Benedict Jacka

Closely related to fortune telling is the Dionysian practice of auguries.  Like its relative, an augury looks into the future to find answers, but while fortune telling is focused around a person, an augury is based around a course of action.  In Apollonian terms, it asks the question ‘is this a good idea or not?’ but since it isn’t Apollonian, the question and answer are more vague – and more far-reaching.

An augury requires a physical focus.  Differing foci necessitate slightly different spellcasting styles, so most diviners pick a single one to master.  Common choices include tarot cards, a crystal ball, a set of bones, tea leaves, the I Ching, or fresh entrails.  This makes augury a difficult art – the diviner must not only correctly perform the magical elements of the spell, but must have sufficient skill with the focus technique to enact the ritual effectively and interpret the results afterwards.

Despite its limitations, augury is a powerful tool.  Although an augury (like a fortune reading) is not guaranteed to be correct, the consequences it judges can be very long-term indeed, reaching to months or years – far further than any Apollonian spell can see.  Moreover, more powerful auguries can provide hints or even instructions towards questions and problems that the diviner didn’t ask.  An augury is not a simple yes-or-no – it can alert the diviner to issues that they wouldn’t have thought to look into.

That’s Not Supposed To Work

It’s a source of great frustration to Apollonian diviners that Dionysian diviners can see so much further into the future than they can.  To an Apollonian diviner, any kind of even moderately unpredictable situation is an impassable barrier – their method of divination means that they can’t possibly predict a human being’s medium- or long-term future, which Dionysian diviners can do easily (if not reliably).

Over the centuries, many Apollonian diviners and research mages have attempted to study how the long-term predictions of Dionysian diviners work.  Some of the most popular theories include large-number probability (Dionysian spells predict average results, which usually but not inevitably win out), determinism (the future is predestined and Dionysian spells can look ahead and glimpse it) and interference (Dionysian spells nudge fate and probability and actually cause the events they predict to happen).  So far none of these theories have been generally accepted, because all of them either fail to match the evidence, contradict existing Apollonian assumptions about how the world works, or both.

Dionysian diviners themselves couldn’t care less about how their spells work.  They don’t think explanations are important.

What Passes in Dreams

One of the most obscure Dionysian techniques is oneiromancy – divination through dreams.  The diviner sleeps, experiences some kind of vision, and gains some insight about a future event or situation.

Almost nothing is known about oneiromancy.  The working theory of Apollonian diviners is that it makes use of the mind’s capacity to store memories and observations in the subconscious, and dreaming somehow allows a diviner to access areas of their mind which are usually closed off, but how and why this works is unknown.  Since oneiromancy is virtually impossible to monitor or study, it’s unlikely this is going to change any time soon.

It’s commonly theorised that oneiromancy has some connection to Elsewhere, the strange dream-like world that exists beyond our own, and indeed Dionysian diviners do tend to be linked to Elsewhere in stories.  Further discussion of Elsewhere is beyond the scope of this article, and will be covered in a later entry.

Dionysian divination tends to have a bad reputation amongst Light and independent mages.  This hasn’t always been the case – according to mage historians, until as recently as the Late Middle Ages, Dionysian methods were still seen as the ‘standard’ approach to divination.  Only within the last few hundred years have they fallen into obscurity.

The reputation is understandable – even to the initiated, Dionysian divination can be frightening.  Apollonian divination tends to be distant and detached, almost clinical, and rarely uses any focuses except for the mage himself.  An Apollonian diviner at work just looks like someone sitting around doing nothing.  By contrast, Dionysian divination is passionate and primal, and some of its rituals aren’t for the squeamish.  Haruspicy (divination through examination of the entrails of a ritually sacrificed creature) is Dionysian in origin, and it isn’t the only one of their techniques that involves blood.  However, it probably isn’t the blood in Dionysian rituals that really disturbs mages – it’s the hints of irrationality and madness that lie beneath.

Despite its suppression, however, Dionysian divination has never quite gone away.  Perhaps it’s because it can do things that Apollonian divination can’t, or perhaps it’s because it speaks to something that’s too fundamental in human nature to be so easily discarded.

Cross My Palm With Silver

The most iconic technique of Dionysian divination is fortune telling.  Through studying a subject’s palm or looking into their eyes, a diviner can predict their short, medium, or long-term future . . . sometimes.  The futures that the spell reveals are vague, and always portrayed in terms of their relation to the person in question.  Events of no personal significance to the receiver of the spell are never foretold – everything is seen through the lens of their personal experience.

Fortune telling is one of the most imprecise of all divination methods.  Many mages have attacked it over the years, calling it unreliable, dishonest, and an exercise in manipulative psychology.  There’s some truth to these claims – the vagueness of fortune telling makes it a fertile ground for liars and confidence tricksters, and certainly the number of fake fortune tellers is vastly greater than the number of real ones.  There have been several famous cases of fortune telling ‘diviners’ being revealed to be just sensitives who were very good at fooling people (in some cases to the great embarrassment of their mage clients, who you really would have thought should have known better).

Even a genuine fortune reading does not guarantee success.  The information gathered from this spell tends to be in terms of omens, items of symbolic significance, or images of a person or situation.  It can provide guidance, but that guidance is by no means easy to interpret, and it’s very likely that the recipient won’t fully understand the omen until after it’s come to pass.  Worse, the futures it predicts aren’t always accurate – fortune telling is a ‘best guess’ rather than a precise prediction.  The fortunes of a genuine diviner do come true far more often than random chance would indicate, but whether they come true often enough to be genuinely useful is another question.

