Divinations: Introduction

[Introduction to the history, development, theory and application of Divinations for Beginners. This page and those linked under the title of "Divinations:" on the wikia are all written to be the defacto IC textbook. These pages comprise the official material for the Divinations class at Hogwarts. For any questions regarding content, please speak to Ysandir Dharnen in-world. For a handy list of pages on Divinations in the wikia please see the Table of Contents for the text book below.

OOCly this series of pages and all those put together for the subject is a group effort split between several players (listed contributors at the end of this page) using research and information gathered from across the web and from personal real world studies in both psychology and metaphysics and the occult. While any sources you use are perfectly viable options for potential use, be aware that these pages contain the accepted and curated theories used for the role play, and your own sources may not be accepted or approved as ICly -correct-. To find out if yours are viable, please contact Ysandir Dharnen in world.]

Written by Vela Cygnus

Published by Wize Academ Publishing, Stolkshire, U.K., 2017.

Forward

Welcome to the world of Divination! My name is Vela Cygnus and I've written this book to put into one convenient place all the introductory knowledge needed for the beginner (or returning) diviner! In this book, you will find the work of nearly a life time, written to be used as a guide on your first steps into the often abstract world of ambient magics and sight. You will learn much in this book about the basics of the art, but I have also made clear to focus on the theory behind the art.

For more in-depth information or supplemental works on the art of divination and magical theory, I highly recommend my compendium, and there are always the academic journals (most likely kept in your library) but remember; the best guide you will have is your own intuition and, of course, your local divinations professor!

 Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 - Introduction to Divination
• Chapter 2 - Preparing and Opening the Mind's Eye
• Chapter 3 - The Diviner's Tool Box
  • The Tarot
  • The Crystal Ball
  • Tassomancy
  • Palmistry
  • Astrology
  • Numerology & The I-Ching
  • Dream Interpretation
• Index/Glossary

Introduction

Divination is the art of getting insight into the patterns and movements of meaning in life. We (Diviners) like to play with the word and say that it is a matter of dipping in to the fundamental fabrics of magic, though many skeptics claim there is no value to the art. There are many traditional tools for doing this: the tarot, I Ching, Cowrie shells, palm reading, tea leaves, numerology, the Runes, the pendulum, the cabala, astrology, etc. Some of these tools carry an unsavory reputation as superstitious foolishness, others are tied in with religious(muggle) traditions and are thus labeled as 'non-magical'. After all, how can a practice embraced and still performed by muggles yield true magical results? Read on, dear students, and find out!

Innumerable methods of divination can be found around the world, and many cultures practice the same methods under different names. During the Middle Ages, scholars coined terms for many of these methods — some of which had hitherto been unnamed — in Medieval Latin, very often utilizing the suffix -mantia when the art seemed more mystical (ultimately from Greek mantis, prophet) and the suffix -scopia when the art seemed more scientific (ultimately from Greek skopein, to observe). Names like drimimantia, nigromantia, and horoscopia turned up, along with a slew of other esoteric (and distinctly Medieval) "sciences" such as phrenology and physiognomy.

Of course, some forms of divination are much older than the Middle Ages, like haruspication, while others (such asmegapolisomancy or coffee-based tasseomancy) are born of the 20th and 21st century. These you will find more information on further in the text, along with a handy Index of Methods in the back of this text. In fact, there are some forms of divination so popular they have become part of our very cultures, even becoming games we no longer realize have their roots (pardon my pun) in divinatory practices.

Fun Fact: Herbology and Divination

Some types of divination were so popular, they remain a part of our cultures!

Have you ever found yourself pulling petals from a flower, whilst saying something like "he loves me, he loves me not"? Or perhaps you asked a "Should I... Shouldn't I" question instead? This is, believe it or not, a form of divination called Anthomany - more commonly known as Floromancy! This type of divination is relatively new, dating back to the Victorian period, and its more defined methods (those which involve observing flowers and plants directly) has many modern off-shoots. Typically, this type of divination is used when seeking answers regarding love, or the heart and emotions.

