Divination, Oracles & Omens
The past, present and future are full of tantalising mysteries: questions about our own and other people’s lives that we long to answer. Across history, human cultures have devised a wide range of methods to discover what might lie ahead or to understand past events.
This fascinating book features twenty-four divinatory techniques from around the world that have been and are still used to uncover hidden information: from astrology, palmistry, and Tarot to egg divination and Chinese Yijing. Each chapter is beautifully illustrated with a wide range of associated objects, such as cards, dice, altars, candles and texts, and even mathematical tools including astrolabes and astronomical tables. While these practices are often seen as light-hearted entertainment, a soothsayer’s uncannily accurate reading can catapult a client from scepticism to serious engagement.
From ancient times to the present day, this spellbinding collection explores our need to appeal to powers beyond the realm of our day-to-day understanding for prediction and clarification, and how the questions we ask can reveal more than the answers we are given.
Michelle Pfeffer is a research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a historian of early modern science and religion.
David Zeitlyn is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and an initiated Mambila gam dù spider diviner.
