Divination

"Many witches and wizards, talented though they are in the area of loud bangs and smells and sudden disappearings, are yet unable to penetrate the veiled mysteries of the future."

- Sybill Trelawney



Divination is a branch of magic that involves attempting to foresee the future, or gather insights into future events, through various rituals and tools.

Human divination
Witches and wizards who are born with the rare natural gift for prophecy are known as Seers, who can foresee the future with their Inner Eye. Non-Seers can learn divination methods, but their success varies. Divination is taught as an elective subject from the third year on at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Diviniation has been practised since ancient times. The earliest known method of human fortune-telling is the product known in the West as Chinese Fortune Sticks.

Learned wizards and witches seem to regard the practise of divination with scepticism. Hermione Granger once described it as "woolly" and "a lot of guesswork," Minerva McGonagall thought it was "one of the most imprecise branches of magic," and before he decided to take on Sybill Trelawney as Divination professor at Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore was inclined to scrap the subject altogether.

Silver lime wands had a reputation for performing best for Seers and those skilled in Legilimency.

Centaur divination
Centaurs have a way of practising divination distinct from that of humans, apparently mainly based around observing the movement of planets, moons, and stars, which they had been doing for centuries by 1996. It can take up to a decade for centaurs to understand what these celestial portents meant, and even then, the results were rarely precise. They may attempt to narrow their prediction of when an event will take place by burning certain herbs, such as sage and mallowsweet, and looking for various shapes and symbols in the fumes.

Centaurs seem to have had a low opinion of human methods of divination. Firenze, who taught Divination at Hogwarts, described what "humans call fortune-telling" as "self-flattering nonsense," and voiced the belief that humans obsess over mundane, day-to-day predictions because they are "blinkered and fettered by the limitations of [their] kind."

Known methods

 * Astrology — observing the movements of planets and stars
 * Cartomancy — reading Tarot cards
 * Catoptromancy — looking into mirrors
 * Chinese Fortune Sticks
 * Crystal-gazing — looking into a crystal ball
 * Dream interpretation — analysing the meaning of dreams
 * Fire-omens — unknown, possibly related to observing flames
 * Heptomology — unknown, possibly related to the number seven
 * Ichthyomancy — involving fish
 * Palmistry — reading the lines on a person's palm
 * Ornithomancy — unknown, possibly related to birds
 * Ovomancy — cracking open eggs and observing which way the yolks fall
 * Tessomancy — reading tea leaves
 * Xylomancy — involving twigs

Appearances

 * PS undefined

Notes and references
Adivinación Divination (branche de la magie)