Divination, Oracles & Omens

The past, present and future are full of tantalising mysteries: questions about our own and other people's lives that we long to answer. Across history, human cultures have devised a wide range of methods to discover what might lie ahead or to understand past events.

This fascinating book features twenty-four divinatory techniques from around the world that have been and are still used to uncover hidden information: from astrology, palmistry, and Tarot to egg divination and Chinese Yijing. Each chapter is beautifully illustrated with a wide range of associated objects, such as cards, dice, altars, candles and texts, and even mathematical tools including astrolabes and astronomical tables. While these practices are often seen as light-hearted entertainment, a soothsayer's uncannily accurate reading can catapult a client from scepticism to serious engagement.

From ancient times to the present day, this spellbinding collection explores our need to appeal to powers beyond the realm of our day-to-day understanding for prediction and clarification, and how the questions we ask can reveal more than the answers we are given.

Beautifully illustrated, Divination, Oracles & Omens presents an array of related objects used in divination practices, such as cards, dice, altars, candles, astrolabes, and astronomical tables...More than just a survey of divinatory techniques, this spellbinding work explores what it means to seek answers in an unpredictable world, revealing that our questions often speak volumes about our lives and the times we live in.

Michelle Aroney and David Zeitlyn have produced a fascinating, gorgeously visual book with highquality images of artefacts and manuscripts. Those of us with an interest in divination and the occult will be poring over it for years to come.

Michelle Pfeffer is a research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a historian of early modern science and religion.

David Zeitlyn is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and an initiated Mambila gam d spider diviner.

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