Ancient and modern, side by side

The ages of these systems differ sharply, and the entries say so. The runes are attested in inscriptions from the second century CE; the I Ching's core is older still. The tarot, by contrast, begins as a fifteenth-century Italian card game and acquires its esoteric meanings only from the late eighteenth century onward, while much of modern numerology is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century construction on a Pythagorean base.

Grouping them together reflects how they are used rather than a claim of common origin. Divinatory method as such, how a question is put and an answer read, is treated more fully under Divination Systems, with which this section overlaps.