This quasi was originally going to be on applied phrenology, an invention of mine, that used the old method of determining personality traits by feeling the bumps and dips on the outside of the cranium. After feeling up a client’s noggin, the phrenologist would then consult a chart of a generalized skull with the areas of various personality traits drawn on the skull, to do a character analysis of the client. A bump here meant one thing, a divot there another. This lump says you have criminal tendencies, that flat spot says you love children, maybe a little too much. Applied phrenology would use a mallet, ball peen hammer, and maybe a flat iron, to correct evil tendencies, and enhance good qualities, by enlarging, or flattening the appropriate place on the skull.

I decided not to do a quasi on that. Please feel free to use my invention however you see fit.

No, when I started looking up phrenology, I got other references to other forms of divination and got distracted. I blame Google.

Just on Wikipedia I found a list with over a hundred kinds, and that was just under the ones starting with A, B, and C.

Let’s list a few, in no particular order.

We all know about haruspication. I mean who hasn’t tried to figure out what’s going to happen next by examining the guts of some animal you have sacrificed for that purpose, especially sheep and poultry. I did that both in high school and college, looking for how to pass the biology class. The liver was the favorite organ for many and that aspect of haruspication is called hepatoscopy, which means “looking at a liver.”

Batrachomancy is divination by watching frogs. Armomancy is divination having one’s shoulders examined. Labiomancy uses the lips, the lips on the mouth. Get your minds out of the gutter.

Then there’s the always popular necromancy. How about abacomancy, reading dust? Gematria is one of my favorites. The modern form is numerology. Gematria assigns a numeric value to each letter of a given alphabet. You then add, subtract, divide, multiply, hell, maybe take the square root of, the numbers you come up with when you translate the letters of your name, or whatever, into the numeric equivalent.

I’m just going to list some more with no explanation. Getomancy, cattabomancy, bletonomancy, drimimancy, micromancy, molybdomancy, skatharomancy. This is driving my spell corrector nuts.

I’ll end with a completely idiotic one, a modern one, only possible since the invention of digital playlists: Shufflemancy. Yes, there are those among us who believe you can predict the future based on putting your favorite playlist on shuffle and examining what the shuffle comes up with.

I am sure that a good haruspication would be more accurate, if you’ve got the guts to do it.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast: