Divination Tools: What To Use?

Currently, I am practicing Divination through the Olympus Tarot. But I would like to use more traditional Divination tools or practices. Can anyone advise me on how to do that? What can I use?

Thanks,
Agathon.

Divination by means of playing cards is a rather recent development — within the last few hundred years at most.

Classical divination was quite different from the private ouija board and tarot-card hogwash that rebellious teens and new-age flower children are so fond of, and that you can buy for yourself at a bookstore or even a Toys-R-Us.

The majority of Classical divination was public, not private. It was done by trained individuals whose actual job, or part of it, was to perform divinatory services. Most such acts involved a ritualized observation of some sort of natural occurrence. The most widely known is, of course, the examination of the entrails and viscera of slaughtered animals (usually goats, sheep, pigs, and occasionally, cattle or even birds). This would actually have been reasonably common, facilitated by the fact that, in that era, as it still is in many parts of the world, animal slaughter and butchering was a fairly regular, common, and public occurrence. We buy meat in neat little packages and keep our slaughterhouses far away where we don't have to look at or think about them. In Classical Greece or Rome, if you wanted meat, you either went out to the back yard and slaughtered one of your own pigs, geese or chickens (beef was rarely eaten — cattle were extremely expensive to buy, were expensive to raise, and were commonly considered labor and pack animals more so than food), or, if you lived in a city, you went down to the market, bought a live animal, and either took it home to slaughter yourself, or had it killed, bled, and butchered on the spot.

Aside from viscera examination, augurs and diviners would perform highly ritualized observation of things like the flight patterns of birds, the pattern of smoke rising from an altar fire or incense, or (at one particular place in Epirus) the rustling of leaves in the breezes of a particular wooded area. Bird divination was also done wherein a bird (usually a chicken or a duck) would be placed into a special enclosure, and its movements were observed as a kind of divination (this is very much like the kind of 'chicken bingo' or 'cowpie bingo' that they have at some US state fairs, where a chicken or cow is released onto a huge number-grid drawn on the ground, and where the chicken pecks, or the cow poops, is how the numbers are selected for the bingo game).

As I said, most divination was public, professional, and usually had to be paid for, and of course, just as today, was absolutely rife with scammers and frauds. Unless one was consulting a time-honored, established, and respected source, future-telling was seen by most people as sort of unsavory, superstitious, suspicious, and liable to getting one scammed out of his/her money.

Private divination did exist, but, as I said, was less common, and could (and did) lead to accusations of nefarious and/or criminal behavior. The was a stereotype that private fortunetellers performed all kinds of shocking and horrifying rituals.

More tamely, however, a very common sort of private divination was by dice. Dice throwing games of chance and, as you might imagine, gambling, were wildly popular forms of personal entertainment. One such use of dice was for personal, informal fortunetelling, where the numbers thrown, the pattern in which they fell, and the numbers relations to one another were used to interpret the universe's responses to queries.

Finally, another method of Classical divination that even survived well into the Medieval and Renaissance eras in both the West and the Byzantine Empire was book divination. The procedure certainly varied, but the basic idea is that one would select a particular, special book (in the West, this was usually either the Aeneid or some Biblical book, often the Psalms (later, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante and Milton were occasionally used for divination), while in the East it was either a Biblical book, the Iliad, or the Odyssey), and somehow, whether by random opening and pointing, or drawing a page/passage number from a hat, or rolling dice, one would open to the passage, and interpret the contents of that randomly chosen passage to answer your question.

Various forms of astrology were also reasonably popular, especially in Late Antiquity, but those are too complex to summarize in a post.

Nevertheless, I feel I need to also make the point that there are and have always been those who disavow divination. Although we do not explicitly forbid it, the extant Orphic brotherhood, who trace our lineage back to Antiquity, discourage it for a variety of reasons, and under most conditions.

I would encourage you to read this article/explanation:
http://www.hellenicgods.org/divination-in-hellenismos---mantosyni---mantosyne

I hope I have answered your question; and welcome to the forum. I hope your time spent here is worthwhile.

Thank you very much for all of that wonderful historic information. I find the book divination to be intriguing. I have many Greek books I could use for that, such as Plato's Complete Works, The Iliad, and The Odyssey, to name a few. But I would have never guessed that the ancient Greeks practiced book divination. I would have certainly thought that was a modern invention. I am also very into Astrology, so I am very sure I could practice divination through that as well, which perhaps would be more accurate than card readings.

Do we have any sources on various forms of divination like orinthomancy? Not just that they practiced it but what they looked for? OR was it all essentially whatever message the Gods sent the diviner? Incense smoke wafts to the left and birds fly south in groups of seven this means X and Y today but may not mean that tomorrow?

spokane89 wrote:Do we have any sources on various forms of divination like orinthomancy? Not just that they practiced it but what they looked for? OR was it all essentially whatever message the Gods sent the diviner? 

We do know a few things about augury, but only very few. It was a fairly exact science – one that, per the sources, took at least several years of training in order to learn, and once trained, was a knowledge base from which trainees often made a living. 

Incense smoke wafts to the left and birds fly south in groups of seven this means X and Y today but may not mean that tomorrow? 

That's exactly the thing – auspices did not always have the same meaning. Circumstances were vital, and it was much more complex than that X event always indicates Y outcome.

Alright both were things I was assuming but always good to clarify, now if only I had several years and a great teacher