There is a strong Christian tabu against divination, that is, supernatural means of discerning the future and the unknown. As a Christian, that is, someone who has repented of sin and committed to Christ as the unique fully human and fully divine being who died on the Cross for me and rose on the third day, plus the rest, I have considerable sympathy for that view although it clearly hasn’t always been the case. It’s also notable that Judaism is much less committed to this prohibition, although it still exists.
A brief aside regarding the nature of Christianity. Although I don’t currently believe the above statement of faith, which is of course abbreviated, a Christian is someone who has at some point gone through the process I’ve described and believed that collection of propositions. There’s belief combined with conscious free decision. Then there’s the doctrine that one never loses one’s salvation. This means that anyone who has ever become a Christian in the terms I’ve just described is still Christian, regardless of belief or action. It isn’t a negotiable position, something one can escape from and so forth or something that wears off, and although this definition isn’t held by everyone calling themselves Christian, I do go by it, and in fact I think it’s important that even lapsed believers including atheists continue to assert that they’re Christians because there’s a tendency for Christians to say that someone couldn’t have believed in the first place if they no longer believe, thereby purporting to know the person’s mind, quite possibly a complete stranger, better than they know themselves. It’s incumbent upon us to be a thorn in such people’s sides, so yes, I’m still Christian. In more detail, I still believe in the power of prayer and that that power is mediated through God, and this is the crucial point, so to speak. Because I do believe in such power, it’s more or less a given that I believe in the supernatural, and in fact I do believe that divination accesses a non-natural force of some kind. I’m also pretty much orthodox in my belief, like many other Christians today, that divination is sinful.
There are two reasons why divination might be sinful. The first translates easily into everyday secular morality – that it’s a con trick and therefore deceptive. This assumes it doesn’t work and there are, I’m sure, many situations where it doesn’t and the person concerned is deceiving others, or themselves, when they practice it. The other reason would sound foolish to a metaphysical naturalist, i.e. someone who believes there is no such thing as the supernatural. It therefore makes sense to describe it as a sin as well as something which is morally wrong. Most people who buy this much into the supernatural in a monotheistic concept would probably be comfortable with this description. The reason it’s a sin in this context is that it takes matters into one’s own hands, and since we are finite, i.e. limited, beings without infinite wisdom and intelligence we are incapable of understanding the Divine plan for the Universe. I suspect that what happens when one practices divination and acts upon one’s findings is that God will proceed to correct the deviation from her plan caused by those actions, and this can be harsh, just as when a body heals itself the process can be harsh and costly.
Nonetheless, I have practiced divination myself and think it’s clear that some forms of divination do lead to accurate information about the unknown which could not be discovered easily by other means. I realise that talking this way is going to take me far away from the consensus rational view of reality most non-religious people have. Nonetheless it is so, and I would also point out that one can be both atheist and have a physicalist view of the mind-body problem without rejecting the possibility that divination can be successful, although it might be hard to account for how that information would interact with the human mind if it is supernatural in form. I’ve mentioned Nostradamus on here before, so I’m not going to go into great detail on his ‘Centuries’. This work was said to be fulfilled over a period of five millennia from the time of publication, 1555, and since there were fewer than a thousand quatrains they could be expected to happen on average about once every five years, and assuming even distribution about one in ten would’ve come to pass by now. True randomness includes clusters of events rather than a uniform distribution, incidentally, so this is entirely compatible with several of them happening in quick succession, particularly if they’re related to each other. Two of them stand out in particular to me right now: 9/11 and events in the Persian Gulf on certain dates in the mid-1980s. By the way, many of the dates are precise because they’re indicated by unusual astronomical events. The 9/11 one is obfuscated by fake quatrains floating about online, but long before the internet became popular it was widely understood that certain quatrains referred to an aerial attack on towers in New York City using aircraft and involving fire. This was asserted as early as 1978, and if you take a look at physical copies of books on Nostradamus printed around that time, this is what you will find. I was one of the people who believed this would happen. I remember it clearly and wrote it down twenty years before it happened. It could be coincidence but it doesn’t help sceptics’ cases that they seem to be unaware of this fact, or possibly ignore it because it doesn’t fit their world view. Note that I’m not saying I approve of what Nostradamus did, just that his work is good evidence for the possibility of accurate divination. It’s an awkward fact of course.
