A peek at the horoscope, puzzling the meaning of dreams, wearing lucky socks, having a method for choosing lottery numbers – many otherwise rational people retain a vestigial interest in prediction to ensure favourable outcomes. I’ll happily admit to a fascination with Tarot cards – and I do seem to be an archetypal bossy Aries. Christopher Dell’s Prophecies demonstrates just how widespread a belief in divination has always been across cultures, however peculiar or unsavoury the methods.

In ordering his vast material, Dell sets out some ‘categories of convenience which allow us to impose some structure on a naturally amorphous topic’. Historically, divination – reading entrails or analysing the flight of birds in Ancient Rome, for example – was state-sanctioned and respectable, whereas fortune-telling was individualistic, unregulated and somewhat disreputable. Using Revelation, Channel, Intermediary and Context as his labels, Dell defines haruspicy, the practice of examining the liver of a sacrificed animal, as Active, Tool, Priest and Official respectively. I’m not sure how helpful this is.

The Sami believed that whistling at the Northern Lights would bring bad luck

The Sami believed that whistling at the Northern Lights would bring bad luck

The book is a rich salmagundi of bizarre ideas and absorbing........

© The Spectator