What is the Future?

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Since the beginning of recorded human history, and probably well before that, people have wanted to learn about what the future would bring for them as individuals and for their societies. Despite this common urge, there has been great diversity in the methods by which people have attempted to learn about the future. What sorts of methods have they used, and why has this common urge existed?

Surveying the vast landscape of divination methods is a daunting task, covering huge expanses of human history and cultural geography - enough to intimidate most researchers. Clifford A. Pickover has, however, done exactly that in an attempt to provide a comprehensive resource about the human desire to learn about the future. He provides not simply an overview of the principle behind various styles of divination, but also explanations of hundreds of specific methods, do-it-yourself instructions on how to try a few yourself, and a look at just why people have been interested in divination so long.

There are divination practices using the human body: aromancy (readings based upon a person's shoulders), copromancy (readings based upon human feces), omphalomancy (counting the bumps in an umbilical cord), stolisomancy (reading omens in the way people dress), and more. There are plenty of practices using non-human animals as well: haruspicy (reading animal entrails, one of the most popular), ololygmancy (reading the howls of wolves and dogs), oomancy (reading the shape of an egg white after the egg is broken into a glass or saucer of water), plastromancy (reading the cracks in a heated tortoise shell), and many others.

Food is certainly a popular means of divination - everyone has heard about tasseography (reading tea leaves), but how many have heard about alomancy (divination with table salt) or tyromancy (divination using cheese - for example, the shape and number of holes)? Pickover offers further information on a plethora of other methods divided into categories like: methods using fire, methods using sounds, methods using vision, lights and shiny things, methods using things that swing, slide or swirl, and of course many, many more.

So, why do people believe such things? It really isn't surprising - who wouldn't want to know what would happen to them in the years to come? Who wouldn't want to know if they will find true love, if they will become wealthy, or which fork in the road they should follow? As Pickover explains:

In a universe where the future seemed capricious and unpredictable, it is understandable that ancient humans craved a way to learn the fate the gods held in store for them. The divination methods provided a means of being in touch with knowledgeable, spiritual beings who could control the future. Divination freed our minds from a resignation of living in a shackled world.

It is ironic that learning our destiny ended up being a means of feeling more, rather than less, free, but it is not so strange in an environment where people simply had no causal explanations for the events around them. Divination may not have been much, but it was probably all people really had - and that little bit of hope was better than nothing at all.

Unfortunately, it was never entirely replaced by better explanations and understandings, and has instead remained to color how we still view the world. Do people really still need that tiny bit of hope, even though they have access to so much more? Pickover thinks it likely:

Divination will always be popular because anything that can be used to justify coming to a decision about an unresolved matter brings a sense of relief, reduces anxiety, and seems like a breakthrough or transformation. The divination process lest a little randomness into people's lives, which can be good for yielding fresh insights. On the other hand, using something like rune stones or the tarot to help make major decisions not only relieves people of the responsibility for the decisions, it might have profoundly dangerous consequences that could cause great anxiety.

Among those dangerous consequences is imprisonment and death - Pickover explains how the method of spider divination in regions in Africa not only serve to maintain the authority of men over women (because only men are allowed to do it, and spider divination is a highly regarded occupation), but also serves to help imprison people on the pretext that they are witches. This is so because if any two respected spider diviners offer the same conclusion that someone is a witch, that person will go to jail for up to ten years.

On the other hand, when someone uses divination while also keeping in mind that it is not "real" but instead simply an unusual means of releasing the minds creativity and pattern-seeking abilities, the results can be very good. Pickover looks at how a number of authors have used tarot cards, for example, as a way to get through times when a book's plot is dragging and as a means of figuring out what direction to take some characters.

If you have any interests in divination or prophecies whatsoever, Pickover's book should be high on your list of future purchases. He has written an invaluable and comprehensive resource which should prove incredibly useful to a wide variety of people. Although a skeptic, he does not engage in heavy-handed critiques - thus, not only will skeptics benefit from the information, but believers will also find a lot in here to learn.