Divination

Divination is the act of foreseeing and foretelling the future, and interpreting present actions and decision-making processes, via omens and supernatural means. Divining is facilitated by trained diviners, soothsayers, shamans, seers, priests, and psychics, who use ritual objects to “spiritually read” symbols and signs. Divination can be used to decipher potential life warnings, upcoming illnesses, personal struggles, symbolic dreams, individual relationships, and problematic social interactions. Practitioners employ divination to answer lifealtering questions about a variety of topics, from finding the perfect spouse or job, to knowing when to build a house or business, to uncovering personal or communal wrongdoing, to even determining the time of one's death. In communities where water or produce resources are sparse, divination can unearth what actions are required for rain or crops to [Page 305]bountifully return. As a worldwide phenomenon, practiced in both ancient and modern times across religions, divination serves as an indicator of humanity's continued fascination with discerning unknown questions through spirit-centered methods. For practitioners, divination is an individual and community tool relaying a seeker's potential life outcome through revealing the necessary steps to follow to avoid ill fortune and achieve success.

Objects used to divine can vary from culture to culture, ranging from Tarot cards, rune stones, palms, astrological signs, pendulums, Ouija boards, tea leaves, and coffee grounds in Europe to spiritually reading sand, mirrors, divination chains, divining rods, dreams, candles, the Bible, eggs, animal entrails, and cosmological signs (such as thunder, and star and cloud formations) in Africa and Latin America. China is noted for its Book of Changes, the I Ching, which is more than 4,500 years old. Many other divinatory methods around the world are used—the connection between the methods being that the objects used are ritualized, held to high esteem, and seen as conduits capable of revealing higher answers from supernatural orders. Ifa, an elaborate divination system originating with the Yoruba of Nigeria, uses divining chains (opele) holding 256 possible codes, with each code containing 16 different stories, proverbs, herbs, and divinities determining a divination's outcome; training and initiation can take decades to master. Other divination methods, such as palmistry, can be rudimentarily book learned within a few weeks.

Practitioners generally believe that divination is made possible through one of the following means: (a) divine beings or spirits associated with prophecy, (b) ancestral beings speaking on a person's behalf, (c) energetic presences manipulated or honed from other worlds or dimensions, (d) a diviner's intuition or telepathic abilities, (e) a scientific system of nature interpreted, or (f) for those outside a communal religious system, “magic” and sheer luck. For nonbelievers, divination can be viewed as chicanery or merely coincidental—an ill-attempted form of personal psychotherapy—or, on the other end of the spectrum, as a demonic practice inviting ill-tempered spirits to heretically act against God's law.