Bibliomancy is divination by picking a random passage from a book to answer a question.

    Bibliomancy is very easy to do: Ask a question. Pick up a book. Thumb through the pages, stopping at a randomly chosen page. Without looking at the page, poke your finger anywhere on the page. Read what your finger landed on. That’s your answer. If the answer doesn’t make sense, repeat until you get a good answer.

    Usually it is best to ask your question outloud. This forces you to have a well-formed question.

    Picking a book is an important part of the process. Some books are much better for bibliomancy than others. Books of wisdom and books of poetry tend to be the best books for bibliomancy.

     Good poetry is subject to many interpretations, making it more likely that a collection of poems will produce answers to almost any question.

    Christians often use the Christian Bible for bibliomancy. The word “Bible” is Latin for “the Book”. The “biblio—” part of the word “bibliomancy” means “book” and the “—mancy” party means “to use divination”. An old traditional method that Christians have used for naming their babies is to use bibliomancy and name their child with the first name of matching gender to whereever their finger landed in the Christian Bible.

    Jews sometimes use the Jewish Torah for bibliomancy. Muslims sometimes use the islamic Koran (or Quran) for bibliomancy.

    Some of the ancient Chinese and Hindu books are used for bibliomancy. The Book of tao is particularly popular, even among those who aren’t Taoists (it is a collection of short sayings, so it works really well for bibliomancy).

    Witches often create their own bibliomancy books. This can be part of thier Book of Shadows, or it can be a separate book just for this purpose. Start collecting poems, sayings, and other short passages that are meaningful to you. The more the better, because bibliomancy works best if you can’t remember what is written on the pages or where ont he pages certain things are written.

    Like any form of divination, you have to be intune enough to recognize when the divinatin is working and when it isn’t. Sometimes the answers in any form of divination are just random junk. You have to be able to feel when an answer is real and when it isn’t. If you feel that an answer isn’t real, then repeat the divination to get a real answer. With practice you will be able to recognize when a junk answer comes up.

See also: divination

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