Spex
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Adjunct Professor of Auguries provides some introductory material to beginners interested in various methodologies of divination and market research.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
and a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
and Eternity in an hour
—the ultra famous (and yet often misquoted) opening lines
from “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake
One of my favorite forms of divination, of reading the past or (remote) present or future in unlikely places, is called haruspicy. A haruspex, or practitioner of haruspicy, is a reader of entrails. Entrails, of course, is just what you call some creature’s insides once you have removed them from their inside, much as you don’t get to call it lava until magma has emerged from underground.
There are forms of divination based on the shapes that cooling molten material takes on as it solidifies. Or blood as it spatters and coagulates. Or clouds as they form and dissipate. Or ink as it dissipates in a glass of water. Or smoke in the air from a pipe.
Haruspicy was originally based on the patterns arteries and veins and other associated vessels take, judging from the etymology of the name. Assuming you ate meat from hunting or from livestock, it generally required no materials other than what you would consume for ordinary daily life, which was a bonus. It was only a sacrifice if it wasn’t quite dinnertime.
It was only afterward that the practice became solely one of sacrifice, where you took your would-be dinner to the priesthood and had them do the honors of slaughter and evisceration and interpretation, and—one would assume—a quiet dinner once prophetic obligations had been met and the clients had been encouraged to depart.
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Forgive the aside, but I have to add my commentary here. The notion of sacrifice has always been a bit backwards. The whole idea is based on “what you will receive is determined by the value of what you pay, give up, or destroy,” which assumes the existence of the one thing Nature abhors more than a vacuum, and that’s a fair market.
If you want a fair transaction then what you want is a relationship built on mutual trust and respect, where you give someone else something they like or need and they give you something you like or need, calibrated to a point where both parties feel equally satisfied. You can’t reach that point without a relationship that includes mutual empathy, and that is so far beyond the modern idea of a market that it can’t be seen from a market stall due to the curvature of spacetime.
Without a relationship built on mutually valuing the other participant, you can count on getting the absolute least someone can give you in exchange for the absolute most you can afford to pay. If you’re in a sacrifice economy, you’re much better off learning to read the signs for yourself than dealing with a local monopoly that barely has a use for the best you can offer.
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That said, it’s not that easy to see a whole world in a grain of sand. It’s a bit easier if it’s around fifty grains of sand with a substantial bit of regional and temporal separation so you can construct a reasonable holographic divination from numerous perspectives. And even then, more is better.
Those aren’t my rules. It’s just good data science.
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If you want to understand the rules of divination, then you need to understand a little bit about how the spots and lumps and twisty veinings on a rooster’s intestines might carry some information concerning the health of a prince in a neighboring state in the first place. When you pick a chicken to eviscerate, does it matter which chicken? How old it is? If it has close relatives in the kingdom in question? Can you substitute that chipmunk that your cat brought you last night since it’s already on hand?
How is the information encoded? Are the political headlines toward the gullet end of the tubing and the sports scores by the cloaca? But more importantly, how the hell does it know?
There are those who grin that beatific and punchable smirk you see on the covers of self-help books and say, “Everything is interconnected.” And it’s true. Probably more true than you think, but also probably a good deal less true than they preach.
The universe is delightfully deterministic and predictable up to that point where interactions remain uncomplicated and time-reversible. When the interactions take place in an accelerating frame is when time’s arrow starts to have a sense of direction, but we’re still in the arena of predictability for a little while. It’s only when levels of complexity start to scale exponentially, when the size and weight of potential outcomes become larger than a single universe could concurrently contain, that we start to feel that phenomena and events that actually happen are properly precipitated out of the chaotic sea of potentiality.
Things clump. The presence of some outcomes exclude the possibility of others in both directions on the timeline. That’s when these events and phenomena can be proved to be statistically correlated. But also we go from an infinite cloud of nearly indistinguishable global probabilities to something substantially more Bayesian once we have more knowledge of some local phenomenon that is known to be connected and determined.
Please note that a diviner only cares about correlation. Twisted-up chicken innards don’t cause the prince’s illness. The prince’s illness doesn’t cause the intestine to be kinked. One can be safe in assuming that there might be a mutual cause somewhere in the history of both prince and chicken, but that cause could well be something nonsensical, like the way a leaf fell forty years ago. Causes are only important if you’re trying to cause things. Causality is of little concern in problems of divination.
It should be sufficient to know that the version of the timeline that has the rooster’s intestine kinked in a certain way is one of several in which the prince is ill in certain ways, and other observations—possibly unrelated to chickens in any way—will be helpful in nailing things down.
The more observations, the better.
And let’s be sensible. If one of those confirming bits of information comes from a side-channel to the prince’s personal physician, that would be excellent.
That’s not cheating. Get it straight. Obtaining direct information from a knowledgeable source is exactly what’s expected. There’s nothing surprising there. It’s divination that’s cheating.
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Let’s set aside how it works for a bit and discuss how you’d do it.
I’ve read some sources that say you should tap into your intuition and let the shapes and signs you see speak to you. “Does that black spot look like the prince’s face in profile and bring to mind thoughts of the Black Plague? There you go!”
Rubbish.
That approach reminds me of the risible Doctrine of Signatures in which medieval natural philosophers would assume that a plant with leaves shaped like a tooth would be good—if prepared properly—to treat toothache, and leaves shaped like an ear would be useful for treating earache, etc. Rigorous research has shown this approach to be an excellent way to get lightly poisoned and not significantly better than random chance for discovering new treatments for physical ailments.
