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我们昨天下午五点约朋友bookofchange和kungfuchan2000吃中饭和买中国数字式激光视盘．以前我们去书店。我用很多钱，我买三本书的中文。我买中文“飞天小磨女”翻译的德语。我买“白蛇船”和我也买“中国历史全知道”。三本书很便宜。我也买“中文听说读写”教科书和作业本和激光唱盘。我买"Level 1 part 2"这个很贵，我是很高兴知道更中文。以后我们看我们的朋友。我们吃很吃好中饭。我们去买中国数字式激光视盘。我买两个数字式激光视盘，”唐伯虎点秋香“和“水浒传之英雄本色”。

Divination and Oracles

Last week I read Divination and Oracles Edited by Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacker, written in 1981 it is a collection of essays by different experts on the way different cultures practiced divination. The areas covered were; Tibet, China, Japan, The Classical World, The Germanic World, The Babylonians and Hittities, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Israel and Islam. The book itself was only about 240 pages so it didn't leave much room for a great deal of discussion or analysis but looked at some of the basics of each area.

The chapter on Tibet was interesting and unique in that it was written by Lama Chime Radha Rinpoche who was the only author to actually believe in the methods he was describing. He took a much clearer stance on the East versus West divide than I'm used to reading about in scholarly works but despite his biases it was a very good account of the different divination methods used by Tibetans, and what they were used for. Divination in Tibet seemed to be used by almost everyone for all sorts of matters. Lamas were instructed to always keep the divination vague so as not to loose credibility which was interesting and not something you'd expect someone to admit. The essay also included a short look at the history of Buddhism in Tibet which I do not know anything about but the tales he told were really interesting and seemed a lot like the miraculous tales in "Journey to the West", people changing into monsters and demons, demons and gods being converted to Buddhism etc.

Michael Loewe's chapter on China was a little disappointing as he left so much uncovered. He only looked at three areas, bones and shells,yarrow stalks and the book of changes, and Feng shui. Interestingly enough the next chapter on Japan also looked at 3 different methods of divination, turtle shells which were inspired from Chinese divination, Dream Oracles, something else quite common in China that was not mentioned in Loewe's essay, and the inspired medium, something else also found in Chinese culture. These chapters were responsible for my earlier thoughts on divination and the role of women in religion.

The Classical world chapter looked a lot at the role of Oracles. The author quoted from ancient texts a great deal, as opposed to the other authors who had used personal knowledge, archeology and texts to support their arguments. It seemed that unlike the East mostly the oracles were used by the elite rather than by ordinary people in day to day matters. (Though the earliest Chinese oracles were just done by Kings). The Germanic world in contrast seemed to have many more divination practices, those used by the army and those used by the common people. The Germanic world also had a woman seeress who would visit homes and answer people's questions but who would also hold meetings where she could be asked questions concerning the future of the community and individual problems.

Evidence for the rest of the chapters was very fragmentary and therefore it was much harder for the authors to draw conclusions about how often rites were practiced and what was involved. While the book was not attempting to take a cross cultural look at the phenomena I think it would be interesting to do so. See how the Gods were contacted, who was answering the divination, how the different practices compared, and who was the person needing the knowledge.

It was a fairly interesting book, though too shallow in scope. The areas that I knew something about it presented very little new knowledge. It did give a concise overview of different methods of the divination practiced. And while not drawing any of it's own conclusions I found myself drawing my own.