What each individual method has in common is that it is used to help the reader tune into their own intuition and magical ability; the mind's ability to read the movements of energy. As you will find out with all things in divination, regardless of muggle or magical status, the tools are pretty worthless without the skill of good reading or interpretation to go along with them. The specific tool provides a vocabulary, and sometimes a grammar, for understanding meaning; not all of the process is even magical in nature, which is why there are instances of 'correct' readings done by muggles using the same tools as magical practitioners (more on that below in the next sections). Trying to use a tool without thoroughly understanding its lexicon and organization can be like trying to read poetry in a foreign language with only a dictionary in hand.

The first thing to remember is that Divination is the art of acquiring answers and knowledge that otherwise would be unavailable to us. By making use of magic in its most natural state, as will be explained in the section on theory, we are able to extract information that we are seeking from the all-encompassing magical energy of life around us. Not all divinatory tools and methods are specific to future sight. Some, like Scrying and Dowsing, are methods of seeing or finding things in the present world rather than the future for example; for now, let us leave these more complex sections of the art for the rudiments that will form the base of your studies.

Divination is a timeless practice that, through thoughtful meditation and implicit actions, empowers us to have an understanding of what lies in the future for ourselves as well as for others. The art of divination is one of the few magical arts which has always been as it is today, and which has seamlessly existed in parallels throughout both magical and muggle cultures alike. Muggles, for example, have developed some ingenious ways of measuring the energy intake and output of brains, which (though barbaric) has shown those who study it that there are minute changes to our physiology (our physical beings) that coincide with the acts that make up the art of divination. From the first steps of preparation, to meditation and finally to the actual reading itself, we are applying ourselves to a very real task which has concrete results.

This is to say that, no, divinations is NOT just a load of waffle! In the hands of someone who is not only well prepared but also properly open (we will discuss 'opening' and preparing for a reading further on) the likely hood of a successful reading increases many fold! Divination reveals to us paths we may not have previously considered, and helps to prepare and guide us to perform the right action or to properly react.

Fun Fact: Divination and Early Magic

Divination practices formed the earliest known understandings of magic use and practices.

Alveromancy, or divination by sound has been used throughout magical history and is the foundational theory upon which our usage of spell incantations is built. Used throughout ancient cultures world wide, this was most popularly touted by both magical and muggle cultures in ancient Egypt. This understanding that words and specific arrangements of sounds originated in the belief that all sounds and words had meaning. Early magic users learned quickly that certain arrangements of words could aid them in focusing their magical abilities (spell casting), and soon the theory spread to everything, even filtering into the muggle populace as a religious belief that sounds came from the gods, when confronted with spell usages. In this theory, the pronunciation, and exact recital of magical 'scripts' was used to effect magical change, and it is upon this early theorizing that our current magical system came. Simply put, the ancient peoples believed that if the 'words of power' were not properly spoken, the magic or 'divination' would not succeed. This is the first and most basic lesson to practical magic use taught in all major schools today.

"But professor, if this is a practical use of our magic, why is there only a LIKELIHOOD of success and not a certainty?" - Yes, I can almost hear the questions now. The art of divination is not a concrete, active use of magic, as are for example transfigurations and charms spells. There are several reasons divinations practices have such an awkward and often unreliable track record.

