Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
Marco Polo gives some interesting details of the customs of the natives, one is that when a king dies, the nobles throw themselves into the fire in his honour; another strange custom is that of the religious purifications twice every day, and their blind faith in astrologers and diviners; he also speaks of the frequency of religious suicides, and the sacrifice of widows whom the funeral pile awaits on the death of their husbands.
There are but two modes, I think, of explaining these extraordinary phenomena either by supposing them effected by supernatural agency, as all seers and diviners from antiquity, through the Middle Ages down to our somnambulists, have pretended that they really stood in communication with spirit; or, by supposing that there is an innate latent divining element in our own natures, which only becomes evident and active under certain circumstances, and which is capable of revealing the future with more or less exactitude just as the mind can recall the past.
He is the brainy exception of craft united to common sense, and he uses these to best advantage for his own interests. Thunder-maker's method of divining was very simple after all nay, even childish. We have seen it performed by redskin jugglers, as we have also seen the same effects produced by Arab diviners on the Syrian desert.
It seemed also to the diviners a most happy omen, that Dion, when he made his address to the people, had under his feet the stately monument which Dionysius had been at such pains to erect; but because it was a sundial on which he stood when he was made general, they expressed some fears that the great actions he had performed might be subject to change, and admit some rapid turn and declination of fortune.
He put again to sea, and having reached Dyrrachium, on his coming to shore there, it is reported that an earthquake and a convulsion in the sea happened at the same time, signs which the diviners said intimated that his exile would not be long, for these were prognostics of change.
So that this Tiberius was more addicted to all such sorts of diviners than any other of the Roman emperors, because he had found them to have told him truth in his own affairs.
With the rationalizing influence of the Persians the hold of astrology weakened, and according to Jastrow it was this, in combination with Hebrew and Greek modes of thought, that led the priests in the three centuries following the Persian occupation, to exchange their profession of diviners for that of astronomers; and this, he says, marks the beginning of the conflict between religion and science.
Also Plinius telleth a wonder thing, that the emperor sat by Drusilla the empress in a certain garden, and an eagle threw from a right high place a wonder white hen into the empress' lap whole and sound, and the hen held in her bill a bough of laurel tree full of bays, and Diviners took heed to the hen, and sowed the bays, and kept them wisely, and of them came a wood, that was called Silva Triumphans, as it were the wood of worship for victory and mastery.
These being so taken by the Athenians, and carried to the officers, and the multitude of names appearing, the diviners thought it unpropitious, and were in apprehension lest this should be the only destined fullfilment of the prophecy, that "the Athenians shall take all the Syracusans."
When these seemed sufficient to free them from the dread of the former, the diviners declared, that they were all the more terrified by the latter: because entrails too fair and promising, when they appear after others that are maimed and monstrous, render the change doubtful and suspicious But Nor fire nor brazen wall can keep out fate; as Pindar observes.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking