Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Ornithomancy (modern term from Greek ornis "bird" and manteia "divination"; in Ancient Greek: οἰωνίζομαι "take omens from the flight and cries of birds") is the practice of reading omens from the actions of birds followed in many ancient cultures including the Greeks, and is equivalent to the augury employed by the ancient Romans.
This earlier, indigenous practice of divining by bird signs, familiar in the figure of Calchas, the bird-diviner to Agamemnon, who led the army (Iliad I.69), was largely replaced by sacrifice-divination through inspection of the sacrificial victim's liver—haruspices—during the Orientalizing period of archaic Greek culture.
Huginn and Muninn sit on Odin's shoulders in this illustration from an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript.. In Abrahamic and European mythology, medieval literature and occultism, the language of the birds is postulated as a mystical, perfect divine language, Adamic language, Enochian, angelic language or a mythical or magical language used by birds to communicate with the initiated.
Methods of divination can be found around the world, and many cultures practice the same methods under different names. ... (Latin avis, ' bird ' + Greek manteía, ...
'rooster' and μαντεία, manteia, 'divination') is a form of divination in which the diviner observes a bird, several birds, or most preferably a white rooster or cockerel pecking at grain (such as wheat) that the diviner has scattered on the ground. It was the responsibility of the pullularius to feed and keep the birds used. The observer ...
For the king of Babylon standeth at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination; he shaketh the arrows to and fro, he inquireth of the teraphim, he looketh in the liver. [1] [2] One Babylonian clay model of a sheep's liver, dated between 1900 and 1600 BC, is conserved in the British Museum. [3]
The bird strike led to one of the scariest moments in my life, in which our plane circled the airport for 45 minutes, dipping and weaving, before finally making an emergency landing back in Chicago.
The augur's decisions were based on what he personally saw or heard from within the templum; they included thunder, lightning and any accidental signs such as falling objects, but in particular, birdsigns; whether the birds he saw flew in groups or alone, what noises they made as they flew, the direction of flight, what kind of birds they were ...