Divination



 (from Latin divinare "to foresee, to be inspired by a god", related to divinus, divine) is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual.

Quotes

 * DIVINATION, n. The art of nosing out the occult. Divination is of as many kinds as there are fruit-bearing varieties of the flowering dunce and the early fool.
 * Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).


 * There is a deep, ancient connection between gambling and divination.
 * Aaron C. Brown, The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006), Chapter 6, Son of a Soft Money Bank, p. 167

The very thing that makes these divination techniques seem so unscientific is what makes it possible for them to work.
 * The purpose of the I Ching or the tarot […] is to help you get access to yourself, by providing ambiguity for you to interpret. And this quality of ambiguity is shared with nearly all forms of divination — cast artifacts, or entrails, or weather formations, or events such as the flight of birds, that one could choose either to see as "omens" or to ignore.
 * Michael Crichton, in Travels (1988)


 * The songs of a city are its diviners.
 * Sumerian proverb, Collection I at,.


 * [A]spiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision.
 * Leo Strauss, Commenting upon the Aleinu prayer, in "Why We Remain Jews" (1962).


 * Criticism is properly the rod of divination.
 * Arthur Symons, An Introduction to the Study of Browning, preface (1906).