1. There is no wand use. This may not seem like much to those of you who have never tried wandless magic, or for those who have never thought about the role your wands play in your daily lives, but the loss of this tool would surely show you WHY this is such a big part of this process. Our wands, simply put, are focusing artifacts. They channel our will and magic together, amplifying or regulating it as our natures require, as an aid to help us directly apply our magic towards some effect (such as making something levitate or changing something's colour). This common, everyday item is so integral to how we operate our magic that it is often very, very hard to learn to cast spells with out it. In fact, only the greatest witches and wizards are able to master wandless magic; most adults have difficulty with wandless casting, even though we are all trained in our N.E.W.T years to learn it.
2. There are no incantations. Again, this staple of applied magics does not exist in divinations. While there are, through out history, Oracles and Seers who spoke in riddles that could, in some contexts, seem like incantations - they are not. The gift of true sight often presents in the commonly associated riddles of prophecy, but this is related to our subconscious interpretation of the information received, rather than the casting of some elaborate spell. We will discuss why this is so further on, but suffice to say it is hard to unwind the often snarled and complex meanings of visions - our brains are very likely to interpret the overabundance of information in strange, or symbolically heavy ways and not every brain is alike so not everyone will come up with the same answer.
3. Everyone interprets information and imagery differently. While many have tried to standardize the meanings and imagery most common to the art, it is actually fairly close to impossible to standardize a practice that, at it's core, is based in the intuition and subconscious mind of the seeker or querant. Not only that, but when the diviner is reading for another person, this additional person has influences over the way the information is interpreted - if not directly with their energy and ambient magic then by simply taking in what they are told and re-interpreting it for themselves. Our brains love to solve puzzles and put logic to things that seem illogical - which is why we can often see patterns where none exist, or find patterns in the midst of chaos. This natural inclination to create order out of chaos is both an integral part of the process and its greatest foil. Because no every one finds the same route to the same answer, or even comes up with the same answer, often the mixture of diviner interpretation, method of divination (IE what sort of tool their prefer to work with) and emotional connections to the imagery or tool will alter the reading. Ultimately, this adds to the success or failure, depending on the individuals and tools in question.
4. Not everyone is able to maintain the clarity necessary to divine accurately. In order to control for the above situations interfering with the success of a reading, we must do certain very specific things to prepare ourselves and our tools and even our area. This preparation comprises several parts, from setting up and 'cleansing' your area (using specific herbs and scents to create a specific atmosphere, setting up your materials and a comfortable place to sit) to the fore-practice of meditation called 'opening', this is called 'set and setting'. Muggle 'Mediums' (I wonder why they are not called 'Smalls' or 'Larges') understand this procedure remarkably well, which accounts for the rare successful readings that makeup their own beliefs on the art; they pay an almost spiritual heed to the rules of 'set and setting' as well as 'opening' which prepares those with even a hint of magic to connect with the ambient magics of our world.
5. Not everyone knows what questions to ask. Because the art of divination is so very based in things like intuition and use of passive magic, it is unlike any other form of magic you will study at school. Questions are to divination what incantations and wand movements are to regular-use magic. This means that, if you do not know the right question or the correct phrasing for your queries, you will often find the answers you receive are off or you have to work harder to make sense of them, just as you would have trouble correctly casting your charm without the right pronunciation of the incantation. Sometimes, you may ask one question and get the answer of a completely different one. Fear not; divination truly is an art. Practice makes perfect, and you’ll find that meditative practices (as we will go into later) will assist with your intuition when interpreting answers to the questions you ask.

Introductory Theory

Fate is not indefinite; it is manipulable and its hand is constantly changing. So, if this is true, then how does divination work?

Divination works through the applied use of passive magics, or the act of 'tapping in' to the ambient magic around us. This is the the 'spark' that animates us and which exists even in the plants and earth under our feet. This magic permeates all of our world, and is separate from the magic we hold internally within ourselves. This is why even muggles are able to occasionally achieve correct answers with their divinatory attempts; though less accurate than a witch or wizard, a muggle may still by chance manage to passively connect to this magic which is an integral part of our world, as this magic exists as a part of what animates them in the same manner it animates dogs, cats, trees and flowers.

