extispicy

Examination of the internal organs to make predictions is known as extispicy.

Other texts include two extispicy reports provide divinations based on examination of animal entrails.

Seers used many methods to explicate the will of the gods including extispicy, bird signs, etc.

Extispicy: by the entrails of animals.

As a soothsayer he practiced extispicy, the observance of animal entrails to foresee future events.

He laments heavily, he slaughters numerous animals to perform extispicy but does not find the words he needs.

According to the tablets, a prophetic dream was had, a letter would be sent to a diviner who would perform extispicy to confirm the revelation.

By the late Hellenic period, the text of the series had become more ossified as astrology superseded extispicy as the preferred method of divination.

For a second time he went to perform extispicy on a kid regarding the temple, but the omen again had nothing to say about the building of the temple.

Over the course of lunch I will examine the entrails of my Cornish pasty, but I can already tell you the results of the extispicy.

Iamblicus also attributes to Abaris a special expertise at extispicy, the art of predicting future events through the examination of anomalies in the entrails of animals.

Haruspicy was part of a larger study of organs for the sake of divination, called extispicy, paying particular attention to the positioning of the organs and their shape.

Varieties of divination include: astrology, augury, cartomancy, chiromancy, dowsing, extispicy, fortune telling, geomancy, I Ching, omens, scrying, and tarot reading.

The Romans, in classical times, used Etruscan methods of augury such as hepatoscopy (actually a form of extispicy) (for example, Haruspices examined the livers of sacrificed animals).

Litatio was not a part of divinatory practice as derived from the Etruscans (see extispicy and Liver of Piacenza), but a certification according to Roman liturgy of the gods' approval.

The practice of extispicy, divination through the entrails of animals, was perfected into a science over the millennia by the Babylonians and supporting texts were eventually gathered into a monumental handbook, the Bārûtu, extending over a hundred tablets and divided into ten chapters.

The šumma immeru records observations derived from scholarly debates relating to the behavior of sacrificial lambs before and during the ritual and there were also "orientation tables" in the form of extispicy models (example pictured right) and interpretive grids to assist with the training of bārû.

Cephalonomancy (also known as cephaleonomancy or kephalonomancy) is an ancient form of divination which used two different methods; one was concerned with the shape of the skull, somewhat like extispicy or phrenology the other involved heating the skull of an donkey or goat while reciting various phrases, often the names of criminal suspects.

Christopher Herwig's Soviet Bus Stops is beautiful but bizarre while Reading the Liver: Papyrological Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy by William Furley and Victor Gysembergh is a rigorous exploration of sacrificial sheep.

Meanwhile, Reading the Liver: Papyrological Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy has become my go-to book on divining the will of the gods from the entrails of animals; I can also imagine it becoming the core text at a pop-up street food vendor in Shoreditch.