In the Roman Republic, divination was not a private consultation but a formal arm of the state: augurs, who read the flight and behaviour of birds, and haruspices, who read the entrails of sacrificed animals, were established religious offices consulted before nearly every major public act, a military campaign, the founding of a colony, the convening of an assembly, and a magistrate could have an assembly's business halted simply by announcing that the auspices were unfavourable, giving the diviner's technical judgment direct and formal power over the conduct of Roman public life.
Some of the earliest surviving Chinese writing exists at all because of divination: the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty, inscribed questions and answers scratched onto turtle shells and ox bones and then cracked by heat for a diviner to read, preserve both an early stage of the Chinese script and a detailed record of the questions Shang rulers put to their diviners about war, harvest and ritual. The descendant of that same divinatory tradition, the I Ching or Classic of Changes, remains in everyday use today, consulted by throwing coins or yarrow stalks to generate a hexagram, alongside an enormous modern commercial industry in tarot reading and other divinatory practices that operate as popular and largely unregulated consumer services rather than as state institutions.