Divination

attempt to gain insight or secret knowledge into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual

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

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  • (About demons) Sometimes, however, they predict beforehand, not things they themselves are doing, but things which they know by natural signs are going to take place. [...] Sometimes also they learn with complete ease the dispositions of human beings not only as they are expressed in speech, but also as they are conceived in thought, when certain signs from the mind are expressed in the body, and on this basis predict even many things that will come to pass, things wondrous to others, who have not known these things which were so disposed.
  • 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
  • [A]spiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision.
  • Criticism is properly the rod of divination.
    • Arthur Symons, An Introduction to the Study of Browning, preface (1906).

See also

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