Divination
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Since the dawn of consciousness, and perhaps even before that, man has tried to untangle the ball of yarn that is Life by unraveling the connection between seemingly random phenomena and the events to come. The methods for doing this are pratically innumerable. From tarot cards to tea leaves, animal bones to crystal balls, we as humans are willing to use anything we can get our grubby paws on to get just the slightest hint of what's to come for us.
No matter how we seek to see into the future, we find that we are, in fact, really just using these methods to look inside ourselves (some say our more powerful "unconscious" selves) to find answers that make life more predictable and, I would add, also to satisfy our innate need for the magical, the spiritual, or the wondrous.
Divination, in all its manifestations and elaborations, is a natural attempt to connect with the hidden powers we (even those of us who live in a society awash in solidly scientific explanations of the world) feel exert their control over our lives. Indeed, science and divination are two sides of the same coin: the former tries to explain the physical universe to reduce it to a predicable system, the latter seeks to explain the internal and interpersonal microcosm to discover its underlying predictability. Scientists and mystics both want a deeper and more useful understanding of the inner and outer worlds.
Obviously, finding patterns in nature and even in our own thoughts and deeds is something which humans do profoundly well. It is no surprise, then, that we take particular delight in ascribing meaning to the patterns that we find. This is the fundamental idea behind divination of any sort.
You see a pattern: for example, an eagle attacks a dove midair, then one week later your peaceful village is pillaged by a bellicose rival tribe. Thereafter, if you live through the carnage, you think perhaps that those birds symbolized, in advance of the occurrence, the attack on your village. Now you watch birds in general more closely. Very often you find a connection between the birds' lives and human phenomena. You declare yourself an interpreter of omens, and if you're any good, your tribesmen trust you and consult you before acting.
Now, here's the trick: You could just as well have watched the actions of ants or toads, the movements of cloud formations, the falling leaves, etc., and each of them would have given you potentially accurate omens. The truth is that an interpreter of omens in fact already has his finger on the pulse of the tribe's actions, etc. The omens, or rather the patterns, in essence merely tap into his knowledge, unconsciously bolstering his confidence in his predictions.
That's just one explanation. Who's to say that there isn't a connection between the lives of birds, etc., and the lives of men? Perhaps there is some great flux of life that moves all things in corresponding patterns... God, fate, or whatever you prefer to call it. Or perhaps it's all just coincidence.
In any case, here is a catalog of the many methods of divination for you to browse through. I will make as many entries as I can, as quickly as I can, but one person alone will not make so impressive a list. I urge you please to add any types of divination you can think of to the forum. Later, I will add them into the main page. Please keep your additions short and accurate; use the technical and common names of the form of divinition (if you know them); and provide a pithy description of the method and goal of the form of prognostication.
No matter how we seek to see into the future, we find that we are, in fact, really just using these methods to look inside ourselves (some say our more powerful "unconscious" selves) to find answers that make life more predictable and, I would add, also to satisfy our innate need for the magical, the spiritual, or the wondrous.
Divination, in all its manifestations and elaborations, is a natural attempt to connect with the hidden powers we (even those of us who live in a society awash in solidly scientific explanations of the world) feel exert their control over our lives. Indeed, science and divination are two sides of the same coin: the former tries to explain the physical universe to reduce it to a predicable system, the latter seeks to explain the internal and interpersonal microcosm to discover its underlying predictability. Scientists and mystics both want a deeper and more useful understanding of the inner and outer worlds.
Obviously, finding patterns in nature and even in our own thoughts and deeds is something which humans do profoundly well. It is no surprise, then, that we take particular delight in ascribing meaning to the patterns that we find. This is the fundamental idea behind divination of any sort.
You see a pattern: for example, an eagle attacks a dove midair, then one week later your peaceful village is pillaged by a bellicose rival tribe. Thereafter, if you live through the carnage, you think perhaps that those birds symbolized, in advance of the occurrence, the attack on your village. Now you watch birds in general more closely. Very often you find a connection between the birds' lives and human phenomena. You declare yourself an interpreter of omens, and if you're any good, your tribesmen trust you and consult you before acting.
Now, here's the trick: You could just as well have watched the actions of ants or toads, the movements of cloud formations, the falling leaves, etc., and each of them would have given you potentially accurate omens. The truth is that an interpreter of omens in fact already has his finger on the pulse of the tribe's actions, etc. The omens, or rather the patterns, in essence merely tap into his knowledge, unconsciously bolstering his confidence in his predictions.
That's just one explanation. Who's to say that there isn't a connection between the lives of birds, etc., and the lives of men? Perhaps there is some great flux of life that moves all things in corresponding patterns... God, fate, or whatever you prefer to call it. Or perhaps it's all just coincidence.
In any case, here is a catalog of the many methods of divination for you to browse through. I will make as many entries as I can, as quickly as I can, but one person alone will not make so impressive a list. I urge you please to add any types of divination you can think of to the forum. Later, I will add them into the main page. Please keep your additions short and accurate; use the technical and common names of the form of divinition (if you know them); and provide a pithy description of the method and goal of the form of prognostication.
