The Occult

Divination Practices

Divination · 15 min read

Divination is the practice of discerning hidden information, future possibilities, or underlying patterns by means other than ordinary sense perception. Within the Western esoteric tradition, divination includes reading the tarot and casting runes, scrying in mirrors and crystal balls, consulting pendulums, drawing astrological charts, interpreting the flight of birds, the patterns of fire, the shapes of stones, and the lines of the hand, and receiving messages by automatic writing and by mediumship. Divination has been a central practice of Western esotericism for at least two and a half thousand years; it stands at the historical intersection of religion, magic, medicine, and proto-science, and it remains a living practice in the twenty-first century. This page is the central account of how divination fits into the Western esoteric tradition, the theory behind the practice, the major methods in use, the ethical questions raised by divination, and the modern state of the practice. For the deeper treatments of specific methods, see Tarot as a Tool of Divination and Scrying, Runes, and Other Oracles. The standard short academic treatment is Michael D. Bailey, Magic: The Basics (2018); the indispensable specialized study of the field’s long prehistory is Sarah Iles Johnston, Ancient Greek Divination (2008).

History of Divination

Divination is among the oldest documented human practices. The Mesopotamian liver-modeling tradition, in which the livers of sacrificed sheep were read as cosmic diagrams, is documented from at least the second millennium BCE and is the ancestor of the Greek hepatoscopy described by Homer and Cicero. The practice was so central to the Babylonian and Assyrian state that the king’s military campaigns were routinely preceded by the consultation of the bārû, the priest-diviner, whose reading of the liver determined whether the omen was favorable. Francesca Rochberg’s work on the celestial omens of Enūma Anu Enlil has shown how Babylonian astrological omen texts became the technical ancestor of horoscopic astrology in the Hellenistic world. The Etruscans, the Romans, the Celtic peoples, the Germanic tribes, and the Slavic peoples each had their own oracular and divinatory traditions; the augurs of Rome, who read the flight of birds and the feeding of sacred chickens, were among the most important state officials. The augural college, founded according to tradition by Numa Pompilius, was a permanent body whose members consulted on matters of war, peace, and public order; their findings could block an assembly or a military campaign.

The Hebrew Bible records the urim ve-thummim, the lots cast by the high priest (Exodus 28:30, Leviticus 8:8, 1 Samuel 28:6, Ezra 2:63), and the prophets of Israel, who mediated divine messages to the king; both forms of divination were contested by the later prophets, who insisted that only direct prophetic speech was legitimate. The Greek world had oracles — most famously the Oracle at Delphi, where the Pythia delivered her pronouncements from a tripod — and a wide repertoire of divination methods, from cleromancy (casting lots) to oneiromancy (interpreting dreams), from the consultation of entrails to the casting of astragaloi (knucklebones). The older theory that the Pythia’s trance was caused by rising vapors from a chasm has been substantially challenged: the geological work of Jelle de Boer and the archaeological work of John Hale have shown that the fault at Delphi does not produce psychoactive gases, and the chasm has never been located; the trance is more plausibly explained as a self-induced or ritually-induced altered state. The Greek philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, debated the legitimacy of divination; Aristotle in particular argued for a naturalistic account in which the diviner reads signs of the gods in nature rather than producing them by ritual.

