Greek armies refused to fight until a seer read the right omens
In ancient Greece, two armies could face each other and wait, because neither general would advance until his seer reported favourable signs. Divination, the attempt to read hidden answers in cards, stars, organs or flames, has shaped decisions for millennia, and sceptics have attacked it for almost as long.
Divination tries to extract meaning from what looks random: tarot, astrology, runes, tea leaves, numerology, pendulums and many more. Practitioners usually claim their insight comes from spirits, gods or the will of the universe. Scholars sometimes separate it from fortune-telling, treating divination as the more formal, social and often religious practice, while fortune-telling is everyday and personal. In relation to magic, divination is the diagnosis: it identifies a cause of illness or danger, and magic then acts on that finding.
The Greeks had two kinds of specialist. Oracles, such as the one at Delphi, were believed to speak the gods' words directly, but they kept limited hours and were hard to reach. Far more common were seers, who interpreted signs from sacrificed animals, bird flight and other omens. Generals consulted them in camp and again on the battlefield. Many Greeks suspected individual seers of dishonesty, yet the craft as a whole was trusted, and the Stoics even built its validity into their physics. Alexander the Great famously visited the Oracle of Amun at Siwa after taking Egypt in 332 BC.
Across the ancient Near East divination was bound up with sacrifice. Diviners in Mesopotamia and Israel read messages in the abdominal organs of offered animals, a practice called extispicy. The Bible appears to forbid divination in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, yet it also records the casting of lots, which the remaining eleven disciples used to choose a successor to Judas, probably as a way of discerning God's will instead of predicting events.
Criticism is ancient. Cicero challenged divination in the first century BCE, Sextus Empiricus attacked astrologers in the second century CE, and the satirist Lucian mocked a false prophet named Alexander. Modern science classes it as superstition: rigorous experiments find no evidence that these methods foretell the future better than chance.
Source: Divination
