# Stars, Sieves and Stories > An interactive exhibition about early modern divination ## Pages - [Curriculum guide](https://starsandsieves.com/curriculum-guide/): Curriculum guide Home We encourage educators to make use of the resources collated by this exhibition. Below are some guidelines for using the exhibition in university classrooms, and ten suggested lesson plans. You can also download a version of the curriculum guide in doc or pdf format; this is the same as the below, with… Read More » - [Feedback](https://starsandsieves.com/feedback/): Feedback ← Stories Home We warmly welcome feedback on the exhibition. If you’ve spotted mistakes, or things that could be improved, we’d love to know and will do our best to make appropriate changes. If you’ve found the exhibition enjoyable and/or informative, or have used it for teaching purposes, we’d love to know that too.… Read More » - [Welcome](https://starsandsieves.com/welcome/): Welcome Home Diviners → This exhibition explores divination in Britain in the early modern period – that is, between about 1500 and 1750. Divination was the practice of seeking hidden knowledge by reading patterns in the natural world or invoking the aid of supernatural powers. Divinatory methods typically predicted the future. They might also… Read More » - [Stories](https://starsandsieves.com/stories/): Stories Home Feedback → - [Weather](https://starsandsieves.com/weather/): Weather ← Spirit guides Home Further reading → Early modern people had some understanding of the natural processes that led to unusual weather events, but religious explanations were also common throughout the period. Droughts, floods, earthquakes and even cloud formations might be seen as portentous. When several floods occurred across England in 1674, one author… Read More » - [Spirit guides](https://starsandsieves.com/spirit-guides/): Spirit guides ← Sieve and shears Home Weather → Consulting spirits – or perhaps necromancy (raising the dead) – was an ancient form of learning hidden knowledge, and a dangerous one. The perils were famously explored in Christopher Marlowe’s late sixteenth-century play Dr Faustus, in which Faust’s hunger for magical prowess leads him into the… Read More » - [Sieve and shears](https://starsandsieves.com/sieve-and-shears/): Sieve and shears ← Second sight Home Spirit guides → Divination by the sieve and shears, or coscinomancy, dates back to ancient Greece. In the early modern period it was most commonly practised by those in the middling and lower social ranks, typically to identify thieves. Courts heard numerous cases like that of the 1641… Read More » - [Second sight](https://starsandsieves.com/second-sight/): Second sight ← Scrying Home Sieve and shears → Second sight was a gift associated particularly with the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Second sighted seers saw apparitions foreshadowing future events. Some visions were dramatic; it was common for seers to see approaching armies, foretelling oncoming battles. Others were more mundane: one seventeenth-century seer from Mull… Read More » - [Home](https://starsandsieves.com/): Stars, Sieves & Stories An interactive exhibition about early modern divination Welcome Diviners Clients Animals Astrology The Bible Bones Candle wax Cards Dreams Elements Kale Lots Nature Palmistry Physiognomy Prayer Prophecy Scrying Second sight Sieve and shears Spirit guides Weather Further reading Stories Play through the life story of a seventeenth-century Englishwoman.Optionally, use the fortune… Read More » - [Further reading](https://starsandsieves.com/reading/): Further reading ← Weather Home Stories → Some of the topics covered in the exhibition have been discussed extensively in scholarly literature. The reading lists below suggest starting points; they are not exhaustive. Candle wax, kale, the elements (as used in divination) and the sieve and shears are not included below because they are not… Read More » - [Prayer](https://starsandsieves.com/prayer/): Prayer ← Physiognomy Home Prophecy → In the early modern period, there were no rigid boundaries between science, religion and magic. Astrology is a good example of a practice that blended scientific and magical theory. And religious beliefs underpinned most divinatory methods: they worked by God’s grace to reveal his will. Prayer is perhaps not… Read More » - [Prophecy](https://starsandsieves.com/prophecy/): Prophecy ← Prayer Home Scrying → Most forms of divination were practised deliberately. Prophecy (arguably along with second sight) belongs in a different category. Typically it was conceived of as a gift vested on people by God; prophets saw the future not because of their own skill, but through divine inspiration. Prophets commonly foretold the… Read More » - [Physiognomy](https://starsandsieves.com/physiognomy/): Physiognomy ← Palmistry Home Prayer → Physiognomy was the art of interpreting people’s character and life prospects by looking at the features of the body, drawing on the theory that God’s providential plan was writ in every element of the natural world. Facial features, moles and lines on the body were all potentially instructive. Guides… Read More » - [Scrying](https://starsandsieves.com/scrying/): Scrying ← Prophecy Home Second sight → Scrying was the art of telling the future by interpreting shapes or visions. The most common method was to gaze into a reflective surface such as a mirror, crystal ball, body of water, or even a polished fingernail. Other popular options were