The Latin Middle Ages inherited this repertoire and added the Christian devil. The grimoires of the period describe astrological image-magic, necromancy (calling the spirits of the dead), and the conjuration of angels and demons; the church treated all of these as illicit, though in practice the boundary between forbidden magic and legitimate Christian prayer was porous. The ecclesiastical condemnation of divination is itself a long and serious history. The Canon Episcopi (a canon attached to the proceedings of the Council of Paris, c. 906 CE) condemned those women who “believe and profess that, in the night hours, they ride forth with Diana or Herodias on certain beasts,” and treated divination as a form of diabolic illusion. Burchard of Worms’ Decretum (c. 1012) and later penitentials continued the condemnation. The grimoire tradition culminated in the Lesser Key of Solomon and the Goetia and infernal tradition. The Renaissance saw the recovery of the Hermetic tradition, the spread of printed divinatory manuals, and the use of the tarot as a divinatory tool in northern Italy in the late fifteenth century, when the four-suit playing-card deck, originally developed in the Mamluk and Arab world, acquired a fifth suit of trumps that eventually became the Major Arcana of the modern tarot.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought a new wave of divinatory practices. The eighteenth-century French card decks, the Marseilles tradition, and the German and Swiss cartomantic manuals developed reading methods that would be carried into the twentieth century. The Comte de Saint-Germain, the eighteenth-century French polymath and (probably) charlatan, is associated in later occult literature with an early cartomantic method, although the specific 1781 publication attributed to him is not securely documented; the most cautious reading is to treat the attribution as a piece of post-Romantic folklore. The French occultist Éliphas Lévi, in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–1856), gave the tarot a major place in the Western esoteric canon by assigning each of the 22 Major Arcana to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and to an element of his own elaborate Kabbalistic schema, an assignment that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would later adopt. The nineteenth century also saw the spread of automatic writing, the rune revival of the late nineteenth century, the origins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the publication of the Rider-Waite tarot in 1909. The twentieth century saw the spread of divination to the broader public through the Occult in Popular Culture and through the New Age movement; divinatory practices that had been the property of specialized orders became available to a mass audience. The British Museum Sloane manuscripts (Sloane MS 3847, 3848, and the compendia of the Sloane collection more generally) preserve some of the most important early-modern grimoire material in English; the Warburg Institute’s archive holds the iconographic material on the Western esoteric tradition that Aby Warburg began assembling in the early twentieth century.

Theory of Divination

Divination, in the Western esoteric tradition, has been justified in several distinct but overlapping ways.

The sign theory. The oldest theory holds that the world is full of signs, and that a trained reader can learn to read them. The flight of a bird, the entrails of a sacrificed animal, the falling of a lot, the arrangement of cards: each is a sign that can be read by one who knows the language. This theory is implicit in Mesopotamian hepatoscopy, in Roman augury, in the casting of lots, and in much of the grimoire tradition. The sign theory treats divination as a kind of literate practice, the reading of a cosmic text. The Stoics, in the Hellenistic period, gave the theory its most articulate classical form: the universe is a coherent body of signs written by the divine logos, and the trained reader learns to recognize them. The medieval theory of signa and signata, in which the visible world is a vast system of signs pointing to invisible realities, draws on this Stoic inheritance and supplies the conceptual frame for the Christian practice of reading the book of nature as well as the book of scripture.

The mediation theory. A second theory treats divination as communication with non-human intelligences. In ancient Greece, the oracles were the voices of the gods, transmitted through the Pythia at Delphi or the priestesses of Dodona. In the medieval grimoire tradition, the magician conjures angels or demons and questions them; the response, written in the consecrated parchment or spoken by the spirit, is the answer to the question. In the Spiritualist tradition of the nineteenth century, the medium receives messages from the spirits of the dead, a practice discussed in Spirit Communication and Mediumship. The mediation theory treats divination as a conversation rather than a reading, and it raises the question of the mediator’s reliability, since the interlocutor may deceive, distort, or misunderstand.

The synchronicity theory. The third theory, articulated by the psychologist Carl Jung, treats divination as the operation of meaningful coincidence. The card you turn over, the rune you draw, the line you read in the I Ching: it is, in a meaningful sense, the right one. The divinatory operation does not produce the meaning; it reveals a meaning that is already there. Jung’s theory, developed in dialogue with the I Ching scholar Richard Wilhelm and given its classic formulation in his 1949 Foreword to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching, has been influential in modern depth-psychological approaches to the tarot and the runes. Synchronicity, in Jung’s account, is not a mechanical cause-and-effect relation but an acausal connecting principle, in which the events of the moment are bound together by their meaning rather than by their physical sequence.

The probabilistic and psychological theory. A fourth theory, common in academic and skeptical accounts, treats divinatory methods as projective instruments. The patterns are not, in this view, signs of any external reality; they are prompts for the reader’s own unconscious processing. The tarot spread is a structured way of asking yourself what you know but have not yet let yourself know. This theory, in its stronger forms, denies the reality of the divinatory claim, but it has the practical virtue of explaining the often-surprising accuracy of the readings: the reader, working in a focused meditative frame, attends to material that the everyday self has been ignoring. The projective theory, in other words, does not so much refute the divinatory claim as relocate it: the action is in the reader, not in the cards.

