What it is
Divination is the art of gaining knowledge, of the future or of what is hidden in the present, by means that ordinary inquiry cannot supply. Ancient writers distinguished two kinds: natural divination, by inspiration, dream, and prophecy, and technical divination, by the reading of signs such as lots, entrails, the flight of birds, or the stars.
The literature runs from Babylonian omen lists to this year's tarot handbooks. Astrology, the most elaborate of the divinatory arts, has its own guide.
Where to begin
Read Cicero's On Divination, which gives the case for and against better than anything written since. For the tarot, read Michael Dummett's The Game of Tarot for the history and A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key for the most influential modern deck.
The ancient world
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On Divination (De divinatione) Marcus Tullius Cicero. Latin. 44 BCE. L 5
A dialogue in two books. In the first, the author's brother Quintus defends divination with a flood of examples. In the second, Cicero, himself an augur, takes it apart. The fullest ancient discussion, and fair to both sides.
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Oneirocritica Artemidorus of Daldis. Greek. Second century CE. L 5
"The Interpretation of Dreams", in five books: the only complete dream book to survive from antiquity. It was compiled by a professional who gathered cases across the Mediterranean and insisted that the same dream means different things for different dreamers.
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The Delphic dialogues Plutarch. Greek. About 100 CE. L 5
Conversations set at Delphi, where the author served as a priest, asking why the oracles had fallen quiet and why the Pythia no longer answered in verse.
Lots and books of fate
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Sortes Astrampsychi Greek. Second or third century CE. L 5
A lot oracle. The inquirer chooses one of ninety-two questions, picks a number, and is led through tables to one of ten answers. The ancestor of every later book of fate.
A simpler method needed no special book. In the practice called sortes, a reader opened Homer, Virgil, or the Bible at random and took the first line seen as the answer. The custom is recorded from Roman times to the present.
The I Ching
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I Ching (Yijing), the Classic of Changes Chinese. Core text of the early first millennium BCE, with commentaries complete by about the second century BCE. L 5
Sixty-four hexagrams of broken and unbroken lines, each with a judgment and statements for its six lines, consulted by casting yarrow stalks or coins. Around the oracle grew the commentaries called the Ten Wings, which made it a book of philosophy. Richard Wilhelm's German translation of 1924, put into English in 1950, brought it to a wide Western readership.
Geomancy and the reading of hands
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The geomantic treatises Arabic, as the "science of the sand". Latin from the twelfth century. L 5
Sixteen figures, each of four rows of one or two dots, are generated by chance and set into a chart that is read much like a horoscope. Hugh of Santalla made the first Latin version, and Agrippa and Robert Fludd wrote treatises. It was among the commonest forms of divination in medieval and Renaissance Europe.
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The chiromancies Latin and vernacular tracts from the twelfth century onward. L 5
Short guides to the lines and mounts of the hand, often bound with medical and astrological texts. Palmistry was popularized anew in the 1890s by the society palmist who wrote as Cheiro.
Tarot
Tarot cards were invented for a game. They appear in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century as an extra suit of picture cards, the trionfi or triumphs, added to the ordinary pack for trick-taking games that are still played in parts of Europe. There is no evidence that anyone used them for divination, or saw a hidden doctrine in them, before the eighteenth century. The occult tarot is a French creation of the 1780s, and its history since then is a series of confident reinterpretations.
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The Visconti-Sforza cards Milan. About 1450. L 5
Hand-painted and gilded packs made for the ruling family of Milan: the oldest tarot cards to survive in any number. Available in facsimile.
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Le Monde primitif, volume 8 Antoine Court de Gebelin. French. 1781. L 5
Contains the essay that started it all, announcing that the tarot was a book of ancient Egyptian wisdom in disguise, and a companion essay by the Comte de Mellet linking the trumps to the Hebrew alphabet. Neither claim has any historical basis. Neither has ever gone away.
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The books and deck of Etteilla Jean-Baptiste Alliette. French. Books from 1783, deck about 1789. L 5
A Paris print seller and fortune-teller who published the first method of divining with tarot and designed the first deck made for the purpose.
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Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie Eliphas Levi. French. 1854 to 1856. D 5
Tied the twenty-two trumps to the Hebrew letters and made the tarot the key to a whole system of magic. Every later esoteric tarot descends from this book.
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The Tarot of the Bohemians Papus (Gerard Encausse). French. 1889. L 5
The first book devoted entirely to the esoteric tarot.
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The Pictorial Key to the Tarot Arthur Edward Waite. 1911. Deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, 1909. L 5
The handbook to the most influential deck of the twentieth century. Smith gave every one of the fifty-six suit cards a full scene, which is why the deck is so easy to read and why most later decks follow it.
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The Book of Thoth Aleister Crowley. 1944. Cards painted by Lady Frieda Harris, 1938 to 1943. L 5
A dense commentary on a deck that reworks the tarot through astrology, Kabbalah, and Crowley's own religious system.
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The Game of Tarot Michael Dummett. 1980. L 5
The history of the cards as playing cards, by a philosopher who established from the documents what the tarot was before the occultists found it. The necessary corrective.
Runes
The runes are an alphabet, used for inscriptions across northern Europe from about the second century CE. The medieval rune poems give each rune a name and a verse. The Roman historian Tacitus describes Germanic lot-casting with marked slips of wood, though he does not say that the marks were runes. The systems of rune divination now in print were devised in the twentieth century. The older sources are shelved at the West Gate in class B 2.
Things to watch for
- Egypt. The tarot did not come from Egypt, and it was not brought to Europe by the Romani people. Both stories arose in France in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- "Arcana". The terms Major Arcana and Minor Arcana were introduced by the French writer Paul Christian in the 1860s. Fifteenth-century players spoke of triumphs and suits.
- Method and meaning. A handbook's card meanings belong to its author and school. Meanings in Etteilla, Waite, and Crowley differ, and none is the original.
- The skeptics. The second book of Cicero's dialogue remains the best statement of the case against. General skeptical works are in class T 4 in the Tower.
On the shelves
Divination is shelved at the South Gate in class L 5, together with about 340 tarot and oracle decks. Related guides: Astrology and Kabbalah.