Divination

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.

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.

Quotes

• 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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