Divination

The art of seeking knowledge or guidance from things not logically connected with the inquiry.
Divination is essentially magical and very ancient and widespread. It is concerned with finding out secrets, reaching decisions, and predicting the future. The point is always that it is not logical, in the sense of relying on ordinary causal connections. There are many methods. An important one is to cast lots, with a meaning attached to each possible result; tossing a coin, heads or tails, is an elementary way. In classical Greece, omens were taken from birds: it was promising if they flew on your right, unlucky if they flew on your left. When Latin was more familiar to Europeans, the Sortes Virgilianae were used (sortes is the plural of sors, “lot”). You opened Virgil’s Aeneid at random, touched a passage with your finger, and took whatever it said as a response. The same has often been done with the Bible, though, in such a large book, the chances of a text being apt to the inquirer’s need are slight. There is an old joke about a man who opened it and read “Judas went out and hanged himself.” He tried

again and read “Go thou and do likewise.” A similar method, employed in China as well as the West, is to walk outdoors and try to extract hints from the words spoken by passersby. Before the invention of the tea bag, expectations were often inferred from the distribution of loose tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.
Far more complex and philosophic is divination by the Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes. This work is very old indeed and was known to Confucius. The system is based on sixty-four hexagrams—diagrams of six lines, made up of broken and unbroken ones in every possible combination. Each hexagram has a “judgment” associated with it. To consult this oracle on a given issue, you construct a hexagram by some random method, such as tossing coins six times to decide whether each line, in turn, should be broken or unbroken. Having built the hexagram, you look up the associated judgment. The judgments tends to be enigmatic, but Jung and others who have studied the system have been struck by the relevance and profundity of the meanings that may emerge on reflection; also, by their frequent predictive effectiveness. The I Ching is certainly more interesting than the crude types of divination already mentioned, though the “reflection”—the contribution of the thoughtful inquirer—may be more important than the hexagrams as such.
In several advanced forms, divination requires expert practitioners. They might object to the term divination being used at all, on the ground that their techniques are more sophisticated, more scientific even, than throwing dice or listening to passing pedestrians. It is not easy, however, to draw the line because the lack of logical nexus is always there. Astrology, fortune-telling by cards, palmistry, all of these may seem to work when the expert uses them. But there are no proven reasons why the movement of planets in the Zodiac or the accidental fall of cards or the lines on a hand should be linked with anyone’s character or destiny. It has been argued that the undoubted successes of a few astrologers, card readers, and palmists are due to their own insights and intuitions, rather than the alleged significance of the phenomena they expound.
In ancient divination, a god or other supernatural agency was sometimes thought to underlie the event from which the answer was inferred or to inspire the person who inferred it. Divination might then verge on full-scale prophecy. At the oracle of Dodona in Greece, an inquirer received a “yes” or “no” reply according to the color of a bean taken from a jar, and this reply was from Zeus because he determined which sort of bean was taken. Roman augurers made prognostications from the entrails of sacrificed animals, and the technique involved a special gift of augury. Early Israelites used the Urim and Thummim, which are mentioned several times in the Old Testament. The exact nature of these objects is mysterious, but consulting them was a form of lot casting controlled by God and not by chance. Priests carried them in an ephod, probably a kind of wallet. An Israelite wanting guidance could ask a priest to put a question to the Lord through the Urim and Thummim. He might give a “yes” or “no” answer, but there was at least one other potential result—that he did not answer at all (see 1 Samuel 28:6). It is strange to find an oracular procedure quite like that of Dodona (if a little more complex, owing to the null possibility) embedded in Scriptures that refer constantly to far more exalted communication with God and culminate in the great prophetic writings of Isaiah and others. Furthermore, the Urim and Thummim take a long time fading out. They are mentioned even after the Babylonian exile (Ezra 2:63).