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SP: To give my audience a few examples of Divination.
CI: Divination is a world wide practice that takes on countless forms.
Introduction:
There is one thing that is always coming and rarely here, and yet it is all around us. It is in the sky above us, at the bottom of our tea cups, in the cards we play, in the books we read, we always carry it in our hands, and we even dream about it. With out knowing what it is we ignore it.
There are people who say they can see it and know what it is through a time old practice known as Divination. The word Divination comes from the root word Divine which means to guess. For this speech, Divination denotes fortune telling. I have not known much about divination, but a friend of mine introduced me to it recently and I thought I’d share my new found knowledge with you.
There are 9 kinds of divination that are practiced globally.
MP1 Perhaps the most used form of divination is astrology.
1. Astrology in newspapers web pages etc..
2 Astrologists believe that our moods and health are controlled by the position of the planets.
A. Since the position of planets can be predicted, Astrologists feel they can also predict our moods.
3. Records of it date as far back as the Babylonian Empire, but countries all over the world have independently developed their own forms of astrology, later borrowing and mixing ideas from each other as communication between countries increased.
4. In America we use a system created by Ptolemy.
MP2. Another common form of divination is Tarot.
1. Tarot began as a card game in Italy.
A. The game was called Torocchi in Italy, but we have adopted the french spelling of Tarot.
B. Although the cards from the game were used to tell fortunes, Torocchi was a lot like bridge.
C. It isn’t certain when the game became a form of divination, but tarot were used to represent personality traits in song, and this combined with regular playing cards being used for divination, probably led to a combination of the two as we see in tarot.
2. Reading tarot is much like a ceremonious card game.
A. The way the cards are cut can effect the outcome.
B. The cards are then placed in a spread.
C. There are many kinds of spreads.
D. The meaning of the spread depends on what cards are drawn and the order they appear in.
MP3. Palmistry is another common form.
1. People who practice palmistry believe that the lines on our hands foretell our future.
A. Each persons hands are unique.
2. Palmistry is often called Chiromancy as well.
3. Although most Christian churches today consider palmistry a communion with the devil, Christians three hundred years ago used palmistry when witch hunting.
4. Palmistry goes way back.
A. A shrine to the god Hermes bears treaties on palmistry.
B. The oldest known book on palmistry is seven hundred years old.
5. The Most Famous Palmist is Cheiro.
1.Cheiro read the palms of Mark Twain, Osar Wilde and a number of rulers.
2. He accurately predicted the often tragic deaths of all the rulers he read for.
MP4. Crystalmancy, Hydromancy, and Pyromancy are all a part of a form of divination known as intuitive divination.
1. Intuitive divination relies most strongly on a persons psychic powers, with out which, Intuitive Divination is impossible.
2. Pyromancy is intuitive divination based on the actions of fire.
A. When the ancient Greeks read the behavior of sacrificial fires to determine the mood of the gods.
B. Later on, witches believed that salamanders represented the spirits of fire and used them to intemperate the messages of fire.
C. Some people still believe that the sudden extinction of a large flame foretells immanent disaster.
1. In hydromancy the behavior of water is used to tell the future.
A. Its very old
2. The oldest records of hydromancy were collected by the Jesuits.
1. Much like the Athen’s fire reading traditions, the spead with which a loaf of break was accepted into the fountain of Ino could tell of a gods pleasure or wrath.
B. The ways of deciphering the messages of water vary greatly.
1. Studying ripples
2. A ring hung by a thread in a glass of water stirred and count the number of times it hits the sides.
3. Color
3. Crystalmancy is famous.
1. You may know what to expect. In crystalmancy a fortune teller sits behind a crystal globe, counts down the colors of the rainbow in her head, and goes into a trance. She then opens her eyes and watches for symbols she sees in the crystal.
2. The history of crystalmancy is so fraught with superstition that it is impossible for me to tell you it’s history. While searching for crystalmancy, I’ll I encountered were tails of warlocks and witches and dragons, nothing real.
MP6. Perhaps the only form of divination practiced by Christians and Muslims is Bibliomancy.
1. In Bibliomancy one prays a question to God, or simply a request for guidance, and opens their book to a random passage in the Bible or the Koran. The passage is read as a divination from god.
2. The Chinese have a far more complex form of Bibliomancy involving the I Ching.
A. A number of methods are used to discover the page and passage meant to be read. Instead of randomly opening their book.
B. The oldest method involves heating a turtle shell until cracks form. The cracks or used in a hexagram that is read to lead them to a page in the I Ching.
C. Other more complicated methods exist.
MP7. My favorite form of divination in Dream Interpretation.
A. Oneironauts are explorers of the dream world.
B1. There are early biblical references to dream interpretation. Perhaps the most famous being of a boy who predicted his own rise of status.
B. Dream interpretation may be the most realistic as it relies not on Gods or Devils or Spirits, but on our own psyche. In dream interpretation we are reading our own subconscious mind.
C. The idea is that we dream what we dare not think. Every thought that is too silly or perverted, or unlikely for us to accept during our waking hours, runs rampant when we sleep. Since we refuse to accept many of these thoughts, they can not helps us make important decisions in our lives or give us clues as to what to expect, but if we examine our dreams carefully, we just may see what fortune tellers have told us all along; the clues to our futures.
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