Stinging romance
The Stichomantie or Bibliomantie (also Bibliomantik ) is a form of divination by means of texts. Often works are used for this that are considered holy or at least particularly important, such as the Iliad , the Bible or the I Ching . In Iran, the work of the poet Hafiz is very popular for this.
The fortune teller formulates a question that he cannot answer himself. Then he chooses one of the books mentioned or any other one, opens it or intuitively pricks a book page somewhere with a pointed object and interprets the text passage at this position as an answer. With this method he tries to find out something about his own or "foreign" behavior, about future regulations and possibilities.
Bibliomancy was already known in antiquity . Texts by Homer and Virgil were often used for this . In Latin one spoke of sortes homericae or sortes vergilianae . With the rise of Christianity , these divination practices based on the Bible ( sortes Sanctorum ) lived on. This has been handed down for both the church father Augustine and Francis of Assisi . At the Synod of Vannes in 465 , such practices were prohibited and threatened with excommunication . This prohibition was also adopted in numerous later councils.
Again stimulated by Nikolaus Graf von Zinzendorf , among others , bibliomancy was widespread in many layers in the 19th century. They were also known as thumbling because the thumbs quickly flipped through the pages and then turned to a random page.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mark Forsyth Bibliomantik ... in "Lob der guten Buchhandlung", Fischer 2015, ISBN 978-3-596-03610-3
- ↑ Concise dictionary of German superstitions , Volume 5, pp. 1375f.
