CONGRESS CANCELED Revealing the Unknown II: Sortilège, Bibliomancy, and Divination
Description
From earliest times, humans have sought methods to contact supernatural entities to obtain knowledge of the present or future, known as divination. In ancient and medieval contexts, two such methods that were sometimes connected were sortilège and bibliomancy: for example, the Lots of Mary, Sortes Astramphysychi, Homeric Oracles, and Virgilian Oracles.
These practices involved numerological processes to select specific passages from canonical texts in order to divine on desired topics. This session will focus on these and other methods of divination, so as to understand how textual and other authorities became invested with powers far greater than the impacts of their literary merits. Mildred Budny
CONGRESS CANCELED Revealing the Unknown II: Sortilège, Bibliomancy, and Divination
Fetzer 2030
From earliest times, humans have sought methods to contact supernatural entities to obtain knowledge of the present or future, known as divination. In ancient and medieval contexts, two such methods that were sometimes connected were sortilège and bibliomancy: for example, the Lots of Mary, Sortes Astramphysychi, Homeric Oracles, and Virgilian Oracles.
These practices involved numerological processes to select specific passages from canonical texts in order to divine on desired topics. This session will focus on these and other methods of divination, so as to understand how textual and other authorities became invested with powers far greater than the impacts of their literary merits. Mildred Budny