It seems that people have been anxious about the unknown of the future for a very long time.
Because they want to have a better grasp of what lies ahead, they have come up with various original ways to try and obtain that information, each of which has a name. The goal of the art or practice of divination is to discover hidden knowledge or to forecast or foretell future events.
If you’re lucky, divination may also make use of paranormal powers or entail the interpretation of omens.
Aeromancy requires you to keep a watch on the skies at all times. Be on the lookout for clouds, birds, and precipitation. This word also functions as a fancy term for weather forecasting, however we haven’t yet heard it on the local weather report.
You practice a little aleuromancy each time you open the fortune cookie that comes with your lo mein.
In earlier processes, messages were baked into little dough balls. Earlier forms of astragalomancy entailed throwing tiny bones with marks etched into them and predicting the future based on the placements of the bones. The Latin term astragalus is derived from the Greek word astragalos, which likewise means “molding.”
The word “astragal” in modern English can refer to a protruding strip on the edge of a folding door or a thin half-round molding. Opening any book to a random page and deciding that the first thing your eyes capture is a message that applies to your future allows you to immediately engage in bibliomancy.
We would rather use dictionaries even though bibliomancy is sometimes employed with sacred texts like the Bible.