This magic exists in many places, but one of the most widely held understandings is that this natural magic flows in rivers, called Ley Lines which criss-cross the entire earth deep under it's surface in the same way that deep-routed physical rivers of water do. Though they are unseen, and certainly more of a topic of discussion for deep academics, these currents of magical power do exist and serve as the very bloodlines of the planet itself. Where these lines intersect, we find a 'node' or 'pool' of powers. These 'nodes' are usually used as sites for magical rituals and great upheaval, attracting those sensitive to such natural energies. When these currents of power are obstructed, or altered, it causes disturbances in the geographical locations connected to them. For example, a forest which naturally seems to invite disaster and tragedy with no discernible reason. The Suicide Forest in Japan is one potential example of a location altered by a decaying or obstructed Ley Line, which draws from those who unwarily walk into it's depths a deep and unyielding sense of loss and sorrow; in addition, the forest seems to attract all those nearby who feel these things, though we can no longer discern if this is due to the location itself, or simply the cultural knowledge that this is a place people often go to die. Dark, but there is a lesson here to be had in why it is important to learn and understand our intuitive magics - knowing what it feels like when such an effect is upon you (such as the effects of this Japanese forest) can mean the difference between life and death, if you happen to wander into the wrong place!

Similarly to the maternal instinct that triggers when a mother senses that her child is in danger, we can tap into this completely unconscious mind, this natural magics, and pull things from our ambient or higher, passive senses that grant us the intuition necessary to predict the future and change our fate (or to help change the fate of others, of course). The Ley Line currents distribute magic through out the world, and this is where the 'ambient' magic of our world comes from and returns, ultimately, to. When a diviner opens themselves up to this energy, since it is at once connected to all the world and all life in it, it is possible to pull from that mass of energy the specific information you are looking for. Existing simultaneously in all time periods (past, present, future) this magic is both by its very nature unknowable in its entirety (though we try!) and filled with the knowledge of all that has, is and ever will be.

Divination is, at its core, a form of dialogue between the diviner and this all-encompassing ambient magic. If someone is reading (doing divination) for you, they are trying to enter into dialogue with that ambient magic, to learn more about the patterns and values that are presently holding influence over a person, place or situation. The preparatory methods and the tools we use all inform our subconscious to use a particular, pre-decided vocabulary of symbols to help animate our awareness of what is important right now, of where we are headed in life, and of what we need to know. Each individual tool has its own symbolic language, which alters the types and forms of answers we may draw. For example, the language of the Tarot is vastly different from the language of the Runes, and the use of one tool over another will typically inform our understanding differently - though the magics we draw on are the same at their core, it is the language we utilize in this 'dialogue' between us and the ambient magic around us which gives us our answers and determines how successful we are.

Some find that using a divination tool also helps them to build and deepen their relationship with their own innate magic. That is to say, the magic that is internally a part of all witches and wizards and which resides at our core. It can help you to strengthen and expand your intuition and connect you more strongly to those parts of your intuitive, natural self. Each time you ask: "What is going on for me right now?" and draw a card or rune in response, you find your own sense of things validated -- or contradicted -- and in that dialogue you often deepen your understanding of yourself. This widening of the intuitive magical 'muscles' allows us to grow over time and become more sensitive to magic in general.

Using a tool for this dialogue requires a leap of faith. That is to say When you pose a question to "the universe", (or to the ambient magical energy of life), and then use cards, runes, charts, etc. to interpret the response, you have to believe that there is some intelligence in the response. If you feel you are drawing a card or casting your I Ching at random, then of course it is ridiculous to use a divination tool. What makes divination tools work is that they are not random. As you shuffle the cards, or reach in the bag to select a rune, your magic is guiding the selection.

