Continuing the thought of the things we lose to bias and prejudice and all that sort of thing…
Did you know that we have multiple extant contemporary guides to ancient divination practices? We read our horoscopes in the newspaper (ok fine, on popsugar or whatever) and feel connected to the past in that way, but not only do we have Proper Ancient Divination knowledge… in some cases we have COMPLETE KEYS to divination systems that are actually millennia old, even from practices long abandoned or subsumed. Among other things, not yet complete but impressive nonetheless, we have a set of Babylonian tablets, dozens and dozens of them, which describe literally thousands of potential omens which might be witnessed via celestial observation — stars, planets, wind, the length of days, etc. — and mapped onto events of the world. (This collection is called Enuma Anu Enlil, if this catches your fancy, and represents a practice used and shared across a thousand years or more, from 2000-3000 years ago)
The one I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is astragalomancy, which you’ll most often see as people rolling dice nowadays in search of truth or answers, but which started (and in several cultures persists, having evolved independently) as casting the conveniently-shaped knuckle bones from ruminant animals. If you looked at a set of these bones, you might think “wow, what strange hard styrofoam packing peanuts,” because that’s the basic shape. They have some interesting qualities. For one, they are effectively four-sided dice, because the bones won’t rest on their curved ends. Secondly, they are not remotely fair. The keys used to interpret the results take that into account. The structure of the bones gives rough preference for certain outcomes. And they naturally form four unique faces, which can be assigned different numbers or symbols and mapped onto a key.
The ancient Greek version of this practice (with some variation, including in number of bones used) assigned the numbers 1, 3, 4 and 6 to the faces, and used 5 bones for a possible 56 total results (the super negative outcomes are apparently less common with the actual bones themselves, which might be a relief). Our complete copy was engraved on a pillar in Anatolia from … maybe 400BC? I’ve lost the journal article I was reading, but here’s a reference with a different translation: http://opsopaus.com/assets/Astagalomanteion_Enkheiridion.pdf
Imagine, you’d be throwing your bones, likely scavenged from sacrifices and prepared, and read that pillar to determine your fate, and now we can do exactly the same process well over two millennia later and come out with exactly the same results. You can even buy these bones on Etsy!
If you’ve been listening to me babble recently you might have caught a note about the Gods and their epithets serving as different facets of a God’s responsibilities, invoked separately and specifically to seek favor in a particular area when mentioned during ritual or prayer. Here, too, we can see these examples, telling us a little more information about the outcome of our divination.
Take Zeus: we see Zeus Ammôn, which isn’t strictly Zeus as we understand him but a syncretic merger with the Libyan/Egyptian father of gods, which might refer to something like wisdom as this was a fairly remote shrine to which people were willing to travel to seek good counsel. There’s Zeus Ktêsios, which is the aspect of Zeus connected to household wealth (and specifically with keeping your larder full). That’s the epithet you might use when praying to Zeus as one of your household gods. We also see Zeus Xenios, which refers to Zeus as the protector of guests and travelers. And so forth. Layers of meaning which might flavor the interpretation of the outcome. It’s interesting stuff, and it’s amazing that we can simply mimic the very same practices which might have led people to make the decisions we’re now living through the impact of so much later.
