{ "item_title" : "Reading the Signs", "item_author" : [" Tobias Fenwick "], "item_description" : "Before the coin lands, before the bone cracks - who is answering? For four thousand years, humanity's most important decisions were handed to structured chance. Shang kings cracked turtle shells before battle and carved the answers into bone. Babylonian priests read sheep's livers like letters from the gods. At Dodona, ordinary people - a slave asking should I stay or should I go? - folded their questions into strips of lead. Rome watched sacred chickens before it marched. Yoruba priests cast palm nuts through 256 sacred doors of story. And in 1950, a Cincinnati toy-maker floated twenty answers in dark fluid inside a billiard ball, and sold millions. Reading the Signs is the first history to give every great divination system its full, honest hearing: the object in the hand, the room it happened in, the real recorded question, and the procedure step by step - then a legend audit that separates excavated fact from ancient claim and modern invention, and names the inventors. Inside you'll discover: How an oracle-bone consultation at the court of Wu Ding actually worked - and why a woman general, Fu Hao, presided over the rites; The clay liver models of Babylon: among the earliest technical manuals ever made, and how a priest read a liver's fifty-five zones; What the Pythia at Delphi really did on consultation day - and why the famous 'raving prophetess' is a later invention; The mathematics hiding inside the magic: geomancy's 16 figures, the I Ching's 64 hexagrams, Ifa's 256 odu - one family of binary machines; How tarot began as a card game for Italian dukes, and the exact year - 1781 - it was reinvented as an Egyptian mystery; Why the world's most famous fortune-teller, Mlle Lenormand, never designed the decks that bear her name; How the seance-room talking board became the Magic 8-Ball - and what survived the journey from temple to toy store. Who this book is for: Readers of serious occult history who want receipts, not incense; sceptics who suspect the true stories are stranger than the legends; and anyone who has ever shaken an 8-Ball, cast a chart, or drawn a card and wondered where the ritual came from. Every chapter closes by marking, on the page, what is fact, what is ancient claim, and what was made up - and when, and by whom. The signs were never the point. The questions were. Start with the oldest one we have.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/297/9798182975384_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "59.99", "online_price" : "59.99", "our_price" : "59.99", "club_price" : "59.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

Overview

Customers Also Bought

Details