Hazard Yet Forward

 

 

Seton arms, originally only the tressured crescents, is here quartered to include alliances through marriage

 

     I have little enthusiasm for tracing genealogy.  Back four or five generations, the research becomes ever more challenging, yet the rewards shrink since the findings have little discernable relation to one’s own life.  Our ancestors multiply by the factor of two (that is, doubling) every generation.  Everyone has heard the story first told in the thirteenth century by Ibn Khallikan of how the inventor of chess asked as his reward to be given one grain of rice for the first square on the game board, two for the second, four for the third, then eight and so on, resulting, to the king’s surprise in a greater quantity than the entire world produces. 

     The same mathematics, of course, apply to everyone’s number of direct ancestors.  This means that, were one to look a thousand years in the past, estimating three generations per century, we each are descended from a number of people that can be calculated by raising two to the thirtieth power, a number over a billion, over a  thousand times the earth’s population at the time.  Now, this number is not in fact accurate due to the fact that people have very often, particularly in the past, married first cousins with shared grandparents, thereby obliging some individuals to fill multiple slots in the family tree, but the general point is clear.   Tracing only direct patrilineal descent simplifies the matter immensely, though, of course, one is equally closely related to the great crowds of their spouses and their spouses’ families. 

     I have several relatives intrigued by family history who have told me that people with my surname have passed in and out of Scots history for centuries some of whom were given a tartan and a coat of arms.  Now I know that a few generations back, my patrilineal ancestors were homesteaders and I rather suspect that the Seatons (or Setons, Seytons, Seetons) who came to America in the seventeenth century left more memories of want than castles behind in the old country.  There can be little doubt that, going back several hundred years, most everyone’s forebears were for the most part peasants or farm laborers. 

     Yet I rather like the doughty fire-spouting wyvern that tops the ducal coronet on the Seton arms and I find the slogan attached to the coat of arms suggestive and appealing.  “Hazard yet forward,” though certainly a war cry in origin, and likely originally meant to indicate enthusiastic support for the king, expresses a sentiment sufficiently general to provide buoyant encouragement in many settings more pleasant than the battlefield.  I like the airy sound of it, the spirit willingly accepting an uncertain outcome, the progress into an uncharted future, the greeny optimism.  It reminds me of the Yiddish paper, the Forward, and of the use of “Adelante!” in Cuba and other Latin countries. 

     In these cases the anticipated future is a positive change, but of course we hazard yet forward every day without the pleasant expectation of likely progress in the long term.  After all, we are all riding time’s conveyor belt, though for us the end is not manufacture but instead deterioration and eventual disassembly.  This fact cannot be changed, only one’s attitude is in part voluntary.  So, if a wistful feeling of regret at the transitory character of things of this world is unavoidable, it is fruitless (and seems in fact ridiculous when not pitiful) to lament the universal limits of human life.  Every morning when a person rises, it is to “hazard yet forward,” and a failure of this spirit is what the medieval church condemned as acedia, condemned by Aquinas as a flight from God.  Today it would be labeled depression, the psychiatric epidemic of our time.   

     The word hazard, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was originally used in Spain and may well have Arabic antecedents.  It was the name of a game played with dice which has survived into modern times but was first recorded in English in 1300.  Within a hundred years the meaning had expanded to apply to any risk or chance, and by the time of the Renaissance the word implied a negative outcome: “risk of loss or harm, peril, jeopardy.”    

     Shakespeare regularly employs the word hazard in the second of these senses, referring not to a danger but to any chance, a meaning that now sounds slightly literary, perhaps its most dramatic use leans toward the third.  Richard III, when he sees he is doomed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, yet remains resolute, declaring to Catesby, “Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,/ And I will stand the hazard of the die.”

     “Hazard yet forward” as the motto of evolution reverts to more positive expectations both within and beyond the human sphere.  While evolution need not move toward greater complexity, it always serves to better equip an organism for survival and reproduction.  Always striving to pursue incremental improvements seems the habit of our DNA.  Random variation through natural selection is responsible for the magnificent perfection of all organisms, including humanity.  One present product of this immense and fabulously complex process is, of course, our present speculations, these words materializing on my screen. 

     Even more fundamentally, there is chance in all things, even, as the quantum physicists tell us, at the very base of material existence.   Without this unpredictability, we would inhabit an entirely mechanistic universe in which all of history was implied by circumstances at the time of the Big Bang.  When Einstein wrote to Max Born that “the Old One” does not play at dice, he did not consider the possibility that God is dice, that his nature is a wide-open roll, realized and refigured as every instant passes.  Indeed, dice have been used by people since prehistoric times and their first use was not gambling and recreation but divination, like other chance operations: the flight of birds, the cracking of a tortoise shell, the reading of entrails, the I Ching and the Ifa oracle. 