This means that, in order for you to have a successful reading, you must first actually believe success is possible. As with the art of Transfiguration, deliberation and will form a large part of this process. You must determine that this act is first possible, and then imagine it being so, and practice this 'leap of faith' before success in divinations can even be a fever dream. This focusing of your intent and belief, or will, is what 'gets the magical juice flowing' so to speak. Without this integral part of the process, you might as well just throw poop at a wall and declare the image of the muggle god in the splatters, for all the effect you will get. This act of faith, or reaffirmation of belief, is a focusing process done before each reading. This is called many things, here we will call this meditative process 'opening' as we are intending to open ourselves to the possibilities. By employing the techniques of meditation, grounding and centering we can seek to open ourselves up and be receptive to the possibilities that exist around us. This is always the first step, and should be done regularly to condition yourself to the process and the calm balance that comes with it. We will discuss and learn more about this crucial first step in Chapter 2: Preparing and Opening the Mind's Eye. If you feel doubt about this, then I recommend you try it for a time. After you select the same answers from your tool (be it tarot, runes or one of the many others) "randomly" over a two-week period to refer to the same ongoing issue in your life, you will begin to feel that, yes, indeed, there is some intelligence involved here. But it is not an intelligence inhabiting the tool! It is the connection you forge between your innate magical talents and intuition, and the ambient magic of the world around you collaborating to make information and insight available to your conscious, active mind.

So when people ask "is there any validity to divination" its like asking "is there any validity to English, or French, or Spanish" They are just languages which your mind is capable of learning and recognizing, which offer richer or poorer vocabularies and grammars capable of certain things but not others. And they are all valid and useful in the hands of a skilled diviner; they are all crude and inexpressive in the hands of someone who is unable to understand them clearly.

And make no mistake - it takes a great deal of time and effort to learn to divine with any tool, no matter how simplistic it may seem. The Tarot can often take decades, for example, just to learn the particulars of one deck and this may not necessarily mean you can read a different style of deck (more on that in the section on Tarot).

An Abbreviated History

"Why are we here? Who controls our destiny? How does life work? What does the future hold?"

There is archeological evidence showing that these questions have always existed as part of both muggle and magical cultures dating back to ancient man. These questions form some of the greatest philosophical and theoretical debates in history, and link us all together as humans. Through studying these ancient cultures and the little that is left to them, we have seen and tracked back the uses of divinations as an integral part of the human understanding of our world.

A need to know and deep spiritual seeking are universal human traits, and some form of divination has been used since the earliest times as a means to find these answers which seem to so evade us. Many cultures, including Chinese, Mayan, Mesopotamian and Indian cultures, looked upwards to heavenly bodies— stars, planets, constellations, eclipses, and comets—not only to tell time and understand the seasons, but also for signs of portent or to decipher changes attributable to divine(muggle) or magical action. We can see the end results of these practices in subjects such as Astronomy and Astrology (the two sides streams of academic study regarding the movements of celestial bodies) and, in a more pure form, in the practices of the Centaurs. While each band of centaurs may have regionally specific variants, theirs is the purest and most undiluted form of this sort of divination method, with their practices having remained virtually untouched or altered from the original.

Unfortunately it is exceedingly rare for centaurs to share the knowledge of their divination practices. One of the only recorded occasions in recent history having occurred during the run up to the 1998 wizarding war, when Firenze the Centaur took up the position of teaching the subject at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This decision to aid Headmaster Dumbledore resulted in the centaur's banishment from the forest - a price paid for having decided to 'peddle' their sacred knowledge to humans. Unlike most human cultures, many of the magical non-human cultures tend towards extreme isolation and precaution when it comes to their secrets. Often having a greater attunement to the natural magics of the world, beings such as the centaurs pride themselves on their purely maintained and well-respected methods. This, along with the subjugation and oppression many magical beings have experienced under the 'rule' of humanity, have caused them to maintain their isolation and protective stance over their own magics and cultural specifics. While understanding these magics and methods better would help our own understanding of the magic at work in Divination, the difficulty of gaining the knowledge from such beings is exceedingly high. Thus, we know relatively little about the how's and why's of both their magic and their practices.

