When the average person thinks of fortune telling, they might imagine somebody peering into a crystal ball and receiving visions of the future. Or they might conjure up an image of a tarot card reader, coming up with a clearer and clearer picture of events that have yet to pass as each card is turned over. There are many forms of divination, though, a lot of them now obscure and hardly practised.
Astragalomancy is one such form. It involves throwing dice, each with a different pattern on each of its sides, into the air and then reading the future from how they fall. It is similar to Tarot Reading in some ways; each pattern has separate meanings to the others, but they only form a full picture when laid alongside the rest of the dice.
Macharomancy is also rarely practised, possibly due to the potential for things to go badly wrong. It relies on either spinning a blade on a board with numbers and letters around the edge (similar in some ways to a Ouiji board, but without relying on the spirits of the dead), or by throwing blades into the air and observing the patterns they create when they land. This latter form used to be popular inScotland, and was performed on the eve of August to foretell which marriages and deaths would occur in the coming year.
Another form of divination that uses sharp objects to provide a reading is that of Belomancy. This was practised by ancient civilisations like the Babylonians and Greeks, and involved coming up with a number of possible answers to a question and writing them on pieces of cloth or feathers which were then attached to arrows. The arrows were fired into the air and whichever went furthest had the best answer attached.
The thing that connects all of these forms of divination to the popular ways of reading today is that they rely on a spiritual force to influence how the dice, swords or arrows will fall. The spirits use these objects to send us a message, and from there it is up to us to take that guidance and use it well.
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