to study patterns in fire, smoke… Read More » - [Palmistry](https://starsandsieves.com/palmistry/): Palmistry ← Nature Home Physiognomy → Palmistry, or chiromancy, was the art of telling the future by reading the lines of the hand. According to early modern religious theory, God’s providential plan permeated everything in the natural world, including the human form. It might therefore be possible to tease out divine secrets through close attention… Read More » - [Nature](https://starsandsieves.com/nature/): Nature ← Lots Home Pamistry → Observing the natural world was one way to discover God’s secrets. But nature could also be manipulated more directly through rituals or potions. The most common end was healing or protective magic. A 1615 housewife’s manual described how to cure plague sores with a poultice made of ‘the yolk… Read More » - [Kale](https://starsandsieves.com/kale/): Kale ← Elements Home Lots → Some forms of divination required specialist equipment and training. Others made use of whatever was on hand. There are some eighteenth-century records of rural Scotspeople practising fortune-telling by use of leafy vegetables. A subcategory of divination by nature, this practice was largely folkloric, and was probably practised for fun… Read More » - [Dreams](https://starsandsieves.com/dreams/): Dreams ← Cards Home Elements → Early modern people had a range of explanations for strange dreams. They could be a manifestation of personal anxieties, the product of an overactive imagination, or the fruit of indigestion. But scholars also theorised that dreams might be inspired by God or the Devil. Writing in 1716, the Glasgow… Read More » - [Elements](https://starsandsieves.com/elements/): Elements ← Dreams Home Kale → Early modern philosophers inherited an ancient Greek understanding of the four elements as the building blocks of the universe. The German occultist Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) explained in his 1533 Three Books of Occult Philosophy that the elements comprised ‘the root and foundation of all bodies, natures, virtues, and wonderful works’,… Read More » - [Lots](https://starsandsieves.com/lots/): Lots ← Kale Home Nature → Casting lots, or cleromancy, was the practice of making decisions by processes that would usually be considered random, such as rolling a dice, flipping a coin or drawing sticks of different lengths. The principle was that these methods left the outcome up to God’s providence. The Bible records many… Read More » - [Clients](https://starsandsieves.com/clients/): Clients ← Diviners Home Animals → According to the popular stereotype, foolish women comprised the majority of diviners’ clients. In a work lambasting fraudulent practitioners, the merchant John Melton described seeing ‘some twenty women’ and an ‘ancient man’ going to visit an astrologer. The old man told him that the women were ‘creatures so ignorantly… Read More » - [Cards](https://starsandsieves.com/cards/): Cards ← Candle wax Home Dreams → Cartomancy was the practice of divining by use of playing cards. It is unclear when cards first began to be used for fortune telling, though cartomancy was well-known by the eighteenth century. Prior to the sixteenth century, playing cards were imported to England from abroad, typically from Germany.… Read More » - [Bones](https://starsandsieves.com/bones/): Bones ← The Bible Home Candle wax → 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… Read More » - [The Bible](https://starsandsieves.com/bible/): The Bible ← Astrology Home Bones → Some early modern people sought advice by turning to a page of the Bible at random, and interpreting their situation based on the first passage their eyes fell upon. This was termed ‘Sortes Bilicae’ by the Genevan scholar Jean Le Clerc in the later 17th century, and was… Read More » - [Astrology](https://starsandsieves.com/astrology/): Astrology ← Animals Home The Bible → Astrology was the art of telling the future by observing patterns in the skies. Astrologers answered their clients’ queries by drawing up elaborate charts that plotted the position of the heavenly bodies and assigned meaning based on their location and relation to one another. Astrology was divided into… Read More » - [Diviners](https://starsandsieves.com/diviners/): Diviners ← Welcome Home Clients → Many early modern methods of divination could be practised without specialist skills or training. However, there also existed professionals who offered divinatory services for a fee. They can be loosely organised into three categories, although in practice there was plenty of crossover. At one end of the social spectrum… Read More » - [Animals](https://starsandsieves.com/animals/): Animals ← Clients Home Astrology → Animal behaviour was ripe for interpretation. ‘Augures’ were people in the ancient world who conducted divination based on the activities of birds and beasts. The belief that future events could be predicted by these means survived into the early modern period. Portentous animals were normally those encountered on a… Read More » - [Candle wax](https://starsandsieves.com/candle-wax/): Candle wax ← Bones Home Cards → Carromancy, or ceromancy, is the practice of divination by wax. Typically it involved dripping wax into water and observing the shapes that formed as the wax cooled. While it recurs frequently in early modern lists of divinatory practices, records of its use are elusive. When mentions of wax… Read More » [comment]: # (Generated by Hostinger Tools Plugin)