ABSTRACT
Divination—seeking guidance for one’s future behavior from some physical clue in the environment—is a practice ubiquitous in human history and culture and may be seen to be the place where religion and art most closely meet and serve a practical function. Divination takes a great many forms other than the use of literary texts like the Yijing. Divination has employed glossolalia or “talking in tongues” and the interpretation of dreams, which dreamers may deliberately induce by sleeping in specific places. Pyromancy is sometimes applied to divination by staring into a fire, but that term is more properly used for reading the way that things burn or react when heated. Divination “is the art or practice of discovering the personal, human significance of future or, more commonly, present or past events. Evan Zuesse continues: “Divination involves communication with personally binding realities and seeks to discover the ‘ought’ addressed specifically to the personal self or to a group.”
