrahamic Religions: Prohibition and Practice
The Hebrew Bible takes a complicated stance on divination. Deuteronomy 18:10-12 and Leviticus 19:26 can be read as categorically forbidding divination practices. And yet the Bible also describes what look very much like divination techniques being used by God's chosen people.
The Urim and Thummim were objects—we're not entirely sure what they looked like—kept by the high priest and used to determine God's will on yes-or-no questions. Casting lots appears throughout Biblical narratives as a way of making decisions. Even prayer, in certain forms, functions as a request for divine guidance that will be answered through subsequent events.
Some scholars argue these aren't really divination because they're directed at the "one true God" rather than pagan spirits, and because they seek God's will rather than trying to manipulate the divine for selfish purposes. Others find this distinction somewhat thin.
Early Christianity inherited this tension. In the Book of Acts, the remaining eleven apostles needed to replace Judas Iscariot, so they cast lots—and the lot fell to Matthias. This happened just before Pentecost, before the Holy Spirit descended on the church. Some theologians argue this timing matters: once believers had direct access to the Holy Spirit's wisdom, the cruder technology of lot-casting became obsolete.
The Apostle Paul's reaction to a clairvoyant slave girl in Acts suggests his disapproval of divinatory practices. And Christian Roman emperors treated divination as a pagan holdover to be suppressed.
Yet divination persisted. One of the earliest known divination artifacts, a book called the Sortes Sanctorum, appears to have Christian origins. It used dice to provide guidance. Throughout the Middle Ages, fortune-telling remained widespread enough that authorities kept trying to stamp it out. In the Electorate of Saxony, sixteenth and seventeenth century laws prescribed capital punishment for predicting the future. The Waldensian sect faced accusations of practicing divination.
The pattern repeats: official condemnation, continued popular practice, periodic crackdowns, survival.
Islamic Approaches: Science and Spirit
Islamic civilization developed sophisticated approaches to divination that tried to balance religious concerns with practical human needs for guidance.
Astrology was the most widespread divinatory science. Practitioners were trained as legitimate scientists and astronomers who could interpret how celestial forces in the heavens influenced events in the "sub-lunar" realm—everything beneath the moon's orbit, meaning Earth and human affairs. They could predict everything from lunar phases and droughts to the most auspicious times for prayer or founding new cities.
Muslim rulers often patronized astrologers, giving them intellectual respectability and courtly status. Astronomy as we know it was partly made distinct from astrology by scholars who objected to predictive uses, though in daily practice the distinction was often blurred. Astrology was technically outlawed in many contexts but tolerated when employed publicly.
Geomancy—called 'ilm al-raml, "the science of the sand"—involved interpreting figures traced in sand or other surfaces. It was popular at all social levels and shared astrology's core principle: meaning derives from unique positions within a system. Where your sand-marks fell, like where planets positioned themselves, carried interpretable significance.
Reading omens worked differently. Instead of systematic computation, it meant "reading" visible random events to decipher invisible realities. This had prophetic sanction and relied heavily on text—particularly the Qur'an itself and Arabic poetry. A form of bibliomancy developed where one would open the Qur'an to a random page seeking guidance. The earliest known set of instructions for using the Qur'an this way comes from Gwalior, India.
By the early sixteenth century, illustrated "Books of Omens" called Falnama appeared, embodying apocalyptic fears as the end of the Islamic millennium approached.
Dreams and Letters
Dream interpretation held particular importance in Islamic tradition because the Qur'an emphasizes the predictive dreams of Abraham, Joseph (Yusuf), and Muhammad himself. The crucial distinction was between "incoherent dreams"—just mental noise—and "sound dreams," which were "a part of prophecy," genuine heavenly messages.
Interpreting dreams required real skill. The practitioner had to apply general precedents from religious texts to individual dream content while accounting for the dreamer's specific circumstances. Done well, it provided moral guidance grounded in Islamic tradition.
The "science of letters" took textual mysticism further. Its foundational principle: "God created the world through His speech." Arabic wasn't just a language—it expressed "the essence of what it signifies." The letters of the Qur'an, studied through alphanumeric computations, could reveal divine truth. This belief underlaid the power attributed to Arabic inscriptions on amulets and talismans.
West African Islam: Where Divination Spread the Faith
In Senegal, Gambia, and many other West African countries, something unexpected happened. Divination didn't just survive the arrival of Islam—it helped spread it.
Diviners, religious leaders, and healers became essentially interchangeable categories. As Islamic scholars learned esoteric sciences, they joined local non-Islamic aristocratic courts, where divination and protective amulets became "proof of the power of Islamic religion." The association between Islam and powerful esoteric knowledge became so strong that diviners and magicians who had never studied Islamic texts or learned Arabic bore the same titles as those who had.
This created an ongoing debate within Islam: were such practices actually permissible?
Critics like the eleventh-century scholar Abu-Hamid al-Ghazali objected that divination bore too much similarity to pagan practices of invoking spirits other than God. Defenders compared practitioners to physicians—people using natural principles to help others, which shouldn't be forbidden just because it looked unfamiliar.
The debate continues today.
Mesoamerica: Divination at the Heart of Creation
In pre-Columbian Mexico, divination wasn't peripheral to religion. It was central.