     Perhaps we might all become devotees of a neo-pagan cult of Tyche (Τύχη), called Fortuna by the Romans, the goddess of chance.  In his description of Argos Pausanias notes a temple of Fortuna in which he says Palamedes dedicated the dice he had invented.  Originally associated chiefly with good luck, Tyche was depicted with a cornucopia and often a gubernaculum or ship’s rudder, which might suggest either a hope for safety in sea voyages or perhaps simply the steering of events.  By Hellenistic times her governance had spread to all events, both welcome and feared, and Polybius at the outset of his histories concedes control of all men’s affairs to her.  In spite of his sympathy for Christianity, Constantine built a temple to Tyche (which Julian later spurned) in Constantinople.  Have we today any better understanding of our destiny?  Any better way to predict the future?  Her rule, it seems, continues.

     We cannot foresee a single day, but, whatever our experiences, we are each likely to find ourselves eventually in the position of Byrhtwold in “The Battle of Maldon,” aware of a bitter doom that cannot be dodged.  May we at that time be as unbowed as that antique hero who declared, “the mind must be tougher, keener the heart, the spirit stronger, as our strength fades.”  When only self-possession remains, fortitude is the sole dignity left us, a final challenge to hazard yet forward. 

 

 

The family history research has been conducted by my sister Mary Frances Wallner and my cousin Carol  Ann Seaton. 

The passage from Pausanias is found his Description of Greece (or Traveling Around Greece, Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις) 2.20.3.

Polybius’ comment is found in his Histories (Ἱστορίαι) 1.4.

In the original Old English the quotation from the ”Battle of Maldon” reads "Hiġe sceal þē heardra,     heorte þē cēnre,/  mōd sceal þē māre     þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.”

 

Playing Cards

 

     The deck of playing cards has an elaborate structure, capable of communicating a symbolic code, just as a language does.  The suit and rank of each card define a specific position in the grid, resembling in this way the coordinates of a mapping system.  Games and techniques of divination are both based on the random selection of certain cards or groups of cards with which value or other specific significance is associated. 

     Some structural characteristics are undeniable, chief among them the four suits and thirteen ranks [1].  An initial division produces the colors, red and black.  Each of these then splits again, producing the four suits which show only a small deviation through the centuries and the countries of Europe, where, doubtless due to increased trade with Egypt and the East, they had first appeared shortly before the Renaissance.

     Considered diachronically, a session with playing cards, whether recreational or fortune-telling,  presents a sort of table model of fate, in which each player receives a certain destiny in the deal.  In a worthwhile game, the player’s outcome will depend in  part on skill just as in cartomancy the subtlety of the practitioner is often decisive.  Receiving a strong or weak hand parallels being born into affluence or poverty, health or disability, though a vulnerable position can sometimes come out ahead through bluffing or other strategy.  Fortune-telling differs only in that the implications are made explicit with the occult practitioners  defining the specifics they find implied by a particular array of cards.  Like a life, the game or the session with a “reader/advisor” has a beginning and an end with victories and defeats between.  The cards allow players to experience a variety of such brief imaginary lives recreationally or, if the players are gambling, with some real consequences reflecting the symbolic ones. 

     Synchronically, the array of possibilities in a deck of cards is designed as a universal symbolic system, like the catalogue of possibilities available in the divination tools offered by astrology, I Ching, the Ifa oracle, and the like.  The more elaborate mahjong set of tiles evolved from playing cards, with possibilities far beyond a simple set of dominos.  [2]  Many have noted the numerological correspondence of playing cards with the passage of a year: fifty-two cards and fifty-two weeks, four suits and four seasons, thirteen of each suit and the thirteen lunar months, two colors corresponding to night and day, yet these associations are in general an indication of their encyclopedic comprehensiveness rather than a specific and determined signification.   To some the suits possess differing inherent worth.  For instance, in bridge the lowest is clubs, followed by diamonds, hearts, and spades.