The four theories are not mutually exclusive. Most practicing readers combine them: signs, mediation, synchronicity, and projection, all at once, in a layered practice. The astrological chart, for example, is read as a sign of the heavens, a mediation with the planetary intelligences, a synchronicity between the moment of birth and the moment of reading, and a projective mirror of the reader’s situation. The skilled reader learns to move between the layers, to read the chart as sign and as project, as message and as meditation.

Major Methods at a Glance

A representative inventory of the methods the Western tradition has developed:

  • Tarot. A 78-card deck of Major and Minor Arcana, originally designed as playing cards in 15th-century Italy, now the most popular divinatory deck in the West, treated in depth in Tarot as a Tool of Divination and in the practical guide How to Read Tarot for Beginners. The deck of 78 cards, divided into 22 trumps and 56 pip cards, has been the most flexible of the Western divinatory tools, capable of simple one-card draws and elaborate ten-card spreads, of psychological reading and of astrological interpretation.
  • Runes. The 24 letters of the Elder Futhark, the oldest runic alphabet, used as a casting oracle in modern occult practice, treated in Understanding Rune Readings and in Scrying, Runes, and Other Oracles. The runic tradition goes back to the Germanic Iron Age, but the modern occult use of the runes as a divinatory tool is largely a product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing on the Romantic and völkisch revivals of the period.
  • Scrying. Gazing into a reflective surface — a polished black mirror, a crystal ball, a bowl of water, a flame — to receive visions, a practice associated with John Dee, Nostradamus, and the early modern magical tradition. The scryer often enters a meditative or light-trance state and reports the images that appear. The art of scrying is treated in Scrying, Runes, and Other Oracles.
  • Pendulum. A weighted object on a string, suspended and allowed to swing, used to answer yes-or-no questions and to locate lost objects, used since at least the seventeenth century. The pendulum’s responses (a swing along one axis for yes, on the perpendicular for no) are interpreted against a chart agreed in advance with the practitioner.
  • Astrology. The reading of celestial positions at the moment of birth (the natal chart) or of a question (the horary chart), a tradition that goes back to Mesopotamia and is treated in Astrology. Modern Western astrology is divided into tropical and sidereal traditions, and into psychological, mundane, and predictive branches, each with its own methods.
  • Pyromancy. Reading the patterns of fire and flame, including candle divination and the interpretation of smoke. The practice was common in ancient Greece and Rome and is still used by some contemporary readers.
  • Aeromancy. Reading the sky — clouds, winds, birds, the patterns of falling objects. Aeromancy is the older umbrella term for the Roman augury, the Etruscan art of lightning, and the medieval tradition of reading the weather.
  • Lithomancy. Reading the shapes of stones, including the casting of stones in a manner similar to the casting of runes. The Greek practice, recorded by Theophrastus’ On Stones and others, used precious and semi-precious stones marked with letters and signs; the modern reader works with a small set of crystals or polished stones.
  • Automatic writing. The practice of writing without conscious direction, often in a meditative or trance state, used by mediums in the Spiritualist tradition and by many modern readers. The writer holds a pen and allows the hand to move, often producing texts that are interpreted as coming from a non-ordinary source, an approach discussed in The Ouija Board and Automatic Writing.
  • Bibliomancy. Opening a book at random and reading a passage as a divination, traditionally using the Bible, the I Ching, or Virgil, now applied to any book. The practice is sometimes called sortes (lots), and the medieval sortes Vergilianae used Virgil as a prophetic text.
  • Osteomancy. Reading the patterns of animal bones, including scapulimancy (reading the shoulder blade) and the African and African diasporic practice of bone-casting, briefly discussed in Scrying, Runes, and Other Oracles. The Tibetan mo divination uses a sheep’s shoulder blade (phyva-mo), and the Mongolian and Buryat traditions also use shoulder blades in the scapulimantic mode.
  • I Ching. The Chinese Book of Changes, a 64-hexagram oracle consulted by coin or yarrow stalk, included in the Western tradition through the translations of Richard Wilhelm (1924) and Cary Baynes (1950, English). The hexagram is constructed by either three coins (the fast method) or fifty yarrow stalks (the traditional method), each line read as yin or yang.

