Lives of the Necromancers | Page 7

food. The college of
augurs was one of the most solemn institutions of ancient Rome.
CHIROMANCY.
Chiromancy, or the art of predicting the various fortunes of the
individual, from an inspection of the minuter variations of the lines to
be found in the palm of the human hand, has been used perhaps at one
time or other in all the nations of the world.
PHYSIOGNOMY.
Physiognomy is not so properly a prediction of future events, as an
attempt to explain the present and inherent qualities of a man. By
unfolding his propensities however, it virtually gave the world to
understand the sort of proceedings in which he was most likely to
engage. The story of Socrates and the physiognomist is sufficiently
known. The physiognomist having inspected the countenance of the
philosopher, pronounced that he was given to intemperance, sensuality,
and violent bursts of passion, all of which was so contrary to his
character as universally known, that his disciples derided the
physiognomist as a vain-glorious pretender. Socrates however presently
put them to silence, by declaring that he had had an original propensity
to all the vices imputed to him, and had only conquered the propensity
by dint of a severe and unremitted self-discipline.

INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.
Oneirocriticism, or the art of interpreting dreams, seems of all the
modes of prediction the most inseparable from the nature of man. A
considerable portion of every twenty-four hours of our lives is spent in
sleep; and in sleep nothing is at least more usual, than for the mind to
be occupied in a thousand imaginary scenes, which for the time are as
realities, and often excite the passions of the mind of the sleeper in no
ordinary degree. Many of them are wild and rambling; but many also
have a portentous sobriety. Many seem to have a strict connection with
the incidents of our actual lives; and some appear as if they came for
the very purpose to warn us of danger, or prepare us for coming events.
It is therefore no wonder that these occasionally fill our waking
thoughts with a deep interest, and impress upon us an anxiety of which
we feel it difficult to rid ourselves. Accordingly, in ages when men
were more prone to superstition, than at present, they sometimes
constituted a subject of earnest anxiety and inquisitiveness; and we find
among the earliest exercises of the art of prediction, the interpretation
of dreams to have occupied a principal place, and to have been as it
were reduced into a science.
CASTING OF LOTS.
The casting of lots seems scarcely to come within the enumeration here
given. It was intended as an appeal to heaven upon a question involved
in uncertainty, with the idea that the supreme Ruler of the skies, thus
appealed to, would from his omniscience supply the defect of human
knowledge. Two examples, among others sufficiently remarkable,
occur in the Bible. One of Achan, who secreted part of the spoil taken
in Jericho, which was consecrated to the service of God, and who,
being taken by lot, confessed, and was stoned to death. [1] The other of
Jonah, upon whom the lot fell in a mighty tempest, the crew of the ship
enquiring by this means what was the cause of the calamity that had
overtaken them, and Jonah being in consequence cast into the sea.
ASTROLOGY.
Astrology was one of the modes most anciently and universally
resorted to for discovering the fortunes of men and nations. Astronomy
and astrology went hand in hand, particularly among the people of the
East. The idea of fate was most especially bound up in this branch of
prophecy. If the fortune of a man was intimately connected with the

position of the heavenly bodies, it became evident that little was left to
the province of his free will. The stars overruled him in all his
determinations; and it was in vain for him to resist them. There was
something flattering to the human imagination in conceiving that the
planets and the orbs on high were concerned in the conduct we should
pursue, and the events that should befal us. Man resigned himself to his
fate with a solemn, yet a lofty feeling, that the remotest portions of the
universe were concerned in the catastrophe that awaited him. Beside
which, there was something peculiarly seducing in the apparently
profound investigation of the professors of astrology. They busied
themselves with the actual position of the heavenly bodies, their
conjunctions and oppositions; and of consequence there was a great
apparatus of diagrams and calculation to which they were prompted to
apply themselves, and which addressed itself to the eyes and
imaginations of those who consulted them.
ORACLES.
But that which seems to have had the greatest vogue in times of
antiquity, relative to the