Other cultures through out history paid special attention to terrestrial omens such as animal migrations and weather patterns, as well as patterns of tossed sticks, bones, amulets, or rocks. African tribes have used bones in divination rituals for hundreds of thousands of years. If you recognized some of these practices from your classes in school, that's because they ARE the very same - or at least they are similar. Chinese Taoists read patterns on tortoise shells, which evolved into the hexagrams of the I Ching. Vikings consulted the runestones. Ancient Roman shamans observed the entrails of slaughtered animals and grains that hens pecked at and formed messages (alectryomancy). Other cultures have looked inwards for the answers (such as the Australian aborigines with their dreamtime), or have used various herbs for vision quests. The Mazatec native tribes of Mexico, for example, used a common local herb called Salvia Divinorum for many of their rituals and divinatory practices to aid in opening the mind's eye. There are also numerous passages in muggle religious texts documenting Jahweh’s* instructions for using a sacred set of dice called Urim and Thummim to make decisions in the name of this mystical figure. (*Jahweh, pronounced YA-WAY, is a word for their interpretation of ambient magic as a sentient, all-knowing being they generally call 'God')

These practices I have mentioned are the precursors to many modern day magical schools of thought and methods of divinations. From your studies in Astronomy and Astrology, which were at one point the same subject, to the study of things like Xylomancy in your divinations class, these were all at one point used to explain the world around us and to pull information (to varying degrees of accuracy) from someplace greater than our own minds. In times where our own logic fails to answer the questions, humans (be they muggle or magical) have always looked somewhere for their answers. In the modern world, we still carry some of these practices culturally; take the practice of Naming Seers, for example. While there is an all-time low in demand for these specialized Seers, it was a common practice up until the early 1990's to hire them to peer into the future of a newborn child and select a name based on what was Seen. Sadly this practice has gone out of fashion in recent years due to the high cost of hiring such a person (the skill is very rare) and because of the amount of unease knowing your child's future may bring (just imagine finding out your child was doomed for bad luck, or that they would die before the age of 20, for example).

That said, even though various forms of divination have been used in all societies, the widespread use of sophisticated divination systems as we have them now (the tarot, crystal ball and palmistry to name a few) across all classes of people (muggle and magical, cross-cultural parallels) is a recent development. The spread of divination systems had depended on verbal records and history passed from one person to another through stories and word of mouth. In preliterate times this was largely the exclusive domain of the rulers, chieftains, official soothsayers, priests, sages, prophets and shamans; the leaders and decision makers of ancient cultures. Although belief in magic was practically universal between muggles and magical folk up to and through the Middle Ages, including primitive divinatory practices of folk magic, knowledge of divination systems and learned magic could not spread wholesale until the invention of printing. As we know from our studies in ancient history, prior to the mass-production of literature and education, the knowledge and studies of magic were regionally restricted and taught in an apprentice/master situation, which meant the passing of this knowledge would not be globalized until the jealously guarded secrets of the individual master began to become more accessible.

The Chinese invented paper more than two thousand years ago, and by 1045 a muggle printer named Bi Sheng had created the first primitive movable type, which served to increase the production of reading material. His method was used to reproduce the oldest book of wisdom—the I Ching, which is also the world’s oldest and most venerated divination system. Muggle Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the Western printing press in the 1450's gave rise to printing of books in Europe, and the reproduction of card decks, including Tarot cards. This globalization and increase in literacy brought with it both the start of the segregation between the magical and muggle communities, introducing for example the Statutes of Secrecy, and also saw the sudden propagation and solidification of what we know today as the Art of Divinations, which exists in near perfect parallels in both muggle and magical cultures world-wide.

As literacy increased, more translations of ancient texts were made and knowledge of divination systems was able to spread over time. Today people around the world and from all walks of life can experiment with all kinds of divination systems, including those from other cultures. There are five systems, or methods, in particular that are rooted in history and are widely used throughout the world today: Astrology, Numerology, I Ching, Tarot and Runes. Because they have stood the test of time and each of them incorporates a sufficiently complex and balanced set of archetypes, these are often referred to as the primary, or main, methods. In your class, you will often study all of these in addition to newer methods such as Palmistry, Phrenology, Tassography and Dream Analysis.

