Nature and significance
Divination is universally concerned with practical problems, private or public, and seeks information upon which practical decisions can be made; but the source of such information is not conceived as mundane, and the technique of getting it is necessarily fanciful. The mantic (divinatory) arts are many, and a broad understanding can emerge only from a survey of actual practices in various cultural settings. A short definition, however, may be offered as a preliminary guide: divination is the effort to gain information of a mundane sort by means conceived of as transcending the mundane.
Though the act of divination is attended by respect and the attitude of the participants in the divinatory act may be religious, the subject matter of divination (like that of magic) is ephemeral—e.g., an illness, a worrisome portent, a lost object. Divination is a consultative institution, and the matter posed to a diviner may range from a query about a few lost coins to high questions of state. The casual or solemn nature of the matter is normally matched by that of the diviner in terms of attitude, technique, and style. Where the diviner is a private practitioner, the elaborateness of the procedure may be reflected in the fee. In contrast to the worldly motives of some diviners, the calling of diviner-priest was seen by the ancient Etruscans in Italy and the Maya in Mexico as sacred; his concern was for the very destiny of his people. Divination has many rationales, and it is difficult to describe the diviner as a distinctive social type. He or she may be a shaman (private curer employing psychic techniques; see shamanism), a priest, a peddler of sorcery medicines, or a holy person who speaks almost with the voice of prophecy. To appreciate the significance of the diviner’s art in any culture or era, one must be familiar with prevailing beliefs about man and the world. In Christian times Europe has moved from a horror of necromancy (conceived not as consultation with a ghost but as a literal “raising of the dead”) to an amused tolerance (among the educated) of spiritualism as a sort of parlour game. To assert that European religious beliefs have remained the same throughout the Common Era would be to ignore the impact of modern science and secularization. On the other hand, to suppose that divination has been doomed by science and secularism would be to ignore the abiding popularity of astrology and recurrent fashions for other mantic disciplines—and perhaps to misjudge the security of “modern” beliefs.