Divination, Oracles & Omens - Michelle Pfeffer

Divination, Oracles & Omens

By: Michelle Pfeffer (Editor), David Zeitlyn (Editor)

Hardcover | 6 January 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover


$62.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $15.69 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 15 to 25 business days

The past, present and future are full of tantalizing mysteries: questions about our own and other people's lives that we long to answer. Across history, human cultures have devised a wide range of methods to discover what might lie ahead or to understand past events.

This fascinating book features twenty-four divinatory techniques from around the world that have been and are still used to uncover hidden information: from astrology, palmistry, and Tarot to egg divination and Chinese Yijing. Each chapter is beautifully illustrated with a wide range of associated objects, such as cards, dice, altars, candles and texts, and even mathematical tools including astrolabes and astronomical tables. While these practices are often seen as light-hearted entertainment, a soothsayer's uncannily accurate reading can catapult a client from scepticism to serious engagement.

From ancient times to the present day, this spellbinding collection explores our need to appeal to powers beyond the realm of our day-to-day understanding for prediction and clarification, and how the questions we ask can reveal more than the answers we are given.

About the Authors

Michelle Pfeffer is a research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a historian of early modern science and religion.

David Zeitlyn is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and an initiated Mambila gam dù spider diviner.

More in Sociology & Anthropology

Social Research Methods : 6th edition - Tom Clark

RRP $99.95

$85.25

15%
OFF
Sociologic : 2nd Edition - Analysing Everyday Life and Culture - James Arvanitakis
Australian Social Policy and the Human Services : 3rd edition - Ed Carson
Thematic Analysis : A Practical Guide to Understanding and Doing - Virginia Braun
Repast (British Museum) : The Story of Food - Jenny Linford

RRP $59.99

$45.50

24%
OFF
Gutsy Girls : Love, Poetry and Sisterhood - Josie McSkimming

RRP $34.99

$28.50

19%
OFF
Homo Deus : A Brief History of Tomorrow - Yuval Noah Harari

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
Invisible Boys - Holden Sheppard

RRP $22.99

$20.35

11%
OFF
The Dawn of Everything : A New History of Humanity - David Graeber
Children, Family and Communities : 6th Edition - Rebekah Grace

RRP $95.95

$79.50

17%
OFF
Sand Talk : How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World - Tyson Yunkaporta
On Tyranny : Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder