Diviner

A diviner is a specialist in a technique for obtaining hidden knowledge, and the defining point is the technique: this is what separates the diviner from the seer, who claims a faculty.

Method, not faculty

The diviner works a system, the casting of lots, the reading of shells, bones, cards or entrails, the interpretation of dreams or omens, the drawing of a figure, and reads from its outcome the answer to a question or the hidden state of things, so the authority rests on the mastery of a method rather than on an inward gift. This is the clean distinction from the seer: the seer sees directly, the diviner reads a result produced by a technique. The diviner may serve to reveal the future, to find the cause of an affliction, to locate what is lost, or to determine the will of a god.

A universal office

Divination is one of the most widespread of all religious practices, and the diviner appears across virtually every tradition, from the Ifa priest of the Yoruba reading the palm nuts to the reader of the Chinese classic of changes, from the ancient inspector of entrails to the modern reader of cards, and the techniques are enormously varied while the office is constant. Entry is by training in the particular system, often long and demanding, and the diviner standing rests on skill in it and on the record of its results. The office is the practical, method-based counterpart to the seer, and its ubiquity reflects the universal wish to know what is hidden and to have a reliable procedure for finding it out.

In the Roman Republic, divination was not a private consultation but a formal arm of the state: augurs, who read the flight and behaviour of birds, and haruspices, who read the entrails of sacrificed animals, were established religious offices consulted before nearly every major public act, a military campaign, the founding of a colony, the convening of an assembly, and a magistrate could have an assembly's business halted simply by announcing that the auspices were unfavourable, giving the diviner's technical judgment direct and formal power over the conduct of Roman public life.

Some of the earliest surviving Chinese writing exists at all because of divination: the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty, inscribed questions and answers scratched onto turtle shells and ox bones and then cracked by heat for a diviner to read, preserve both an early stage of the Chinese script and a detailed record of the questions Shang rulers put to their diviners about war, harvest and ritual. The descendant of that same divinatory tradition, the I Ching or Classic of Changes, remains in everyday use today, consulted by throwing coins or yarrow stalks to generate a hexagram, alongside an enormous modern commercial industry in tarot reading and other divinatory practices that operate as popular and largely unregulated consumer services rather than as state institutions.