Most of all, my focus on divination has involved the Yi Jing, more popularly known by the Wade-Giles spelling ‘I Ching’, also known as the Book of Changes. I probably don’t need to describe what this is, but just in case, I’ll describe it anyway. The book consists of commentaries on sixty-four “hexagrams”, consisting of six parallel lines, each of which may be broken or unbroken, and each of which may be indicated as being in the process of turning into their broken or unbroken correspondant. They actually remind me of the well-known ice cream dessert known as Vienetta, or possibly lasagne, except that some of the layers are broken and others intact. The kind of firmness or yielding nature involved when one bites through a mouthful of these strikes me as oddly reminiscent of the Yi Jing. They’re also effectively six-bit binary numbers, but this doesn’t lend itself as much to the feelings of firmness, deceptive firmness, slipperiness and stickiness which one feels in the hexagrams as one considers them, and it doesn’t seem to be how they were conceived of at the time. Perhaps more appropriately, hexagrams can be boggy, frozen over, have hidden depths or involve thin ice.
There are various methods of generating a hexagram, involving tossing coins or manipulating yarrow stalks. I’ve used both of these and found them to be accurate and useful. I’ve used the Yi Jing three times in my life. Two things are vital to its use. One is to approach the whole process reverently and seriously, and in connection with that to do things like keeping the book on a pedestal, wrapped in a special cloth, not using the coins for any other purpose, ritually cleansing them by boiling or tying the yarrow stalks together by using a lock of my hair cut to the root. The other is to frame the question one wants answered clearly and carefully in one’s mind and focus on it while carrying out the ritual. There are other aspects, such as ensuring the space one does it in is clean and uncluttered. it isn’t a game, and not treating it with the seriousness required will lead to it withdrawing its power or reacting back at one aggressively. The book itself has been seen as being occupied by a sentient spirit.
I’m going to give one example of my use. When I was nineteen, I was utterly fixated on someone romantically who had long been in a relationship with someone else, to the extent that they had been living together for a number of years. I asked the Yi Jing how long it would be before their relationship would come to an end and received the answer that it was three-fifths of the way through. When they did split up, they had been together seven years and nine months, exactly a hundred lunar months in fact. I asked this question, as it turned out, exactly sixty lunar months into their relationship, although at the time I didn’t know how long they’d been together. In case you’re wondering how I got such a precise answer, the hexagram I got was Xun – Penetration – which consists of two identical trigrams associated with the fourth of five seasons in the Chinese system. The message is about constant and gentle action. I’m not going further into that, but my point is that it was accurate and informative.
The final occasion for using the Yi Jing was on behalf of someone less than a decade ago who later asked me to do it again. I refused, of course, and they proceeded to do it many times and got themselves into a lot of trouble. Over-using it, and when I say “over-using” I mean even as often as once a decade, is excessive and harmful. It’s the kind of thing you do in situations of extreme need. It’s an emergency, crisis, thing. Really, even if you’re not a follower of an Abrahamic religion, it’s the kind of thing which I think you should preferably not do at all. It’s similar, in fact, to raising the Kundalini in that way. You do it only if you’re ready and you’d better make damned sure you are or it’ll eat your brains for breakfast. But this is of course rather hypocritical of me.
One of the funnier takes on the work is found in Douglas Adams’s ‘Dirk Gently’ stories. The eponymous character makes a purchase in a second hand shop of an ‘I Ching calculator’ which works as an ordinary pocket calculator some of the time, but also gives Yi Jing readings if one presses the blue button marked “Red”, and famously, gives the result of any calculation greater than four as “A Suffusion of Yellow”. It’s interesting to contemplate how mathematics might be if it were constructed around this kind of arithmetical system and whether that might be in any way useful. You never know. There are, though, mechanical adding and multiplying machines out there, so it doesn’t stretch credibility particularly far to suppose that a mechanical device could be constructed which would indeed be able to produce Yi Jing hexagrams. There is a bit of a problem with this though: it would be rather easy to use such a device casually.
And this is where the alethiometer comes in (“truth measurer”).
The alethiometer is a divination device found in a fictional parallel universe which forms the setting of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ series. It looks something like a pocket watch whose dial is divided into three dozen symbols, has three hands movable by the user and a further hand which moves around and points at the symbols a certain number of times, with each additional indication implying a higher level of meaning. In this multiverse it works under the influence of dark matter, which is conscious. This final needle, and I see a comparison with a compass here which is acknowledged in the American title ‘The Golden Compass’, is made of a rare metal treated in a now-forgotten manner, which means that the six alethiometers in existence can never be replicated unless that technique is rediscovered.