     The face values playing cards are fixed, representing an increasing series from two to ten, then ascending further through the face cards.  The ranks prima facie indicate a differentiation in worth, and the face cards clearly refer to the stratification of feudal society, with the numbered cards representing the lower tiers of society.  The deck then forms an image of “the great chain of being” or scala naturae, as it was more commonly called in Latin. [3]  The deck arrived in Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate where the face cards were all  male, with an “under-deputy” (thānī nā'ib) in the place now occupied by the queen, a pattern reflected in the German decks with an “Obermann” and a lower status Untermann)..  In some Italian decks the place is held by a knight (cavallo).

     In some games, of course, and in particular when using the cards to tell fortunes, every rank must have associated meanings.  Any number of modern occultists have specified such adventitious significance.  For instance, one popular book, written seventy-five years ago yet currently available at Wal-Mart and Target, says that the three indicates happiness, the seven spirituality, and the nine humanitarianism. [4]  All codes, however, of this sort are arbitrarily assigned.  This very susceptibility to a variety of interpretations indicates the cards’ underdetermination, allowing the same deck to be used in  an endless variety of ways.  Specific cards share with Symbolist images a fruitful imprecision conducive to a broad range of interpretations.

     The four suits have varied surprisingly little since they came to Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate in the fourteenth century.  Originally the suits of the Mamluk cards were cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks.  Virtually all suits since have been minor variations of these four.  The swords, in Spanish espadas, became spades, the cups turned to hearts, the coins to diamonds, and, since polo was not a significant game in Europe, the last suit was changed to lances or clubs.  The familiar English set corresponds closely with the suits used in early fifteenth century France, while the Tarot suits are closer to the Muslim model.  Arriving in Britain through Belgium In the passage from Belgium to England the French suits piques (pikes), as coeurs (hearts), carreaux (tiles, “lozenges”), and trefles (clovers)  became the modern hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs.  In Spain and parts of Italy and France the naibi  deck [5] came into use using cups (copas), coins (oros), swords (espadas), and clubs (bastos), the only difference being that in Italy the clubs are ceremonial batons, whereas in Spain they are crude cudgels like Hercules carried.  In Germany and other parts of central Europe the suits are leaves (Grün, Blatt, Laub, Pik or Gras), hearts (Herz or Rot), bells (Schelle, Schell or Bolle) and acorns (Eichel or Kreuz),

     The most profound explanation of the origin of the playing card suits was suggested over a hundred years ago by Jessie Weston. [5]  She argues that the suits correspond as a group to both the treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan and the objects displayed in the Grail castle.  Links between the magic objects of ancient Celtic lore [6] (the Sword of Nuada, the Lia Fáil or Stone of Destiny, the Spear of Lugh, and the Cauldron of the Dagda) and the numinous objects seen in the Grail castle (the Grail itself -- either Cup or Dish, the Sword, the Stone, and the Lance) certainly have remarkable similarity to the naibi suits (cups, swords, coins, and clubs), but Weston felt that both were themselves developments of a more archaic significance.  To her behind the set are elemental sexual symbols through which people sought to encourage abundance and fertility through a ἱερός γάμος, a sacred marriage, that ensures the continuity of life. 

     For her the suits evolved from a pair of sexual symbols, doubled then to make four; lance and sword are clearly the male components, dish and cup the female.  While Weston and others of the Cambridge group doubtless over-emphasized the centrality of re-energizing the “spirit if the year,” the religio-magical motive of  promoting the fruitfulness of the earth and the prosperity of the human community is evident world-wide.

     The origin of the images and their later resonance and reception need not be consistent.  In fact, the durability of a symbol may well benefit from its underdetermination.  A great many interpretive schemes have been applied to them, but all of these are secondary, afterthoughts in a way to the original promotion of life for which they were first intended.  Sometimes the red cards were associated with beneficence and the black with threats.  To some the suits suggested the four elements, to others the cardinal directions.  They have been associated as well with the social classes: hearts (once cups or chalices) suggesting the clergy, spades (once swords) indicating the nobility, diamonds (once coins) for those engaged in commerce, and clubs (once crude wooden ones like Hercules’) for the peasantry. 

     Specific figures from history and legend were sometimes identified with individual cards: the king of spades being pictured as the Biblical David, that of hearts as Charlemagne, diamonds as Julius Caesar, and clubs as Alexander, thus encompassing the known world with the lands of Jews, Franks, Romans, and Greeks.  The queens were identified with Athena (spades), Judith (hearts), Jacob's wife Rachel (diamonds), and Argine, an anagram for regina (clubs), while the jacks were Charlemagne’s knight Ogier (spades); La Hire, a general in the Hundred Years’ War (hearts), the Trojan Hector (diamonds); and Lancelot or Judas Maccabeus (clubs). 