Many Aztec gods, including major creator deities, were themselves described as diviners. Tezcatlipoca, patron of sorcerers and magical practitioners, had a name meaning "smoking mirror"—a reference to obsidian mirrors used for scrying. In the Mayan Popol Vuh, the creator gods Xmucane and Xpiacoc performed divinatory hand casting while creating human beings. The Aztec primordial couple, Oxomoco and Cipactonal, appear in the Codex Borbonicus engaged in divining with kernels of maize.
The Aztecs considered this first couple to be the original diviners, and associated them with the ritual calendar itself. Divination was woven into the mythological foundations of time.
Every Mesoamerican civilization from the Olmecs through the Aztecs practiced divination in both public and private life. Scrying using reflective water or mirrors was common. So was casting lots. Hallucinogenic visions were another major form—morning glory seeds, jimson weed, peyote. These plants remain important to contemporary Mexican divination traditions.
Living Traditions: India, Tibet, Japan
In South India, practices called Theyyam (in Malayalam), arulvaakku (in Tamil), and various names in Kannada regions all involve a devotee inviting a Hindu deity to use their body as a channel to answer questions. The closest English translation is "oracle," though the cultural context differs dramatically from ancient Greek usage.
The Dalai Lama, living in exile in northern India, still consults the Nechung Oracle—the official state oracle of the Tibetan government. This isn't historical curiosity. The current Dalai Lama has, following centuries-old custom, consulted the Nechung Oracle during new year festivities. The tradition continues.
Japan maintains both indigenous methods like Futomani (divining from the shoulder blade bone of a sacred deer in Shinto tradition) and Onmyōdō (a complex system incorporating Chinese cosmology), alongside imported practices. Contemporary Japanese divination, called uranai, draws from Western astrology, Chinese astrology, feng shui, tarot, I Ching, and physiognomy—reading body features to identify personality traits.
Sweden's Midnight Journey
In Småland, a region of Sweden, a practice called Årsgång survived into the early nineteenth century. It occurred on Christmas and New Year's Eve.
The practitioner would fast and isolate themselves from all light in a room until midnight. Then they would embark on a complex journey—the specific steps varied by local tradition—interpreting symbols encountered along the way to foresee the coming year.
The practice was eventually suppressed, but its survival into the 1800s shows how tenaciously these traditions could persist even in officially Christian societies.
The Critics: Ancient and Modern
Divination has never lacked skeptics.
In the first century BCE, the Roman philosopher Cicero—himself an augur, an official diviner—wrote De Divinatione, a dialogue examining and largely dismantling arguments for divination's validity. A century later, Sextus Empiricus attacked astrology specifically. The satirist Lucian devoted an entire essay to exposing Alexander of Abonoteichus as a false prophet running a fraudulent oracle.
These weren't modern atheists. They lived in societies where religious practice was woven into public life. But they found divinatory claims unconvincing.
Modern science has continued this skeptical tradition. Controlled experiments consistently fail to show that divination techniques predict the future more accurately than chance. From the scientific perspective, divination is superstition—pattern recognition run amok, confirmation bias elevated to ritual, the human tendency to find meaning in randomness given cultural sanction.
And yet the practices persist. Horoscope columns appear in newspapers. Tarot readers do steady business. People consult psychics. The I Ching sells continually.
Why?
The Function of Organized Randomness
Divination can be understood as "an attempt to organize what appears to be random, so that it provides insight into a problem or issue at hand."
This framing doesn't require believing in supernatural forces. When someone consults the I Ching or deals tarot cards, the randomization process—the coins or cards—forces them to consider perspectives they might not have consciously chosen. The rich symbolic systems attached to these practices provide frameworks for thinking about complex situations.
A querent asking "Should I take this job?" might draw a card suggesting caution about hidden dangers. They then search their knowledge of the situation for what those hidden dangers might be. The card didn't provide supernatural knowledge—but it prompted a line of thinking the person might not have pursued otherwise.
This psychological function operates whether or not anything supernatural is occurring. It's counseling through structured randomness.
There's also social function. In many societies, divination provides socially acceptable ways to make difficult decisions, to say no to powerful people, to change course. "The omens are unfavorable" is sometimes easier to say than "I don't want to."
Between Magic and Religion
Scholars who study these practices note that divination often functions as the diagnostic phase of magical or religious work. You divine to find the cause of a problem; then you perform rituals to address what you found.
A traditional healer might divine to identify which ancestor is angry, which spirit is causing illness, which cosmic imbalance needs correction—and then prescribe the appropriate offerings, ceremonies, or remedies. Divination is the X-ray; magic or ritual is the treatment.
This relationship helps explain why divination has proven so difficult to eliminate. It's not a standalone practice that can be isolated and forbidden. It's integrated into broader systems of meaning-making, healing, decision-making, and social organization.
What Remains
Two Greek armies once stood frozen for eleven days, waiting for animal livers to look right.
This seems absurd to modern sensibilities. But consider: those soldiers and generals weren't stupid. They had practical concerns—winning battles, surviving, protecting their cities. They used divination because they believed it worked, because their culture validated it, because alternatives seemed worse.
We've largely replaced divination with other decision-making tools: probability theory, market research, opinion polls, algorithmic prediction. We consult data instead of oracles. We read statistics instead of entrails.
Whether our methods are actually better at predicting the future is, perhaps, less certain than we'd like to think. And plenty of people still check their horoscopes, still shuffle tarot cards, still seek insight through ancient randomizing rituals.
The human desire to know what's coming—to lift the veil between present and future, between the visible and invisible—hasn't gone anywhere. Only the methods we consider respectable have changed.
The seers are still among us. They just go by different names now.