Divination

DIVINATION:
"A LOST WORLD OF SOUL

When you hear the word 'divination', chances are that certain images-- will spring to mind: dark gypsy fortune-tellers, tea-leaves, and crystal balls; a scene in a movie when the Ace of Spades falls in a card game or a strange figure draws the Tarot trump Death; charlatans, ouija boards, and phony swamis; or, perhaps, witch doctors and medicine men chanting around a fire. If you look a little deeper, you might see another kind of image lurking in the background: dark magicians in graveyards seeking forbidden knowledge, conjuring demons and the spirits of the dead.

These images express attitudes - ridicule and fear - with a long history. For well over a thousand years, divination was a mortal sin and a capital crime in Western culture, a 'conversation with the devil' that was banished along with the old gods and the wise women. Divination is a central part of pagan culture and the pagan sense of a cosmos or 'living- world'. With the rise of the Church to political power in late antiquity, the old gods of this culture became devils and the living world became their work. With the rise of our modern 'scientific laws' of cause and effect, the devils in turn became superstitions, tales told by those considered to be marginal or uneducated such as women, lunatics, criminals, and savages. In spite of our inherited assumptions, divination is not a collection of superstitions. It is an outlawed way of knowing and speaking with a living world, a world ensouled and full of spirit.