     The significance of the cards is determined strictly by the rules of the game.  Thus queen of spades in the game of hearts is undesirable, trumps in bridge make a good hand, and any two pair will beat a couple of aces in poker.  The flow of the arrival of such cards, meaningful only within the compass of a game, constructs an experience resembling the recognition of motifs in a musical composition, a fugue or  symphony, but there is an important difference.  Every note of The Well-Tempered Klavier is intentional, chosen by Bach, whereas the cards should appear without any conscious design. [8]  The loss in “beauty” due to chance composition is compensated by the fact that the card table more nearly replicates the unpredictability of life itself.   Apart from dependence on chance, the play of the game brings good or ill or middling fortune just as in life.  The value of speculating on the cards of one’s fellow-players likewise resembles the prudent conduct of worldly affairs in which the estimation of the power of rivals may be relevant.  

    The card game is wholly ludic, just for the fun of it, like the delights and disappointments vicariously undergone by the film viewer.  Yet a hand in cards is marvelously abstract, given meaning only by the specific terms of a given game.  Adeptness at the manipulation of symbols is the most distinctive human characteristic, doubtless the source of our species’ success, if success it be, and playing cards allow people to develop, but more importantly, to relish this skill in concert with others.  Dog owners cannot doubt that a dog in play, exercising canine athletic and perceptual abilities, is having a grand time.  A table of suburban bridge players may be doing very much the same in human terms.

 

 

 

1.  I say nothing about the Tarot since, in spite of enthusiasts fond of claiming ancient and exotic origins for the deck, these have been shown to be a variation of the older deck.  In spite of its portentous images, the Tarot deck was developed in fifteenth century Italy for the game trionfi and exclusively used for games until several hundred years later when its use in divination began.

2.  The first references to Chinese card-like game pieces called pái (牌) (a term that could apply to either tiles or cards) date from the ninth century C. E. describing the use of inscribed paper “leaves” and dice in a board game.  Playing cards are known there from circa 1200 C. E.

3.  See Arthur O. Lovejoy’s classic study The Great Chain of Being.  For an early exposition of the scala naturae, ranking animals by their apparent complexity, see Aristotle’s Historia Animalia.

4.  Edith Randall and Florence Evylinn Campbell, Sacred Symbols of the Ancients: The Mystical Significance of the Fifty-two Cards (1947).  Randall and Campbell mention as their source Olney Richmond who claimed to revive a 20,000-year-old tradition in Chicago in 1888. 

5.  The word naibi, of Arabic origin, was used in the original statute mentioning cards in fifteenth century Florence and it is used yet today of the Spanish deck, the baraja Española.

6.  In Ch. 6 of Ritual to Romance (1920).  While it is true that Weston ‘s readership is the result of T. S. Eliot featuring her in the footnotes to The Waste Land and that the Cambridge School as a whole has lost authority, her work, like that of Jane Harrison and Frazer himself, is replete with fruitful observations.  The fact that Weston was susceptible to the occultists of her day whom she liked to think the latest in a lineage descending from ancient esoteric masters does not invalidate her every conclusion.  Even the connections she traces between the treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan, the Grail objects, and the suits is also unnecessary to accept her fundamental idea that spade, hearts, diamonds, and clubs have sexual connotations.  

7.  The treasures appear in an interpolated recension of the legendary Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), the same passage introduction, interpolated in the introduction of Cath Maige Tuired (The Second Battle of Mag Tuired), and in "The Four Jewels", a later, short text in the Yellow Book of Lecan.

