Divinatory 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 sixteen figures and the palmistry of medieval treatises, moves on to the astragals of the oracle at Bura, the lots of Praeneste and the Germanic slips described by Tacitus, and reaches the I Ching and the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty. Alongside the learned traditions stand domestic ones, such as reading coffee grounds and tea leaves, and the arts linked to the elements: fire, water, smoke and mirrors. Other articles are devoted to books used as oracles, from the sortes biblicae to Virgil, to the Yoruba system of Ifá and to the symbolic meaning of numbers, from the Pythagoreans to gematria. Each text rests on ancient sources and recognised scholarship, separates established facts from legends and describes the history and meaning of the practices, not how to perform them.