The History of Fortune-Telling: Ancient Oracles to Modern Day

Fortune-telling has outlived nearly every empire that paid for it. Kings sponsored it, churches condemned it, Parliament criminalized it, and it is still here, currently living on your phone. The methods change every few centuries. The reason people show up has barely shifted since the Bronze Age.

Kings, Bones, and the First Recorded Readings

Start with the bones. In Shang dynasty China around 1200 BCE, royal diviners scratched a question into an ox shoulder blade or a turtle's underside, pressed a hot point against it until the surface split, and read the cracks. Would the rain come? Should the king hunt this week? One surviving set of inscriptions concerns the toothache of King Wu Ding, which somebody thought worth putting to the ancestors.

For most of history nobody knew what these things were. Farmers around Anyang plowed them up and sold them to apothecaries as dragon bones, to be ground into powder and swallowed. Only in 1899 did a scholar in Beijing look closely at one and recognize writing, older than any Chinese script then known.

Mesopotamia preferred livers. Priests inspected the organs of sacrificed sheep and matched what they found against clay models kept as a sort of reference library. Babylonian sky-watchers, meanwhile, logged planetary positions year after year and read them against the fortunes of the throne, and Western astrology grew out of those tablets.

Their record-keeping was slow, meticulous, and entirely manual. The same job now takes seconds: enter a birth date, time, and city into birthcharts.asknebula.com, and the chart appears before your tea cools.

One difference stands out, though. All of this served kings and temples. Nobody was cracking bones over a farmhand's marriage.

The Oracle Everyone Traveled To

Delphi ran on that business for centuries. Petitioners paid a fee, queued for the right days of the year, and put their question to a priestess called the Pythia, who answered on Apollo's behalf.

Croesus of Lydia asked whether to march on Persia and was told that if he did, he would destroy a great empire. He did. It was his own. Herodotus says he sent envoys back to Delphi afterwards to complain, and got the reply that he should have asked which empire was meant. Nothing in the original answer was false. It needed interpreting, and the man who asked had to do it.

Rome turned the same instinct into paperwork. Augurs watched the flight of birds, haruspices read entrails, and the Senate would not act until someone confirmed the signs were good. Cicero held the post of augur himself and still wrote a book taking the whole practice apart, in which he passes along Cato's remark that one haruspex could hardly pass another in the street without laughing.

When Fortune-Telling Moved Into the Living Room

Tarot spent its first three centuries as a card game. Italian nobles were playing tarocchi in the 1440s with nothing prophetic in mind. Then in 1780s Paris, a seed merchant named Jean-Baptiste Alliette, trading under the name Etteilla, started selling readings and printed decks with fixed meanings attached, and the cards picked up a second career they have never dropped.

It was risky work in places. Britain's Vagrancy Act of 1824 filed anyone professing to tell fortunes alongside rogues and vagabonds, and prosecutions ran well into the twentieth century.

The boom happened anyway. After Kate and Margaret Fox reported rapping noises from spirits in a New York farmhouse in 1848, séances spread across Britain and America as evening entertainment. Margaret admitted forty years later that the raps came from her toes cracking. Attendance barely dipped.

Fortune-Telling in the Age of the Phone

The questions got smaller and far more personal, which arguably made them better. Is this relationship worth another year? Do I take the job in another city? Will my mother be all right?

The tools kept pace. A reading used to require travel: a shrine, a fairground tent, a parlor on the correct night of the week. Now it takes a few taps, and an advisor of your choice is a message away at three in the morning, which is roughly when these questions arrive anyway.

What a reading is good for has moved less than you might think. A chart or a card spread does its best work as a mirror, a way of hearing out loud what you were already leaning towards. Anything carrying real weight, health or money, or whether to leave someone, stays your call and belongs with people qualified to advise on it.

Why the Question Keeps Coming Back

Cracked bone, sheep liver, bird flight, tea leaves, push notification. The delivery method has been rebuilt a dozen times over, and the human part has not moved an inch. What Croesus wanted from Delphi was company in a decision he had mostly already made.

So the next time a horoscope catches you mid-scroll, watch which line you were hoping to see. That small flinch of recognition is information you supplied yourself, and reading it is the oldest use anybody has found for fortune-telling.