Given the distances the world’s primary, classical methods have had to travel—through time and space—not to mention the intense persecution their practitioners endured in Western society for hundreds of years (both magical and muggle alike) —it is a miracle that they are still with us. Authentic divination systems passed down by our ancestors are a special heritage. From a practical point of view, their ability to provide fresh perspective on the changes of our lives and world is to our collective advantage. They help us satisfy a primordial need to better understand life and our place in the Universe. Their usefulness has allowed them not only to survive, but also to thrive in the face of all odds. 

Tracking Divinations Methods Through Ancient Times

• The earliest confirmed evidence of divination was on a turtle plastron excavated at Wuyang, Jiahu, in China, 7,000 BC - 5,700 BC. This was the precursor to the method we know today as the I Ching. The I Ching is an ancient Chinese philosophical and divinatory technique with a set of explanatory commentaries ascribed to the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius.
• The world's oldest Oracle texts are preserved in the palm-leaf libraries of India, written in an ancient form of Tamil (a Dravidian language of Madras, and of north-eastern Ceylon). These prophecies projected the life-lines and life expectencies for each man and woman, and were designed to help manage their present incarnations (being a culture that believes in reincarnation) successfully. They were used as magical blue-prints for the life one ought to lead in a cultural practice similar to the Name Seeing practices of our recent past which predicted the same thing in order to give children both a suitable name, and to project the sort of life they may lead. The author of these texts is said to be the mythological hero from the Mahabharata epics (ancient stories), Brighu, who is said to have lived around 5000 B.C.; while we do not have inarguable proof to tie Brighu to either the magical talent OR these texts, the writing shows the names and lives of over 80,000 individuals with 10% of them being of western geographical origins. This, paired with the accounting of Brighu in the Mahabharata epics, and his suggested timeline, does suggest that Brighu may have been (if one reads the ancient stories) both magical and, potentially, an Oracle. This, however, is still up for academic debate.
• Oracle Bones: The very early Chinese Shang Dynasty rulers consulted oracle bones about many aspects of daily life, including weather, health, farming, and fortune. The prophetic bones were tortoise shells heated with rods to produce cracks that could be "read."

• The Egyptians practiced divination for two purposes: to inquire about the present and obtain useful information to make changes to a situation. Thus the magician compelled the universal magics to do his or her will. The primary methods used in ancient Egyptian divination were: trance, mediumship/clairvoyants, scrying (Fire, Water, Oil), dream and dream interpretation and oracles.
• Haruspicy: The ancient Etruscans use a haruspex (diviner) to interpret the divine/universal will by inspecting the entrails of a sacrificial animal. First the animal was ritually slaughtered. Next it was butchered, with the haruspex examining the size, shape, color, markings and general appearance of certain internal organs, usually the liver (hepatoscopy), but also the gall, heart and lungs. Finally, when the animal had been butchered, the meat was roasted and all the celebrants shared a sacred meal.

• Bibliomancy: Using texts such as the works of Homer to divine answers. Usually opened at random or using three dice to determine what lines should be interpreted.
• Kledon: Divination associated with Hermes, where the person seeking an answer would cover their ears, walk into a busy marketplace and then the first words they heard after uncovering their ears would be their answer. Offerings were made before and after to Hermes. Hermes was a popular muggle interpretation of the universal magics in the days of ancient Greeks.

• Augury: Similar to Etruscan haruspicy was augury, but whereas haruspices performed exstipicia of sheep entrails, Roman augurs looked at omens from birds.The practice of looking at omens was called an augurium or auspicium. The Romans believed the will of the gods was revealed by the actions of the birds. Roman divination included looking at portents/prodigies, unusual occurrences that show divine disapproval and can be expiated. This was accomplished (with or without the Senate's order) by consulting the Sibylline Books, or by taking the auspices.