But the relevant thing about alethiometers is that their symbolism and use are intended, and clearly are, to be similar to our real world use of the Yi Jing for divination. When Lyra, the central character, arrives in our world she realises after a while that we use it the way she uses the alethiometer. Therefore the hexagrams can be mapped onto the symbols of the machine, although this isn’t straightforward because there are sixty-four hexagrams plus the changing lines, making 4096 combinations, and the three dozen possibilities of the dial plus the different levels are rather different – more reminiscent, in fact, of the Tarot, or perhaps of geomancy, which is interestingly intermediate. Maybe this doesn’t matter. At least for a simple digital computer, the situation is straightforward. The position of the three hands constitutes an input which can be used as a seed for a pseudorandom number generator which can then be used to provide an output in the form of the movements of the fourth hand. However, this is not an electronic device.
There is an approximately 9K BASIC program which provides a Yi Jing divination. Much of this is taken up by the data consisting of the text associated with each hexagram. Unless we’re talking about a difference or analytical engine a la Babbage, it doesn’t seem feasible to realise this in mechanical form, at least as a pocket watch-sized device with large enough gears to be put together by human hands. But this is unnecessarily complicated. The actual task in hand is simply to provide an output via hand movement from an input via the movement of different hands. There is, for example, no major obstacle in creating a similar machine with sixty-four basic hexagrams, although this would ignore the changing lines, although in this case it’s difficult to conceive of how input might work. There is, however, a problem with apparent randomness.
This is a little reminiscent of the Antikythera Mechanism. This was a machine constructed about two thousand years ago in Greece to calculate planetary movements and calendar dates. It consists of a series of gears and pointers on a dial indicating various astronomical events such as when certain star clusters rise and set according to the time of year. It could be used to compile horoscopes to some extent, and predict eclipses. Not only is this a little similar to the alethiometer itself, but it also reproduces events which would take a lot of human thought to predict accurately, which strongly suggests one way of producing an apparently random sequence.
Machines are usually pretty much deterministic. They do predictable things if they’re working properly. Mathematical processes also have some of these features. It’s straightforward to come up with a method to produce a regularly-repeating cycle of values or ones which are easily predictable, but faking randomness is much harder. This is made still harder because not only should the sequence be unpredictable but also the frequency of particular values should be about the same. Pseudorandom integers between one and ten inclusive should each occur about one time out of ten over a long period, and not in a predictable manner either. This doesn’t mean absence of patterns either, as the pseudorandom distribution of stars in the sky doesn’t stop us from being able to see constellations which occasionally bear a vague resemblance to their names, such as the Northern and Southern Triangles, Southern Cross and Scorpion. With a machine able to deal with algebraic expressions such as digital computers since the 1950s, this is relatively easily realisable, but for an alethiometer, pseudorandom numbers, if it’s appropriate to rely on them anyway in this situation, would require something like a complicated system of gears. However, there are chaotic pendula, so something like that can be done, and if instead of predicting real astronomical events the gears in the Antikythera computer had had different numbers of teeth and ratios, that could have been pretty close to an apparently random number generator, although it’s less clear why the Greeks would’ve made something like that.
ERNIE, the premium bond number generator, used thermal noise to produce its numbers. Because heat is realised as vibration of atoms and molecules, the position of charge carriers such as electrons moves around inside conductors, including transistors. ERNIE used to use this phenomenon by amplifying it and turning it into numbers. Another method used more recently is to use the disintegration of radioactive materials, which is truly random at base because it’s a quantum phenomenon. It’s hard to imagine that working in a large-scale purely mechanical device like a clockwork watch or adding machine, but it is still interesting from the viewpoint of the fact that it would exploit an arcane physical phenomenon like the dark matter which powers the fictional alethiometer.
The human mind is an important component of a divination system. The physical details of the process may not be what counts so much as what your perception does with the result. This too parallels quantum phenomena in being observer-dependent. As a child, Lyra’s intuition is her guide to understanding the device. By contrast, adults can only understand it through intensive and lengthy study. This parallels the way we read texts. Do we read things into them or are they part of authorial intent? Does it even matter what the author intended? And beyond that, do we use divine inspiration to read things into sacred texts? Pullman doesn’t think so of course, so what does Lyra’s talent mean? Where does it come from? Is she really a chosen one if there’s nobody doing the choosing?
An alethiometer is feasible. If it’s what they call a “readerly” text, it’s pretty simple to realise. If, however, it’s a “writerly” text, it isn’t good enough for its gears to simulate randomness. They might actually have to be more than that: a model of the universe or multiverse in mechanical form. Then again, if it does rely on dark matter, which in Pullman’s multiverse could even be seen as God in a pantheist sense, God is moving the final, “magnetised” hand and Lyra is effectively praying when she arranges the arms. Rather an odd thing to happen in an atheistic cosmology.
A Box Of Chocolates 