The Art of Divination
A history of mancies, oracles and signs
The oracle of readings
Turn a card: chance will choose an article for you to read.
Sections
IAncient oracles
For more than a thousand years, in the ancient Mediterranean, kings, cities and ordinary citizens turned to oracles to learn the will of the gods.…
IIDivinatory arts
This section tells the story of the divinatory arts as past civilisations practised and described them. It begins with the Arabic geomancy of the…
IIIAugurs and haruspices
The divination of the Etruscans and Romans was a public science, practised by expert priests in the service of the community. Etruscan haruspices…
IVDreams and visions
Since the earliest civilisations sleep has seemed a threshold: at night the gods spoke to kings, the dead returned to visit the living and the…
VProphets and seers
Prophets and Seers gathers the historical and legendary figures to whom different cultures attributed the ability to see beyond the present. It…
Divination: oracles, divinatory arts and prophets
«The Art of Divination» is an educational website devoted to the history of one of humanity's oldest needs: to know what the present conceals and what the future holds. The site's hundred articles, available in Italian and English, tell how the civilisations of the past questioned the gods, the sky, animals and dreams, and which texts, inscriptions and archaeological finds have handed down their questions and their answers to us.
The journey begins with the ancient oracles: the Oracle of Delphi, where the Pythia spoke in the name of Apollo, the oak of Zeus at Dodona, the sanctuary of Ammon in the oasis of Siwa, the Cumaean Sibyl and the Sibylline Books kept on the Capitol, the cave of Trophonius. It then moves on to the divination of the Etruscans and Romans, with the haruspices who read the entrails of animals and lightning, the augurs who watched the flight of birds and the famous Liver of Piacenza, a bronze model of the Etruscan sky.
One section retraces the divinatory arts in all their variety: geomancy, palmistry, astragalomancy, runes, the I Ching, the reading of coffee grounds and tea leaves, mirrors, fire and smoke. Each technique is described historically, through the treatises and accounts that document it, with no instructions for practising it. Another is devoted to dream interpretation in antiquity, from Artemidorus of Daldis to incubation in the temples of Asclepius, from the dreams of the Bible to Macrobius, down to the Neapolitan Smorfia.
The site closes with a gallery of prophets and seers, historical and legendary: Cassandra and Tiresias, Merlin, Hildegard of Bingen, Joachim of Fiore, Nostradamus and Mother Shipton. The Studio Esoterico Cornelio, which conceived and curates the site, has chosen a historical approach: prophecies are told and placed in their context, never presented as predictions, and documented facts are always kept apart from legends.
Frequently asked questions
What does divination mean?
The word comes from the Latin divinatio, related to divinus, and refers to the set of practices by which people sought to know the will of the gods or future events. Cicero, in his treatise De divinatione, distinguished an artificial divination, based on observing and interpreting signs such as entrails, lightning and birds, from a natural divination, entrusted to the inspiration of the prophet or to dreams.
How did the Oracle of Delphi work?
At Delphi the Pythia spoke, a priestess of Apollo who, seated on a tripod in the innermost part of the temple, pronounced the god's responses. According to ancient sources consultations took place on fixed days, after preliminary sacrifices, and the priests passed on or gave form to the answers. Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi, left us important testimony on how the sanctuary worked.
What is the difference between augurs and haruspices?
The augurs formed a priestly college in Rome that interpreted the auspices, above all by watching the flight and song of birds within a sacred space traced in the sky with the lituus. The haruspices were instead experts in Etruscan tradition, who read the divine will in the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the liver, and in lightning. Rome turned to both, with distinct functions.
What is the Liver of Piacenza?
It is a bronze model of a sheep's liver with Etruscan inscriptions, found in 1877 in the countryside of Settima di Gossolengo, near Piacenza, and usually dated between the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. Its surface is divided into compartments bearing the names of Etruscan deities, like a map of the sky. It is thought to have served the haruspices as a reference or teaching tool.
Who was the Cumaean Sibyl?
She was the prophetess of Apollo who, according to tradition, lived in a cave near Cumae, in the Phlegraean Fields. Virgil, in the sixth book of the Aeneid, makes her Aeneas's guide in his descent to the underworld. Legend also says that she sold to one of the Tarquin kings the Sibylline Books, collections of prophecies that the Romans kept on the Capitol and consulted in times of crisis until late antiquity.
Who was Artemidorus of Daldis?
Artemidorus of Daldis was a Greek interpreter of dreams who lived in the 2nd century AD. He is the author of the Oneirocritica, in five books, the only major ancient manual of dream interpretation to have come down to us complete. The work distinguishes dreams that come true directly from those that speak through symbolic images, and gathers hundreds of examples drawn, according to the author, from his travels and research.