• Sibylline Books: The sibyls were inspired by Apollo (another muggle deity from ancient Greece). In a state of ecstasy, a sibyl uttered prophecies. While we know now today that it is not necessary to induce a state of ecstasy for one gifted with the Sight to See, at the time there were many odd rituals used to 'induce' the visions of Prophecy. Muggles believed these were accurate all the time, but we know that not all of the Sibyls were gifted, with some producing very odd Prophecies indeed! The most famous sibyl was the Cumaean Sibyl who offered the Roman King Tarquin 9 books of prophecy, which he rejected. Eventually Tarquin bought the last 3 books of prophecy for the price of the original nine; this is one of the earliest records of the gift of Sight that we have written prophecies for. The last three books are all that are left of these ancient prophecies today.
• The ancient Mayans had a practice called The Tsolk’in. This refers to a twenty day period of divination which formed the basis for the calculations used for the famous Mayan Calendar, which of course was a prophetic tool. The twenty days of the Tsolk’in are, however, by no means to be considered as abstract computational units. Rather they reflect the physical properties and the origin of man as well as the influence which powerful celestial beings, in particular the moon and the sun, have on his existence. Twenty is the total number of human extremities, fingers and toes, and is contained 13 times in 260, the duration of the divinatory calendar, the Tsolk’in. This time-period (plus one day) actually represents nine lunations of twenty-nine full day-and-night cycles. As is well known, the time between menstruations is one lunation, and it takes nine of these anthropo-lunar cycles for a new human being to form after impregnation. This was also one of the earliest known uses of what would later become known as Numerology, though the form has changed drastically over the years into the modern practice and calculations we have today.
• The ancient Nords (Vikings) were the first known users and creators of the Runes you see in your classes on Ancient Runes in modern society. These early runes were single alphabetical characters from the old Norse language called Futhark. Although this alphabet can be used for writing, and has been added to and adapted over the years (as your Ancient Runes professor may have told you) these early incarnations were used primarily for divination practices and seeking answers, as well as for creating talismanic binding-rune on objects (early object enchantment). The runes were carved into small tumble-polished semi-precious stones, disks of bone, wood or metal and ceramic tiles.
• In Banyang villages in Cameroon (The Africas), a form of divination rarely seen today is the Basinjom masquerade, in which an individual wearing a wild, otherworldly mask and costume is endowed with clairvoyant powers capable of identifying people who have powers of witchcraft. While this may seem strange, this was a legitimate place in ancient African societies for those who found themselves born with the gift of magic and Sight. This was a very focused form of the gift of Sight that selectively only Saw those who possessed or would possess magic. Often the Basinjomi would perform this ritual whenever incidents of accidental magic would occur in the tribe, Seeking out the source of the magic so that it could be dealt with (either by entering the child into apprenticeship with the Basinjomi and Shamans, or by casting them out of the tribe).
• The Tarot was allegedly created around 1440, somewhere in northern Italy. The earliest surviving Milanese Tarot decks and Ferrarese references to Tarot both come from that period, but this is, as yet, the best theory of historians and academics. As noted, the Tarot deck consisted of a regular 56-card deck, augmented with a hierarchy of 22 allegorical trump cards. This created the standard 78-card Tarot deck. We do know, however, that there was an older version of something similar to the Tarot, designed similarly to a pack of playing cards from our modern era. These were, perhaps, the precursors to what we now know and use for both playing cards, and divination both. These early cards, though we have none to study, are said to have originated in Kemut (ancient Egypt) and were used as a game. It wasn't until (as far as we know) Italy in the 1400's that the cards were adapted for the purposes of divination and altered to the familiar illustrative styles we see in divination shops today.

OOC Contributors: Ysandir Dharnen and xmarilynstefanix resident

Last Updated : 12/10/16