At the beginning of his intriguing study of ancient techniques of divination, Robert Temple describes a hair-raising ‘descent into Hell’: after years of trying to gain access to the Oracle of the Dead at Baiae in southern Italy, he finally entered the system of dark, hot and narrow tunnels that led down to an artificial River Styx. The ancient complex, thought to pre-date the Nekromanteion of classical Greece, would allow supplicants with enough wealth and nerve to visit the underworld, cross the Styx and consult the dead – without dying themselves.
Later in the book, Temple discusses in detail other oracles, portents and divination by entrails in western traditions and, in the East, oracle bone-cracking and the I Ching. He concentrates on these major techniques; but I had an irresistible urge to explore further afield. Here is my personal selection of methods for predicting what will be…
Apantomancy: chance encounters with animals, such as black cats, bringing good luck or bad. Chosen because I have a favourite print showing Black Shuck, the huge black dog who can be encountered – for good or ill – on a dark night in Norfolk.
Dowsing or water divining: this is the ancient art of locating water with a forked branch, rod or pendulum.
Enochian chess: invented by one of the founder members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and based on Dr John Dee’s Enochian system of magic, this four-handed chess variant (with Osiris and Isis as king and queen) was both used as a method of divination and played as a game by the Golden Dawn.
Gyromancy: not for those afflicted with vertigo, this is ‘divination by inference from the point at which a person walking round and round a marked circle fell down from dizziness’ (SOED)
Papyromancy: who would have thought the folded paper fortune-tellers we made at school are a proper ‘-mancy’?
Scapulimancy: on my list, not for any love of cracking fire-baked shoulder-blades, but because it was one of the most widespread methods for predicting future events across North America and Eurasia.
Batrachomancy: Frogs! Although mainly used for forecasting weather, frogs were linked with fertility in ancient Egypt. According to Cicero, ‘there is within frogs a kind of natural force for giving signs, sufficiently clear in itself but too dark for human comprehension’.
Ouija: a lot easier than descending sweltering tunnels into the bowels of the Earth, but without the patina of ages, ‘Ouija, the wonderful talking board’ first appeared in America in 1891 as a parlour game, riding the crest of a spiritualist wave. Why ‘Ouija’? Allegedly, the board spelled out its own name and when asked what it meant replied, ‘good luck’.