8.  Some works of Cage, Stockhausen, and other aleatory composers constitute at least in part an exception. 

A Structural View of Certain Oracles

     On even the balmiest of days we are all aware that the specters of mortality, disease, want, violence, and a myriad of other causes of suffering hover nearby. Each of us has experienced the fragility of life and fortune. Tomorrow always poses a threat, vague or vivid according to circumstances. In an attempt to gain some measure of control over a fundamentally unmanageable environment, people have sought patterns in the phenomena around them. While this habit clearly leads toward the recognition of cause and effect and thus in the direction of science, magic and superstition arise from the same source. [1] One of the principal concerns of intellectuals over thousands of years of human history has been the prediction of the future, whether their findings are couched in the hypotheses of experimenters or the resounding rhetoric of Isaiah.
     The oracle in Solomon’s temple is described in detail in the book of Kings while little, unfortunately, is said of its uses. In the ancient world kings regularly consulted oracles for advice on war and statecraft, but many who consulted experts on the future were individuals with more personal priorities. For instance, among the queries that have survived inscribed on lead strips from Dodona, Greece’s oldest oracle, is one from Nikokrateia asking to which of the gods she should sacrifice in order to be better and stronger and cease from her illness. Another implies what may have been a heated issue several thousand years ago: “Lysanias asks Zeus Naios and Dione whether the child which Annula is carrying is not by him.” [2] How suggestive it is that this proposition is stated negatively!
     In antiquity the desire for prophetic knowledge resulted in the formulation of a great many oracular technologies. Some methods, like that which seems to have been practiced at Delphi for over a millennium, were spontaneous, relying wholly on the inspiration of a human intermediary who is thought to directly convey divine knowledge. Similarly, in most shamanistic procedures the prophet simply conveys to listeners what the deity has said. Clearly, from a modern point of view, the efficacy of these oracles depends on the prudence and wisdom of the one delivering the divine message, both in shrewdly analyzing the question posed and in maintaining the kind of ambiguity or obscurity that has, for instance, allowed excited enthusiasts to trumpet Nostradamus’ accuracy with different readings for every generation. Often such prognosticators (and indeed their contemporary incarnations, the reader/advisors that can be found in every American city) have been compared to psychiatrists and other counselors only some of whom hold degrees. Today we hear even of “life coaches.”
     A great many systems of divination involve the priest’s interpretation of specified signs. These vary enormously; among the well-known methods are the observation of cracks in heated shell or bone (practiced in ancient China), of birds (such as much Roman augury), or of tea leaves (called tasseography). These allow for almost unlimited latitude in decoding and thus, like the direct methods above (and such related beliefs such as explaining the meaning of dreams) reflect more than anything else the acumen of the practitioner. Parallels might be made with such varied agents as brokers who rely on the mysteries of “technical analysis.”
     People have also sought to discern the future by selecting one of an inventory of options meant to be encyclopedic. [3] Rather like an Aristotelean essay, such lists of possibilities analyze in the etymological sense, breaking down a topic into constituent parts to produce an anatomy as Burton did for melancholy and Frye for literature. Thus Freud divided the mind into id, ego, and superego and Marx saw proletarians, bourgeoisie, and aristocrats. The scala naturae assumed by Aristotle and elaborated by neo-Platonists similarly aims toward a comprehensive classification of phenomena into a framework sufficient to include all the data. Familiar examples of such symbolic systems that persist in contemporary times include astrology and Tarot. The signs of the zodiac define a comprehensive set of personality types. Just as everyone must have a birth day, everyone must fall into the categories associated with that day (or hour or minute, for the lovers of precision). Were it not used for fortune-telling astrology might claim to be a scientific treatise, resembling the psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual setting forth the possibilities among which to locate each individual person.
     The deck of playing cards which spread from Persia to India on the one hand and to Egypt and Europe on the other, clearly breaks down society by status, [4] but its symbolic application might apply to countless other possibilities and the ordinary deck was early used for divination. Tarot cards, which first appeared in 15th century Italy, with picture cards called trionfi (triumphs, as they served as trump cards) were used for hundreds of years to play trick-taking games before they, like ordinary playing cards, came to be used to predict the future. Yet they ultimately came to be regarded as an inclusive system for representing the innumerable and shifting shape of individual fortune.
     The very ambitious analyses of such oracular systems seek to describe the world of possibilities potential in any given moment. The delineation of the entire array has a value apart from any oracular value. In reading fiction one may come upon this or that chance turn of fortune – but these systems aim to present them all at once as they would appear to the sublime eye. They seek to embrace every possibility after the manner of the multiverses imagined by science and science fiction alike. It is though one were to see from above the entire complex of plot in Ts'ui Pên’s novel (in Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths”). [5]
     The most elaborate systems of this sort of which I am aware are the Chinese I Ching and the West African Ifa which exhibit structural similarities though one existed in written form millennia ago and the other remained in oral transmission until quite recently. [6] Each features 256 options, in the former derived from the eight lines in each of the sixty-four hexagrams and in the latter generated by combinations of the 16 basic Odù. The use of either system involves the selection through a random method of a particular verse as relevant to the question posed to the oracle. The Chinese had used the cracks in heated tortoise shells in ancient times, and more recently the patterns resulting from tossed yarrow stalks. Among users of the Bollingen Wilhelm translation, coin tosses were substituted. Similarly, among the Yoruba and other users of the Ifa the priest or babalawo might use the opele or divination chain, or counters (palm nuts, kola nuts, or cowries) on a divination tray or opon ifá. This aspect of the ceremony is trivial.
     The creator of the I Ching is said to be the culture hero Fu Xi while the Ifa is attributed to Orunmila who governs knowledge in general as well as divination. Their inventories of possibility are taken by believers to be exhaustive. To Jung the I Ching represented a technology based on synchronicity. Confucius, often thought to be the anti-mystic, in spite of his fondness for music and poetry, said that if he had fifty years to spare, he would devote them to the I Ching. Claims no less grand are also made for the verses of the Ifa. A well-known contemporary enthusiast declares of Ifa that the odùs “represent EVERY SINGLE energy, situation, combination of situations that have, are or will ever be,” while some modern professors of computer science assert the validity of Ifa’s predictions and add that the oracle is a sort of computer system. [7]
     In the characteristic way or art, including the art which is called religion, the attitude implied by these oracles is profoundly ambivalent, a passionate assertion undercut by deep doubt. Whether the claims of their partisans are valid and whether any system can in fact predict the future, the I Ching and the Ifa remain as ambitious attempts to classify all experiences in existence from the human point of view and to in a way redeem, with the mandala-like symmetry of the possibilities arrayed in the imagination’s mental theater, the often distressing turns of every life. Such a symbolic pattern allows the adept to rehearse again and again the defeats and the victories even unto the final denouement. Little wonder that a sensitive and intelligent practitioner might gain a sense of mastery from repeated familiarity with such a document either written or oral, and that such a person might occupy a legitimate place in the professions of her or his day.
     Yet the oracles can also evoke pathos, their desperate and unattainable goal of anticipating reality (not to speak of the controlling it through magic) always beyond the grasp of anyone for all the salesmanship and charlatanry of the centuries. They speak the naked voice of desire, the fundamental drive to make all right through possession of one thing or another, as though we could ever find oneself masters of the wild horses of our lives. And, in the lyric beauty of their images, they eloquently testify as well to the satisfaction of play in the manipulation of symbols, the dazzle of a few rapid dance moves, of some liquid sounds (whether verbal or tonal) succeeding to touch the heart, or a tale too striking to be forgotten. Whatever their other virtues or failings, the I Ching and the Ifa resemble, as art does, the human heart, though more composed, more serene, and markedly more wise than the diviners’ agitated customers and a good many of the diviners themselves, and very likely me as well if not the reader. Not every believer in art is a fundamentalist, and all the most reputable seers have sought meaning not in the letter but in the spirit. The predictions retailed on the street in Lagos and Hong Kong may not be debased currency, but merely the form of wisdom most useful to some. The most competent prophets I have no doubt are wise indeed and provide a useful service to their customers today as their predecessors have surely done since mammoths roamed the Alps.



