Observing Animals

Fortune Telling by Observing Animals
By Paula Haworth

It may seem a crazy notion that observing animals (Alectryomancy, Zoomancy, and Theriomancy) can be used to foretell ones future. But then on the other hand, selecting random tarot cards out of a pack of seventy-eight or deciphering a hand full of pebbles or seashells thrown to the ground also challenges the logic in us all. There are hundreds if not thousands of divinational systems (methods to forecast the future) that operate by intuitive rather than scientific or rational means. The premise of all these techniques is in the belief that there is a spiritual world that parallels our own. This incredible world is inhabited by highly intelligent beings often known as spirit guides or guiding angels who lovingly aid the human race in it’s development.

The actual process of how pebbles land in a particular pattern and why a particular tarot card was chosen and not another is as much a mystery to the experienced psychics as it is to the public. However, the key to building a rapport with any of the mantic arts (articles used to focus the intuitive process) is to first adopt a frame of mind in which there is a sense of suspension of ones everyday beliefs.

More than 2,400 years ago the people of ancient Italy (Etruscians) practised Alectryomancy. By utilising a hen or rooster the psychics of those days would draw a circle on the ground, around it where drawn twenty of the Etruscian alphabet. In front of each letter was placed a kernel of grain. The hen or cock was placed in the circle. As the bird ate the grain, the psychic would note down the letters next to the piece of grain and use this to predict the future or to answer a question asked by some one requesting guidance. This form of divination is related to the Ouija board, by the random selection of letters. In contrast, the Babylonians would splash water three times on the head of a sleeping ox. A psychic would interpret the future through observing seventeen possible reactions the ox would make. If for example both eyes opened the answer was ‘yes’. If only one eye opened the answer would be a maybe, and if they remained closed the answer was ‘no’.