Divination
Divination is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of a magic ritual or practice. Using various methods, throughout history, diviners have been providing answers to querents by reading signs, events, or omens, often receiving insight through supernatural agencies such as spirits, gods, god-like-beings or the "will of the universe".
Divination can be seen as an attempt to organize what appears to be random, so that it provides insight into a problem or issue at hand. Some practices of divination include astrology, Tarot card reading, rune casting, tea-leaf reading, Ouija boards, automatic writing, water scrying, numerology, pendulum divination and countless more. If a distinction is made between divination and fortune-telling, divination has a more formal or ritualistic element and often contains a more social character, usually in a religious context, as seen in traditional African medicine. Fortune-telling, on the other hand, is a more everyday practice for personal purposes. Particular divination methods vary by culture and religion.
In its functional relation to magic in general, divination can have a preliminary and investigative role:
the diagnosis or prognosis achieved through divination is both temporarily and logically related to the manipulative, protective or alleviative function of magic rituals. In divination one finds the cause of an ailment or a potential danger, in magic one subsequently acts upon this knowledge.
Divination has long attracted criticism. In the modern era, it has been dismissed by the scientific community and by skeptics as being superstitious; experiments do not support the idea that divination techniques can actually predict the future more reliably or precisely than would be possible without it. In antiquity, divination came under attack from philosophers such as the Academic skeptic, Cicero in De Divinatione (1st century BCE) and the Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus in Against the Astrologers (2nd century CE). The satirist Lucian (c. 125 – after 180) devoted an essay to Alexander the false prophet.
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