Between Religion, Statecraft, and Prohibition

Divination has repeatedly stood at the centre of religious and political life. In ancient Mesopotamia and China elaborate divinatory sciences guided kings and states, with specialist priesthoods and vast archives of recorded omens; the Chinese classic the I Ching began as a divination manual and became a foundational philosophical text. In Greece and Rome the oracles and the reading of signs were woven into public decision-making, and across countless traditions no important undertaking, a marriage, a journey, a war, the founding of a city, was begun without consulting the hidden will.

Yet divination has also been vigorously condemned, above all by the monotheistic traditions. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly forbids the consulting of omens, mediums and diviners as an intrusion on God's exclusive prerogative over the future, and Christianity and Islam largely inherited this prohibition, distinguishing legitimate prophecy, given by God, from illegitimate divination that seeks knowledge by other means. This tension, between the near-universal human impulse to read the hidden and the theological insistence that the future belongs to God alone, runs through the history of the practice, which has persisted in popular forms even where officially condemned.