Rhabdomancy
divination technique involving use of a wand
Rhabdomancy is a divination technique which involves the use of any rod, wand, staff, stick, arrow, or the like.
One method of rhabdomancy was setting a number of staffs on end and observing where they fall, to divine the direction one should travel, or to find answers to certain questions. It has also been used for divination by arrows (which have wooden shafts)—otherwise known as belomancy. Less commonly it has been assigned to the I Ching, which traditionally uses a bundle of yarrow shoots. Another type of rhabdomancy is dowsing in its traditional form of using a wooden stick, usually forked.
Rhabdomancy has been used in reference to a number of Biblical verses. St Jerome connected Hosea 4:12, which reads "My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth unto them" (KJV), to Ancient Greek rhabdomantic practices. Thomas Browne, in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, notes that Ezekiel 21:21 describes the divination by arrows of Nebuchadnezzar II as rhabdomancy, though this can also be termed belomancy. Numbers 17 has also been attributed to rhabdomancy.
W. F. Kirby, an English translator of the Kalevala, notes that in Runo 49, Väinämöinen uses rhabdomancy, or divination by rods, to learn where the Sun and Moon are hidden, but this interpretation is rejected by Aili Kolehmainen Johnson (1950).
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This entry incorporates text from “Rhabdomancy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.