On divination

All divination is just so much malarky. All due respect for the Divination class at Hogwarts for which none of the other professors have any respect, by the way, but divination is a lot of hogwash, meaningless, empty, wrong, void. I think it is very telling that even in the fictional world of Harry Potter, characters which believe in and perform magic do not believe in divination, reading tea leaves, looking into crystal balls, signs, reading palms, tarot, bones, shooting stars, or anything else that might be read or construed as a sign of things to come. In Spain’s 13th century, divination was a real problem because there was so little difference between what might be understood as science and what might be understood as pseudo-science–astrology, quiromancia, necromancia, fortune-telling, and a host of other “mancias” which followed everything from the shape of a dog turd to random feathers found on a street. Black cats, scorpions, bats, goats, any horned animal, a white dove, unicorns were considered in turn to be good, bad, evil, a blessing, all of which is completely meaningless. Unless you find lots of bugs in your house, which might mean you need to take out the trash more often and clean, but this has more to do with deduction and nothing to do with divination. The planets do not guide anyone’s future, and their arbitrary alignment at your birth has nothing to do with who you are as a person. Perhaps I understand why people struggle with divination. Given the chaotic and unstable nature of life, we all want to know what is happening tomorrow–should we invest, look for a new job, buy a new house, get married, have children, break up, undertake a new project, accept a new position, advise someone on their uncertain future? Yet, the future is an unwritten script and will be ruled by the millions and millions of decisions which are made at any given moment as we move forward. The idea that the future is chaotic and unknowable makes people uncomfortable, but the markets will go up and down, students will fail or succeed, couples will get married and breakup, you will make mistakes or your plans will finally come to fruition, but all of that will happen not because you don’t know what will happen, but because you work hard now to make things happen and come true. Everyday, however, people throw away hard-earned money to consult charlatans, quacks, and thieves who have convinced them that they can tell them the future. Predictions are general, over-reaching, non-specific, and the victims (or fools) fill in the blanks, thinking that they have finally found someone who can really tell the future. Why is it, then, that psychics never win the lottery? All psychics are phony, false, criminals. All divination is dishonest. No one has a gift, and all attempts to prove otherwise have proved that things such as ESP don’t exist outside of what is statistically possible to predict. The fact that my colleagues in the 13th century had to wade through such a morass of conmen, fakes, phonies, charlatans is disheartening because the difference between science and non-science was confusing and unclear. No one had the great scientific vision of a Bacon or a Galileo. Questions of mystic visions or psychic revelations, diabolic incantations or black masses, necromancy or palmistry were everywhere because there was no scientific paradigm or orderly scientific method against which these weird and meaningless practices could be debunked. Even today, however, it is mind-blowing that so many people still waste their time and money with these empty and foolish practices. The future cannot be predicted, divined, or foretold–end of story.