Types of divination
As schools of dramatic art range from those relying on explicit technique to those teaching intuitive identification with a role, mantic skills range from the mechanical to the inspirational but most often combine both skills in a unique, dramatically coherent format. The comparative study of divinatory practices is at least as old as the 1st-century-bc Roman orator and politician Cicero’s treatise De divinatione (Concerning Divination), and the convenient distinction there drawn between inductive and intuitive forms designates the range. An intermediate class, interpretive divination, allows a less rigid classification, since many divinatory disciplines do not rely strongly either upon inductive rigour or upon trance and possession.
Inductive divination presupposes a determinative procedure, apparently free from mundane control, yielding unambiguous decisions or predictions. The reading of the “eight characters” of a Chinese boy and girl before proceeding to arrange a marriage—the year, month, day, and hour of birth of the two persons to be betrothed—illustrates this class of procedures. The “characters” are all predetermined by the accidents of birth date and hour, and it is supposed that all proper diviners would come to the same conclusions about them.
Interpretive divination requires the combination of correct procedure with the special gift of insight that sets a diviner apart. The contemporary Mayan diviner of Guatemala, seeking to diagnose an illness, will carefully pass a number of eggs over the patient’s body in order to draw into them an essence of the affliction. The intact contents are then collected in water, and the diviner withdraws into a darkened corner to bend over the receptacle and read the signs of the eggs. His recitation then interprets the origin and nature of the disease.
Intuitive divination presupposes extraordinary gifts of insight or ability to communicate with beings in an extramundane sphere. The “Shaking Tent” rite of the Algonquians of Canada illustrates the use of uncanny phenomena to lend credence to a mediumistic performance. The diviner, bound and cloaked, is no sooner placed in his barrel-shaped tent than the tent begins to shake with astonishing vigour and to fill the air with monstrous noises, and this continues with great effect until, all of a sudden, the communicating spirit makes its presence known from within the tent and undertakes to answer questions. It is difficult to explain away the phenomena of spirit possession as products of deliberate instruction.
The cosmological and psychological conditioning that affects divinatory practices within a cultural tradition will influence in a similar fashion all its religious practices. The Greeks tended to the intuitive, or “oracular,” style, and the Etruscans, in contrast, elaborated upon the more systematic but less versatile inductive practice of Mesopotamia—developing an authoritative state religion in which the positions were monopolized by the ruling class. Greek divination was eccentric in that sanctuaries were located apart from the centres of political power (see oracle); the Etruscan system, on the other hand, was concentric, focused at the summit itself. Rome eclectically incorporated both Greek and Etruscan elements, such as the ecstatic cult and the expert “reading” of livers—i.e., haruspicy. Rome, however, never allowed divination to become the central preoccupation of society as it had been for Etruria, nor did it become an autonomous force in society as it had been for the Greeks. In this, Rome represented a balance that is more congenial to modern Western thought. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, with the notable exception of Egypt, divination was tied to expiation and sacrifice: fate was perceived as dire but not quite implacable, and the function of divination was to foresee calamity in order to forestall it. In trans-Saharan Africa, religion centres on expiation and sacrifice, and divination is a pivotal institution, but the Mediterranean notion of fate is not developed. Instead, the trouble of a person is attributed to witchcraft, sorcery, or ancestral vexation—all of which are believed to be arbitrary and morally undeserved. Divination is employed to discover the source of trouble in order to remove it, whether by sacrifice, countersorcery, or accusation and ordeal. The mind is turned to past events or hidden motives of the present time, however, and not to the future—that would be to borrow trouble.