The correct approach is a bit more abstract. An argument could be made that intuition is still involved, but intuition is such a sloppy word. The popular interpretation of the term concerns unconscious knowledge, something akin to the term gnosis that’s so popular among the mystics. While I guess it’s possible for people to be unconscious of the provenance of knowledge in their own heads, there’s no actual reason for that to be the case. Additionally, if you aren’t aware of the sources of your knowledge or the mechanisms of your deductions, there’s no way you can tell a reasonable conclusion with a significant chance of being useful from a wild guess or wishful thinking.
The thing to keep in mind is that the brain you were born with has a native superpower for recognizing patterns and forming and updating associations. That’s the root of your intuition. That’s the “learning” part of how the brain works that computer scientists have been trying to duplicate for machine learning algorithms—just dumping truly massive amounts of theoretically unrelated data points into even more massive structures so that phenomenally massive numbers of attempts per second can be made to see if there are meaningful correlations between randomly chosen sets of those points—without a worry in the world about any why.
The technologists are making astounding progress lately. Soon they’ll be giving us a true run for our money in terms of detecting correlations, and even surpassing us with access to enough hardware, but they won’t be as good as living brains at the “meaningful” part of it for a good long while yet.
But for divination, we don’t need to put a lot of value on “meaning” at the moment. For instance, between the years of 1999 and 2009, the number of films in which Nicholas Cage appeared correlates highly with the number of people who died in those years by falling into swimming pools. One can waste a lot of time trying to work out what the possible connection could be, and many have, but it’s unnecessary work. If things are truly connected, we just need to know that they are. The diviner merely wants to know what is going on. The why of it all is a question for somebody else.
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If you want to be a diviner—a “–spex” of any stripe—you have to be aware of as much as possible, regardless of whether it seems directly related to any topic of interest. Data, data, data. By this I mean raw sensory data—images and sounds and smells and textures and flavors and such, all unprocessed by that benighted and demented internal narrator that tries to turn anything and everything into a storybook fiction. And also keep in mind that it’s not the shapes of the actual phenomena—faces, coastlines or borders, skylines, etc.—that are the things that will be similar, but the shapes of the graphs the data, of the correspondences when you chart them.
I’m saying you need to be able to visualize these things, either in your head or on paper or on a screen. It doesn’t matter how, really, or how long it takes you. Your accuracy is what you’ll be known for, not your speed or how mysterious you can make it all seem when you finally pronounce your revelation.
If your jam is molybdomancy, for instance, you’re going to be melting thousands of lumps of lead—or I guess tin or lead-free pewter if you’re looking to be able to resell your lab space when you’re done with it—and charting the textures and shapes against a huge array of independent variables. TONS of this data is already available in the Library, of course, in the forms of tables of correspondences in numerous occult texts researched by millennia of diviners, but these correlations are neither permanent nor universal. Any existing tables of correlations will need to be calibrated to your era and the parageographical location of your workspace, with notations made for seasonal or time-of-day variations. But you should feel free to build your own tables and maintain them.
The same applies for innards from any source. For optimal accuracy, you’re going to have to standardize on a breed and probably a supplier as well, as well as feed and raising conditions. Once you have experience with a number of different breeds or even species, you may begin to be able to generalize your inferences with less regard for homogeneity of dissection subjects.
For your own studies, you’re going to want to take copious notes—possibly in code if you’re working in violation of local ordinances. As is quite common, all things considered.
I highly recommend that you start with a single class of object for scrutiny just to minimize possible confusion: the behavior of incoming waves at a particular location on the coast, cloud formations in a particular region, a specific breed of mouse for dissection (provided your eyesight is in good shape for close viewing), stock market indices, etc. At least at the beginning, pick one thing and stick with it.
A juvenile haruspex of my acquaintance developed an early preference for the splatter-patterns of stomped-on bugs as subjects for scrutiny. She profited considerably from my advice to always look for a specific kind of insect for stomping and always wear the same kind of footwear until she got the hang of things.
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If you require a source of entropy for testing your models against random chance, I recommend you work hard to find a source that’s truly causally disconnected from your inertial frame. Many scientific supply stores sell hardware-based random number generators that you can plug into a port on your computer that incorporate a strip of radioactive material. These seem ideal, but keep in mind that radioactive decay is less random than you might think, being dependent on the flux of dark matter particles and zero-point quantum fields in your area, all of which can be impacted by local phenomena.
My favorite source of entropy is a prerecorded 20-terabyte transcription of radio noise from an interstellar source—a quasar around 600 million light-years away—which suitably insulates it causally from local events of relevance. Properly normalized, it makes a one-time pad of functionally infinite length—although if I do eventually expend it, I can easily obtain another file of noise just like it. Purists might point out that the source is not completely disconnected, but given that the radiation in question was being released from its source at about the time multicellular life on Earth was trying to establish itself, any causal linkage dates to before that significant source of local chaos began muddying the waters.
You can use whatever statistical analysis skills you have to establish confidence and significance levels for your suspected correlations. Because it’s free, and divination materials can be expensive enough on their own, I personally recommend the latest version of the “R” statistics platform and extensive use of their built-in libraries.
Unless you care to trust your intuition.