Photo Canadian geese flying in V-formation (“Bird” – Wikipedia) by John Benson on Flickr -Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 Licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
(9) THERIOMANCY – ORNITHOMANCY
The way of animal powers
Similarly to my previous entry for somatomancy, theriomancy, or divination by animals, is likely one of the first methods of divination in human history – or prehistory.
After all, prehistoric humans depended on closely observing animal behavior, including in effect to divine patterns from that behavior, so it was not much of a conceptual leap to divine patterns beyond animal behaviour altogether to other things or forces in the natural or supernatural worlds.
And of course there is the contemporary ritual theriomancy of Groundhog Day.
Again similarly to my previous entry for somatomancy, theriomancy tends to be more specialized to particular animals or types of animal.
My top pick has to go to ornithomancy & alectryomancy – the former is divination by birds (or the flight of birds), with the most famous being the Roman practice of augury (from Latin for looking at birds) and the latter is literally divination using a rooster or roosters, but also more broadly chickens or other fowl.
This is because of its historical documentation or prevalence, particularly in classical Greek or Roman history, in turn perhaps reflecting how birds have always seemed to earthbound humans as liminal beings between heaven and earth.
One form of alectryomancy involved divination using a bird or number of birds, ideally a rooster or cockerel, pecking at grains which are scattered on letters and interpreting meaning from the letters or words spelt out. Something of that may survive in the apocryphal story of the western Roman emperor Honorius and his favorite chicken.
Close runner-up is apantomancy, or divination by chance or random encounters with animals.
As for the balance of another top ten within my top ten – a top ten for theriomancy – I’m going to stick to alphabetical order as their individual details are somewhat scant
3 Ailuromancy – cats
4 Arachnomancy & entomomancy (myrmomancy) – the former is divination by spiders and the latter is divination by insects (with myrmomancy being divination by ants). The former is something I’d imagine as being used by the arachnophile Drow in Dungeons & Dragons – and as an arachnophobe, I see it as the most evil method of divination, even more so than my top ten entry famed for being evil
5 Batrachomancy – frogs
6 Canomancy & ololygamancy – divination by dogs, with the latter as divination by the howls or howlng of dogs
7 Hippomancy – horses
8 Ichthyomancy – fish
9 Myomancy – rodents, particularly mice or rats. Much like modern science and its lab testing, amirite?
10 Ophidiomancy – divination by snakes
What adders came to shed their coats?
What coiled obscene
Small serpents with soft stretching throats
Caressed Faustine?
Although I’d like to imagine it extends to delirious visions from snakebite, a la snake-handling.
Shout-out to dracomancy – included in Wikipedia’s list of methods of divination as divination (or magic) by dragons, obviously limited outside of fantasy or mythology (arguably an example of the latter is Sigurd or Sigfried gaining divinatory powers from the heart of the dragon Fafnir).
Also honorable mention to conchomancy or divination by shells.
As a method of divination, theriomancy seems to be of much wider versality than somatomancy and the same seems to go for it as a school of magic, which would seem to combine the Dungeons and Dragons class of wizard with that of druid (or perhaps medieval witches with their animal familiars).
And with a little fantasy or imagination, it has even wider potential – even if we confine ourselves to theriomancy as being a literal way of animal powers, as being able to replicate the abilities (or form) of any animal, particularly if we extend that throughout the animal kingdom including extinct animals or even microscopic fauna. There’s a reason the Dungeons and Dragons spells of polymorph or shape change are considered broken by being ridiculously overpowered. Of course, one could restrict this by proposing different schools of magic for different taxonomic divisions (or for different habitats or biomes).
RATING: 4 STARS****
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