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Everything about Divination
Attempt to gain insight into a question or situation through magic or the supernatural
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 claiming to receive insight through supernatural agents such as spirits, gods, god-like-beings or the "will of the universe". Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: DivinationA 5-minute orientation
- Skim a recent paper: Ghosts, Divination, and Magic among the Nuosu: An Ethnographic Examination from Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary PerspectivesInfluential work since 2022
- Pick up a classic book: I ChingThe most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: I-Ching Divination Evolutionary Algorithm and its Convergence AnalysisCited 113 times
- Go sideways: Greek divinationA closely related topic
- Go sideways: Fortune-tellingA closely related topic
📖 Definitions
Noun The act of divining; a foreseeing or foretelling of future events.
Noun The apparent art of discovering secrets or the future by preternatural means.
Noun An indication of what is to come in the future or what is secret; a prediction.
🗂️ The subject at a glance
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
I-Ching Divination Evolutionary Algorithm and its Convergence Analysis
Eclipse of the Gene and the Return of Divination
Divination—A New Perspective*
Divination and Power
Genomics, divination, “racecraft”
Ethnomedical field study in northern Peruvian Andes with particular reference to divination practices
Why Divination?
Infrastructure as a divination tool: Whispers from the grids in a Nigerian city
🆕 Influential since 2022
Ghosts, Divination, and Magic among the Nuosu: An Ethnographic Examination from Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspectives
The Algorithm Holy: TikTok, Technomancy, and the Rise of Algorithmic Divination
Instrumentality, empiricism, and rationality in Nuosu divination
ECS-Ecrea Early Career Scholar Prize winner - An astrological genealogy of artificial intelligence: From ‘pseudo-sciences’ of divination to sciences of prediction
Divination of stock market exploration using long short-term memory (LSTM)
📚 Books worth reading
I ChingRichard Wilhelm, Cary F. Baynes · 1950
The Pictorial Key to the TarotArthur Edward Waite · 1959
The Happiness HypothesisJonathan Haidt · 2005
Secrets of the I chingJoseph Murphy · 1970
The tarot of the BohemiansPapus · 1896
The divining handChristopher Bird · 1979
Tarot for your selfMary K. Greer · 1984
The encyclopedia of tarotStuart R. Kaplan, Jean Huets · 1977
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
🔗 Related topics
- Greek divination Greek divination is the divination practiced by ancient Greek culture as it is known from ancient Greek literature, supplemented by epigraphic and pictorial…
- Fortune-telling Fortune-telling is the spiritual practice of predicting information about a person's life. The scope of fortune telling is in principle identical with…
- African divination Divination is an attempt to form, and possess, an understanding of reality in the present and additionally, to predict events and reality of a future time…
- Mesopotamian divination Mesopotamian divination was divination within the Mesopotamian period. Perceptual elements utilized in the practice of a divinatory technique included…
- Scapulimancy Scapulimancy (also spelled scapulomancy and scapulamancy, also termed omoplatoscopy or speal bone reading) is the practice of divination by use of scapulae…
- Alectryomancy Alectryomancy is a form of divination in which the diviner observes a bird, several birds, or most preferably a white rooster or cockerel pecking at grain…
- Major Arcana The Major Arcana are the named cards in a cartomantic tarot pack. There are usually 22 such cards in a standard 78-card pack, typically numbered from 0…
- Oracle bone Oracle bones are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron which were used in pyromancy – a form of divination – during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 –…