A less well-known aspect to fortune telling is that it doesn’t necessarily require the subject’s co-operation.  Dark mages sometimes employ Dionysian diviners for exactly this purpose, extracting information about a target’s future movements that even they might not have known . . . though as always, the futures are subject to change.

A little-known fact about divination magic is that it is divided into two subtypes.  Both have gone by differing names over the centuries, but nowadays are most commonly referred to as Apollonian and Dionysian divination, although few would recognise the terms.  The two techniques are not mutually exclusive – nearly all diviners have at least some talent for both – but most show a marked preference for one over the other.

The Distant Archer

Apollonian divination is by far the better-known type of divination, and for most mages is the only type of divination they know anything about at all.  All of the previous four parts of this article have been describing Apollonian techniques, and most of the iconic abilities of divination magic – precognition, path-walking, danger sense – are Apollonian in origin.

Apollonian divination is rational, ordered, and impersonal.  It teaches that the universe is an essentially understandable place which can be analysed and predicted through the application of divination magic.  Since the universe is understandable, the Apollonian approach emphasises that a diviner should be able to spread their intake of data (to absorb as much raw information as possible) while also developing the ability to narrow their perception (to focus on specific chains of events into order to precisely predict them).  Apollonian divination perceives events from afar, in order to see them more clearly, and diviners who follow the Apollonian model often develop a degree of disconnection from their visions of the future, even when they’re watching their own fate.

Apollonian spells tend to be very good at predicting machines, natural forces, and physical events that follow a primarily deterministic pattern.  They’re less good with people and other living creatures (note that ‘less good’ doesn’t mean ‘bad’ – they’re still a powerful tool).  The main drawback to Apollonian divination is that it’s completely unable to foresee the future once enough complicating or unpredictable elements enter the picture, meaning that for any event involving other people there’s an effective hard cap to how far Apollonian divination can see.

Self-discipline is very important to an Apollonian diviner.  They take in vast amounts of information, yet strive to order it rather than letting it wash over them.  As a result, Apollonian diviners tend to be mentally organised and self-controlled.

In Vino Veritas

Dionysian divination works on a very different model from its partner.  It holds that the universe is an essentially mysterious place that can never be fully understood.  Dionysian divination is murky, unpredictable, and above all, personal – what one diviner sees with it will be very different from the visions of another.

The methods and techniques of Dionysian divination are poorly understood compared to Apollonian ones.  Dionysian lore has traditionally been oral, passed down from master to apprentice and rarely recorded in books – Dionysian diviners tend to believe that the essence of divination can only be understood by practice, and written guides are misleading.  In addition, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw sporadic attempts by factions within the Council to suppress Dionysian techniques.  As a result, what Dionysian diviners can do is better known than how they do it (which isn’t saying much).

Divination can be used for more than combat and social interaction – it also helps with movement and with certain types of codebreaking.

Second Sight

By focusing their vision into the short-term future, diviners can sense their surroundings.  They observe the various futures in which they move in different directions, and see what happens.  Some directions end in a collision, others are unobstructed, and by piecing together the different possibilities a diviner can assemble a mental map of an area.

Diviners can’t literally see in the dark.  They wouldn’t be able to sense “there are a bunch of Lego blocks on my bedroom floor” – instead what they’d sense is that walking barefoot in that direction leads to sudden pain, hopping on one leg, swearing violently, and falling over.  This means they can’t, for instance, read in pitch darkness, as all they’d see would be varying futures of them staring blindly at nothing in particular.  However, they can sense things that wouldn’t be visible to the eye even in broad daylight – if the floorboards ahead were rotten and about to break, they’d see themselves crashing through them if they walked in that direction.  This particular ability makes diviners quite good at climbing, leaping, and similar feats of physical agility, as they can sense whether a handhold is stable, whether they can clear a jump, and so on.

The same technique, slightly modified, is also useful for stealth.  It’s easy for a diviner to tell whether a particular action will set off an alarm, and by the same token it’s only slightly harder for a diviner to tell whether a particular action will attract somebody’s notice.  Diviners who practice this skill learn to categorise futures in terms of whether they’ll be detected, visualising the possible futures in terms of areas of movement;  these directions will lead to detection, these ones won’t.  Of course, this is limited by the diviner’s ability to perceive whether they’ll be detected – if the consequences of detection aren’t immediately obvious, the diviner will have to look further into the future to tell whether they’ve escaped notice or not, which narrows their focus.

One of Many

The stealth abilities of diviners lead in to one of their signature tricks – the ability to pick out correct solutions out of a great number of possibilities, which makes them very good at guessing codes and passwords.

The problem with path-walking is its narrow focus – you can only study one future at a time.  This is fine when you only have two or three choices to pick between (such as which direction to turn in) but is less effective when you have thousands or millions of choices (such as inputting a code).  The solution is a specific subtype of precognition, grouping futures to pick out the one desired.  If a certain group of futures are similar enough, it’s possible to group an almost unlimited number of them together, matching like with like.  The futures that aren’t identical stand out against the crowd – it’s like spotting one white thing in the middle of a thousand black things.  This only works if the ‘wrong’ futures are almost identical – one ‘access denied’ message from a wrong password is the same as any other, but one wrong person looks completely different from another wrong person.

Divination in codebreaking is a complex subject, and there are various tricks and counter-tricks designed to make a system impregnable to diviners (and others designed to let a diviner access just such a system).  Further details are beyond the scope of this article, and will be covered elsewhere.