Prophets For Profit: Telling The Future - Fiction, Fact Or Funny

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Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist by Luca Signorelli  (1499) (Public Domain)

Prophets For Profit: Telling The Future - Fiction, Fact Or Funny

Technically speaking, a prophet is one who is believed to speak for God, but generally speaking, when people hear the word ‘prophet’, they tend to think of one who sees the future. In popular parlance, ‘prophesying’ or ‘telling the future’ is the same thing. People have done this, seemingly, forever, using all kinds of methods, from looking at the pattern of birds in flight; throwing the bones, dice or sticks or reading cards or palms, to predict the future.

Casting lots for tribal inheritance, woodcut for ‘Die Bibel in Bildern’, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1860) (Public Domain)

Casting lots for tribal inheritance, woodcut for ‘Die Bibel in Bildern’, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1860) (Public Domain)

In aeromancy, one seeks the future by looking upward toward the skies. Weather forecasters do this all the time, of course, but the craft also include watching the patterns of birds and butterflies. Sometimes people ‘draw straws’ and this is called belomancy. Randomly opening the Bible, or any book, for that matter, hoping for a message found in the first words read, is called the practice of bibliomancy. Prophets used to carve symbols on small bones, cast them on the ground, and determine the future by their positions, called astragalomancy. Using a special decks of cards to seek messages, is called cartomancy. The phrase, “It is in the cards,” comes from this practice. Palmistry is the art of telling the future by reading creases on the open hand. Casting lots means to throw, or cast, objects such as dice or marked sticks, to see how they land. If dice is used, it is called cubomancy. This is probably what the Jewish prophets did when, in Old Testament times, they utilized the “urim and thummin” to determine God’s will in a particular situation. A conjuror consults the spirits of the dead to foresee the future. A necromancer actually divines the future by reading dead bodies. Sometimes people follow advice given to them in dreams, called oneiromancy. Dowsing, with pendulums, forked sticks, or “L” rods, is technically known as rhabdomancy.


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