Divination and the Other Branches of Esotericism

Divination is intimately connected to the rest of the Western esoteric tradition. The astrologer, the tarot reader, and the rune reader all work with the same underlying schema: a set of symbols, a set of correspondences, a set of rules for moving from the symbol to the reading. The astrological chart is a divination; the horoscope is a divination; the consulting of the I Ching is a divination; the alchemist’s reading of a flame is a divination. The line between divination and ritual magic is also porous: a divination is a magical act, in that it seeks to use the will and the symbols to influence the situation, and a magical act is a divination, in that it reads the situation and the omens before acting. The Sacred Symbolism and Geometry of the Western tradition is in part a divinatory grammar, a set of symbols that can be read.

The line between divination and spirit communication is also blurred. The medium, the channel, the oracle, and the trance-diviner are all part of a continuum that the academic study of religion has spent considerable effort mapping. The trance-diviner of pre-literate Africa, the Pythia at Delphi, the Victorian medium, the modern channel, and the user of the Ouija board all engage with non-human intelligence in a ritualized setting. The divinatory frame — a question, a method, a reading — is what makes the operation manageable for ordinary consciousness.

The history of the occult is also the history of divination, since the ancient esoteric roots and the esoteric revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are both founded on divinatory practices. The Hermetic tradition, the Kabbalah and the Mystical Tree of Life, and the Wiccan sabbats all involve divinatory elements.

Ethics and Responsibility

Divination raises ethical questions that have been debated since antiquity. The Roman augurs were state officials, and their readings could determine questions of war and peace; the responsibility of the diviner was correspondingly great. The Christian church treated divination as illicit because it implicitly claimed a source of knowledge outside divine revelation; the grimoire tradition treated the diviner as in danger from the spirits conjured. The Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century debated whether mediums should charge fees, and most concluded that they should not.

In modern practice, three ethical questions stand out. The first is the question of consent. A divination is a reading of another person’s situation, and the reader has to ask whether the reading is welcome. The second is the question of accuracy. The reader is responsible for the reading given, and the reading given should be the best reading the reader can produce. The third is the question of action. The divination is a description, not a command; the reader who uses the divination to manipulate the querent’s choices is acting unethically.

The mainstream of modern practice, as represented in the bulk of contemporary tarot and astrology literature, treats these three questions as the basic ethical frame: consent, accuracy, and non-manipulation. The depth-psychological theory, which treats the divination as a projective mirror, also has an ethical implication: the reader is responsible for the project, and the querent is responsible for the action. Neither is the divination itself a coercive instrument.

Modern Practice

The twenty-first century is a remarkable time for divination. The tarot, the I Ching, the runes, and astrology are practiced by a public that is larger, more diverse, and more literate in the traditions than at any previous time. Tarot publishing, in particular, has grown into a major industry, with thousands of decks in print, hundreds of books a year, and a robust online subculture. The academic study of divination, exemplified by the work of Michael D. Bailey, Wouter Hanegraaff, and the journals Aries and Correspondences, has given the field a scholarly framework. The digital environment has produced a new generation of readers who work primarily online, with a vocabulary drawn from therapy, coaching, and self-help as well as from the traditional sources. Smartphone apps deliver daily tarot and astrology readings; Instagram is full of card-of-the-day accounts; YouTube hosts long, meditative readings; TikTok has popularized short-form astrological content. The audience for these materials is overwhelmingly young, and disproportionately female, in contrast to the largely male esoteric readership of the early twentieth century.

The institutional frame is also different. Most modern divinatory practice is freelance: the reader reads for clients, sells courses, posts readings on social media, and produces a stream of content. The hereditary and initiatory models of the past — the augur’s college, the Pythia’s shrine, the Golden Dawn temple — are now minor, but the depth-psychological and the New Age models have a broad public reach. The modern reader often combines the tarot, the astrology, and the I Ching into a single practice. Bookshops devote whole sections to the divinatory arts, and most major cities have a number of practicing readers, astrologers, and rune-casters.

Sources and further reading

  • Michael D. Bailey, Magic: The Basics (Routledge, 2018).
  • Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013).
  • Sarah Iles Johnston, Ancient Greek Divination (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
  • Francesca Rochberg, Babylonian Horoscopes (American Philosophical Society, 1998).
  • W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (Penn State, 1999).
  • Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament (Sheffield Academic, 1997).
  • Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Johns Hopkins, 1985).
  • Karel van der Toorn, From Her Cradle to Her Grave: The Woman’s Role in Religion in the Ancient Near East (Sheffield Academic, 1994).
  • P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (Macmillan, 2012).