1. Joseph Needham in the monumental Science and Civilisation in China details the East Asian association of divination and scientific inquiry. Indeed, until quite recent times, scientists of substantial achievement often practiced such “parasciences” as alchemy, divination, and astrology. Newton, for instance, pursued alchemical experimentation and predicted the future. John Maynard Keynes commented that “Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.” (“Newton, the Man”)

2. G. H. R. Horsley, New Documents illustrating Early Christianity, vol. 4: Review of the Greek Inscriptions and Papyri Published in 1979, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997, p. 135.

3. A practice like bibliomancy, in which one randomly selects a passage in scripture or another book is similar but not intentionally inclusive in scope and thus unconsidered here.

4. To Claude François "Pére" Menestrier, the hearts are the church, the spades (or pikes) aristocracy, the diamonds (paving tiles) merchants, and the clubs peasants. (See his Bibliotheque curieuse et instructive de divers ouvrages anciens & modernes.) To Jessie Weston, however, in Ritual and Romance (Chapter 6) they are mystic symbols which are simultaneously sexual.

5. Many of Borges’ stories include such limitless texts (surely the most extravagant fancy of a librarian) in one form or another. The most directly literary are perhaps “The Library of Babel” and “The Book of Sand.”

6. Probably the best edition is Wande Abimbola’s Ifa: An Exposition of the Ifa Literary Corpus (London: Oxford, 1976). There are now a good many version by Africans as well as one by Maulana Karenga, the inventor of Kwanzaa, who produced a partial version under the title Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings.

7. See http://www.academia.edu/5315636/A_Comparative_Study_of_Ifa_Divination_and_Computer_Science “Computer Science takes it origin from ifa divination.”