OXFORD, U.K. – Last month, Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries opened a new exhibition that explores how cultures around the world have attempted to discern the future. The exhibit, “Oracles, Omens, and Answers,” looks to demonstrate how ubiquitous the practice of divination has been across history, with objects from civilizations old as Mesopotamia and subcultures as new as #WitchTok.
Among the highlights listed by the Bodleian Library are oracle bones from Shang Dynasty China, the earliest preserved form of Chinese writing; a 14th century Egyptian celestial globe; and a sketch of Oscar Wilde’s palms, which led to a palmist’s description of his “a great love of detail…extraordinary brain power and profound scholarship.”
Palmist’s sketch of Oscar Wilde’s hands [Bodleian Library]
There are also casebooks of 16th and 17th century English astrologers, whose methods of are a particular research interest of one of the exhibition’s curators, Michelle Aroney, who studies astrology in the 17th century. Their casebooks detail meetings with clients – people of various professions and social classes, who brought their questions to professional diviners.
What the curators found is that these questions are remarkably consistent across time and culture.
“One of the things that brought us together was realising that the questions we are dealing with are basically the same,” said David Zeitlyn, one of the exhibition’s co-curators and a professor of anthropology at Oxford, to the Guardian. “And it’s things like: I’m sick, or my child’s sick, what’s the best treatment? Who should I marry? Can I trust my spouse? So there’s a lot of looking for guidance rather than necessarily wanting to know exactly what the future holds.”
Zeitlyn’s own specialization is a form of spider divination practiced by the Mambila people of Cameroon and Nigeria, of which he is both an academic researcher and an initiated Ŋgam dù practitioner. This practice, according to the Bodleian’s press release, involves using burrowing spiders or land crabs to arrange marked leaf cards in a pattern that is then read by the diviner. The exhibition features a demonstration of the spider divination process, as well as another divination method practiced in Africa, where questions are answered by the configuration of upwards of 30 objects thrown into a basket.
Bodleian Library facade [Remi Mathis, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0
And beyond these occult methods, the curators point out that much of our daily lives are ruled according to other forms of divination and prediction, such as predictive algorithms, and how our responses to those forecasts resemble the ways our forebears trusted in older means of prophecy.
“Every day we confront the limits of our own knowledge when it comes to the enigmas of the past and present and the uncertainties of the future,” said Zeitlyn and Aroney. “Across history and around the world, humans have used various techniques that promise to unveil the concealed, disclosing insights that offer answers to private or shared dilemmas and help to make decisions. Whether a diviner uses spiders or tarot cards, what matters is whether the answers they offer are meaningful and helpful to their clients.
“What is fun or entertainment for one person is deadly serious for another.”
The exhibit is accompanied by a book edited by Aroney and Zeitlyn, Divination, Oracles, and Omens, published through the Bodleian Press.
The exhibit will be held in the Weston Library’s ST Lee Gallery until April 27th.
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