10 Totally Strange Ways People Used To Tell Fortunes Back In The Day

Myomancy is divination via mice or other small rodents. For the ancients, doom and destruction could be predicted by the squeaks or rummaging sounds of mice. These foreboding sounds were taken so seriously that Roman dictator Fabius Maximus retired after a mouse squeaked in his room.

Alectryomancy uses roosters to make predictions. A diviner might scatter grain in different ways, perhaps in letters, and watch the rooster or roosters peck at the food. Their manner of pecking would reveal what the future held by spelling out parts of words or revealing a certain pattern.

Bread was actually used in fortune telling back in the day. But an even more fun fact: alphitomancy was a method of solving crimes using bread for divination. Suspects would be given a piece of bread, often made of barley, and whoever got sick or even thought the bread tasted bad would end up being the supposed guilty party.

Margaritomancy, or divination by pearls, was also a popular fortune-telling method in ancient times. As with bread, it could also be used to catch crooks.

A pearl would be placed in a cast-iron pot and heated until it started to move while a list of names was being read. The person whose name was being read while the pearl moved was the guilty one.

The ancient Egyptians were the first to practice scatomancy, or divination through excrement. The Egyptians would watch dung beetles rolling dung up into balls, then take into account the shape of the balls and the manner in which the beetle made them when reading fortunes.

The organs from sacrificed animals, usually sheep or poultry, used to be used for divination, and the predictions were taken very, very seriously. The practice, called haruspex, was most often done on the liver, and supposedly revealed all sorts of omens to the ancient people.

Gastromancy, or divination through the sounds of the digestive system, is actually the very beginnings of ventriloquism. The sounds from the stomach were thought to be the muffled voices of the dead, and they would be interpreted to tell the future.

Since the beginning of time, fire has been incredibly important to life, so it's not hard to believe that people thought it had somewhat divine powers. The diviner of pyromancy would observe a sacrificial fire, a candle, or really any other flame to tell a fortune.

Rhabdomancy, divination via rods, can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece as a means of revealing fortunes. Dowsing is also similar. This method was popular in the 18th century, and it involved people using rods made of various materials to divine where water was located.

Capnomancy, or divination by smoke, can be traced back to ancient Babylonia, where the smoke of cedar branches was used. It was also used in ancient Greece, when diviners would read the smoke from burning sacrificial animal carcasses.

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