Divination

Divination is the attempt to gain knowledge hidden from ordinary means, of the future, of the unknown, of the will of the gods or the right course of action, through the interpretation of signs, omens or specially consulted media. It is among the most universal of human religious activities, found in virtually every culture and period, and it takes an enormous variety of forms: the reading of the entrails of sacrificed animals, the flight of birds, the casting of lots, the patterns of cracks in heated bone or shell, the fall of coins or yarrow stalks, the arrangement of cards, the positions of the stars, dreams, and the utterances of inspired oracles. What unites them is the conviction that the seemingly random or the specially prepared can be made to yield meaning, because the cosmos is ordered and interconnected and its hidden pattern can be read by those who know how.

Scholars broadly distinguish two great types. In inductive or artificial divination the diviner interprets signs according to a learned system of correspondences, the meaning of each omen fixed by tradition and rule. In intuitive or inspired divination knowledge comes directly through an oracle, a prophet or a medium possessed or inspired by a divine power.

Divination has repeatedly stood at the centre of religious and political life. In ancient Mesopotamia and China elaborate divinatory sciences guided kings and states, with specialist priesthoods and vast archives of recorded omens; the Chinese classic the I Ching began as a divination manual and became a foundational philosophical text. In Greece and Rome the oracles and the reading of signs were woven into public decision-making, and across countless traditions no important undertaking, a marriage, a journey, a war, the founding of a city, was begun without consulting the hidden will.

Yet divination has also been vigorously condemned, above all by the monotheistic traditions. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly forbids the consulting of omens, mediums and diviners as an intrusion on God's exclusive prerogative over the future, and Christianity and Islam largely inherited this prohibition, distinguishing legitimate prophecy, given by God, from illegitimate divination that seeks knowledge by other means. This tension, between the near-universal human impulse to read the hidden and the theological insistence that the future belongs to God alone, runs through the history of the practice, which has persisted in popular forms even where officially condemned.