Divination

Art of obtaining a knowledge of secret or future things by the aid of dreams or oracles, or by the aid of magical rites and the observation of natural phenomena, such as the flight and cries of birds, the appearance of the clouds and the lightning, and the movements of the stars, called natural divination; practiced by Greeks, Romans and Orientals, forbidden by the Jews. In natural divination the oracle was taken as a direct revelation from a spiritual being, who spoke through the voice of the priest, or of a ghost or ancestor who influenced the medium. The methods of artificial divination, as still practiced acticed by primitive people, and survive from remote antiquity among cultivated nations, are based upon an artificial a ociation of ideas in analogy and symbolism. which is found at the present day in a high degree of elaboration among the Chinese and the aboriginal tribes of America. The implement of magic employed in divination by primitive man almost universally throughout the world was his arrow. The bundle of marked arrows, representative of the entire clan, employed as lots, gave rise to many of the existing forms of sortilege. Also arrows were shaken and auguries made, according to their chance falls (belomancy). This was followed by the substitution of staves for arrows (rhabdomancy) and afterward shells, knuckle-bones and dice for staves (astragalomancy). Divination with ar rows and their derivatives appears to have been the traditional and accepted method among the ancient Babylonians, the heathen Arabs, the old Chinese, Tartars, Hindus, and the Scand in avian and Teutonic people, and was versal among the Indians of North and Central and probably of South America. IMG:content-1185.jpg:[graphic] uni