Ancient civilizations encoded spiritual warnings in texts that shaped empires, governed kings, and guided souls through death ...

Magic, sorcery, conjuring and divination involve various strange and ancient practices and terms that can be quite confusing. All of these things fall under the heading of the much larger — and often ...

When will I find true love? Will I get the job? Will things get better in the new year? From the I Ching and palm reading to tarot and astrology, humans have long used all kinds of tools to predict ...

The Liver of Piacenza, a model of a sheep's liver used in Etruscan divination and unearthed in Italy in 1877. | Shonagon, Wikimedia // CC0 1.0 (cropped) The swirling shapes made by pouring melted wax ...

Calligraphic standard in the shape of a falcon (Golconda, India, 17th-century), perforated gilt copper (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London) Although it has manifested in ways that are manifold, the ...

It’s easy for us to look around our world populated by iPhones, AI-driven data analysis, self-driving cars, and self-flying planes, and think that we, and our contemporary technology-rich culture, are ...

Source: Heinrich Stürzl / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons We can define divination as using a systematic approach in order to try to gain insight into a situation or problem (Peek, 1991). In the ...

In 2020, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival will feature a program about the West African nation of Benin and how communities connect to their environment through spirituality and traditional knowledge ...

The Liver of Piacenza, a model of a sheep's liver used in Etruscan divination and unearthed in Italy in 1877. | Shonagon, Wikimedia // CC0 1.0 (cropped) The swirling shapes made by pouring melted wax ...