Mesoamerican Divination

Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions, 2024

Divination is a ritual mode for communicating with the divine. But divination is not just one among many rituals practiced in the religions of Africa and the diaspora. Divination is the very pivot on which all other practices-initiation, healing and the protective arts, libation, sacrifice, and even possession trance-hinge. It is an essential warrant that commissions or sanctions these other rites. It establishes their orienting spiritual vision. It links the individual to the human and spiritual community and reveals the inextricable place of the person in a dynamic and spirit-filled cosmos. It is through divination that we can best understand how these various other practices operate as a complex and coherent religious system, as philosophically sophisticated as it is pragmatic. There are multiple forms of divination and a variety of systems for accessing oracular knowledge among the diverse traditions in the Caribbean. This is no less true of divination in the source traditions of Africa. Divinatory techniques vary tremendously, from the interpretation of omens to water gazing or geomancy, but a common form relies on reading the configurations that result from the random cast of a set of objects, such as shells or bones. The diviner is a ritual specialist who has mastered the technique to obtain and decipher the messages transmitted from the spiritual realm through these phenomena in the physical world. But divination is far more than "fortune telling. " Its primary object is to enable the client to navigate life's problems by offering concrete

The casting of maize seeds is a tool used by contemporary daykeepers in the Ayöök (Mixe) area of Oaxaca, Mexico, which along with the prognostications and prescriptions of the 260-day calendar, helps to cure illnesses and afflictions. This divinatory practice was also employed by precolonial tonalpouhque, who were experts of reading the tonalamatl, the pictographic manuscripts with calendrical, ritual and oracular content, such as the now called Borgia Group codices. In this article maize divination will be described and analyzed, arguing that maize divination results in images that can be read in a similar way to these codices. The reading of maize is approached here by employing the concepts of signs and symbols as described by Carl Jung and the notions of chronotope and dialogical narratives by Mikhail Bakhtin. The Jungian understanding of divinatory practices as a means of gaining consciousness of oneself is also applied to argue in favor of the therapeutic capacity of reading maize, as it offers relief and triggers action.

Vocabulary for the Study of Religion (Brill, 2015)

Religions, 2018

The peripheral role of divination in religious studies reflects centuries of misrepresentation and depreciation in the textual record. This long history dates back to the travel literature of early modern times, particularly in West Africa, where two stereotypical themes took form: divination as mumbo jumbo, and the diviners as charlatans who shamelessly deceive their credulous clients. These two stereotypical themes persisted through the anthropological discourse about African divination until the 1970s. To undo this long history of misrepresentation and depreciation, a change of analytical focus from reified differences to similar engagement with broad ideas and big questions is in order. By considering a particular case study—basket divination in northwest Zambia—through the theoretical lens of worldviews and ways of life, it becomes possible to take divination seriously and grant it a more central place in religious studies. Four broad, inclusive ideas or big questions emerge from the ethnography of basket divination in northwest Zambia: ontology, epistemology, praxeology, and the place of suffering in human existence.

The thesis of this paper is that many Native American cultures share a cluster of connected ideas around themes of randomness, and that many African cultures share a cluster of connected ideas around themes of deterministic chaos. The idea that African cultures are connected to deterministic chaos and its computational relatives in fractals and complexity theory are described in detail in Eglash (1999), but I will briefly review the essential concepts later in this essay. Let me begin however with Native American culture, since the idea of randomness is more familiar to most audiences.

Africa, 1991

A combination of museum research and fieldwork in Angola enables De Areia to present both an analysis of the contents of the divinatory baskets used by Cokwe diviners, and some case studies which illustrate how the carved tuphele pieces and their associated meanings are used in actual divination.

Partial glossary for "An Overview of Divination in China from the Song through the Qing: Some Issues and Approaches," a paper for the workshop on “Divinatory Traditions in East Asia: Historical, Comparative and Transnational Perspectives,” Rice University, February 17-18, 2012