Bones
Folkloric belief imbued dead body parts and bones with occult power, and they were commonly used in magical rituals, particularly to heal or inflict maladies. Divination using bones was less common, but does seem to have been practised. One method was ‘scapulimancy’, or reading the marks and shadows on the shoulder bone of an animal. Sometimes the bone was burned, and the resulting cracks interpreted. There is evidence that seers in the Scottish Highlands practised scapulimancy, typically using sheep bones.
In an influential work written in the 1450s, the Bavarian physician Johannes Hartlieb (d. 1468) described seven ‘forbidden arts’: aeromancy, chiromancy (palmistry), geomancy, hydromancy, necromancy, pyromancy and scapulimancy.1Das Puch Aller Verpoten Kunst, Ungelaubens und der Zaubrey (Augsburg, 1465). Scapulimancy may have been prohibited because of its association with necromancy, as well as with pre-Christian magical traditions.
Scapulae for divination.2Malcolm Lidbury, Wikimedia Commons.
Different forms of divination by bones have been practised around the globe. One method was to cast the ankle bone of a sacrificial animal and draw conclusions based on how it fell. Other seers took the bone of a bird in their mouths, a practice that supposedly triggered a trance during which the future could be predicted. Wrapping an ancestor’s bones in cotton and keeping them nearby could also generate prophetic trances.
Test your potential as a seer – or necromancer – by identifying the skulls below.3Images from the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy FMVZ USP, Wikimedia Commons.
1520 engraving by Agostino Veneziano, showing witches with a carcass.4Agostino Veneziano, The Carcass (1520), National Galleries of Scotland.
An extract from The Secret Commonwealth (1692), by the Aberfoyle minister Robert Kirk.5Robert Kirk, ‘Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth and his “A Short Treatise of the Scotish-Irish Charms and Spells”’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), 77–117, at p. 88; we have further edited Hunter’s version, which retained the original spelling and punctuation.
The minor sort of seers prognosticate many future events, only for a month space, from the shoulder-bone of a sheep on which a knife never came (for … iron hinders all the operations of those that travel in the intrigues of these hidden dominions). This science is called slinnenacd. By looking into the bone they will tell if whoredom be committed in the owner’s house; what money the master of the sheep had; if any will die out of that house for that month; and if any cattle there will take a trake (as if planet-struck) called earchall [contract a plague causing cattle death]. Then will they prescribe a preservative and prevention.
