Tuesday 4 March 2025, 1pm - 2pm
St Luke's Chapel, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter
Register via Eventbrite.
Our newtork will host the launch of Divination, Oracles & Omens (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024), edited by Michelle Aroney and David Zeitlyn, on 4 March from 1-2pm. The launch will include short talks by Katherine Swancutt and Parsa Daneshmand, two of the contributors to the volume, who work on divination in North-east Mongolia and China and ancient Mesopotamian respectively. The event will also serve as the launch of the new TORCH Network, Divination, Oracles, and Omens.
Book description
The past, present and future are full of mysteries: questions about our own and other people’s lives that we long to answer. Across history, human cultures have devised a wide range of methods to discover what might lie ahead or to understand past events. This fascinating book features twenty-four divinatory techniques from around the world that have been and are still used to uncover hidden information: from astrology, palmistry, and Tarot to egg divination and Chinese Yijing.
Each chapter is beautifully illustrated with a wide range of associated objects, such as cards, dice, altars, candles and texts, and even mathematical tools including astrolabes and astronomical tables. While these practices are often seen as light-hearted entertainment, a soothsayer’s uncannily accurate reading can catapult a client from scepticism to serious engagement. From ancient times to the present day, this spellbinding collection explores our need to appeal to powers beyond the realm of our day-to-day understanding for prediction and clarification, and how the questions we ask can reveal more than the answers we are given.
The editors give an introduction to the study of divination and oracles, including the methodological and conceptual challenges of studying the great variety of forms of divination across history and around the world.
Divination, Oracles, and Omens Network
