Hands, cups, lots and omens
The folk arts of divination: casting lots from the Bible to the dice oracles of Asia Minor, asking a book, palmistry and the planets of the hand, tea leaves in the cup, the pendulum and the dowsing rod, omens and augury, and the almanac that chose the day — with an honest eye on why they seem to work, with the fingerprints the police and the palmists took up, and the French radiesthesia of the pendulum over the map.
9 lessons · about 2 hours of reading · 1 free
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Urim and Thummim, knucklebones and dice oracles, the Germanic lots — the oldest and simplest way of asking.
The Sortes Virgilianae, Augustine's "take up and read", the Church's ban on the lots of the saints, and how to ask a book well.
The medieval chiromancies, the planets' mounts, the four great lines, the elemental hand shapes, and Cheiro.
Tasseography from the Victorian parlour to the Scottish spae-wife, how to prepare and read the cup, and coffee grounds.
Miners with forked twigs, the dowser of Lyon, Chevreul's experiments, and how to use a pendulum honestly.
The Roman augurs and their sacred chickens, birds and weather in folk lore, and keeping an honest omen journal.
The little book that chose the day for centuries — Moore's Vox Stellarum and Poor Richard's, the Moon in the signs for sowing and cutting, the planetary days and hours, the zodiac man, saints' days and weather lore — and the Today page as an almanac of your own.
What the ridges on the fingertips are, how Galton sorted them into arches, loops and whorls, why the police took them up and the palmists after, what dermatoglyphics can and cannot tell — and how to read your own ten.
The twentieth-century French school that made the pendulum a science of 'rays' — the abbés Bouly and Mermet, map dowsing and medical radiesthesia, its cousin radionics — what they claimed, what the tests found, and what is worth keeping.
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