They were comfortable sampling sounds from rivers, rocks, and Soil, scent, light, shadows, dreams, and the electromagnetic emanations of the aurora Techniques: attending to the presence of flora, fauna, weather, clouds, sound, The third day we experimented with a variety of other Hydromancy (divination through water) as a part of our fifteen-kilometer hike Moss and lichen carpet the stones pools of water collect withĪlmost symmetric precision.
It is an arctic forest filled with lakes, fells, and rough, The next day, we hiked through Malla, a strictly enforced We wereĭelighted to learn, after consulting our reader, that these were propitious These included berries (4), reindeerĭroppings (30), mountain peaks (7), and spots of lichen (235). Our first day together and involved geomancy, in which we counted items of While our colleagues in the “Surfing the Semiosphere” group studied the patterns and actions of lichen, rocks, and plant life, and while those in the “Humus.sapiens” group collected and considered the texture and function of soil, and while the “Reciprocal Sensing” group explored and expanded the limits of human sensation, and while the “Second Order” group studied us all as we went about our tasks, we in the “Augury” group practiced divination. As with all the groups that made up Field_Notes, once we arrived in Kilpisjärvi we spent most of our time outdoors, conducting aesthetic experiments. Before we met in Finland, Martin sent us a reader of several hundred pages, a collection of writing and art and scientific practice related to divination, broadly conceived. In Kilpisjärvi, a biological research station in northern Finland, I was a part of a research focus group called “Augury: Machines which look at birds,” hosted by Martin Howse. Privileged to have the time to engage with augury as a daily practice. In the Finnish Bioart Society’s Field_Notes Laboratory, however, I was Means for such beings to traverse the earth and sky of our shared habitat.Īn artistic strategy or a historic curiosity for many years. Looking at the flight patterns of birds in a contemporary context,įor example, might not tell us how the future will unfold, but it will provideĪ wealth of information about the weather, the wind, the birds, and what it Signs-a way to access nonhuman modes of autopoetic expression, communication,Īnd agency. Less a practice of prediction than a method of deriving meaning from natural Augury in this more expansive sense becomes If we can think of the term more generally, itĬan serve as a useful heuristic. Reframe conversations about imperiled ecologies. Our current age of environmental fragility, augury has the potential to help us Literary and natural history, I have begun to think seriously about augury. Depending on his assessment, wars were waged, lives sacrificed or spared, fortunes lost or gained. A priest skilled in augury could determine whether such signs were propitious or inauspicious, portentous or banal. Pliny notes the divinatory import of bees, beasts, lightning, and teeth more broadly still, the skill of augury required one to read omens from all sorts of natural signs: water, weather, flora, fauna, fire, smoke, vapor, and stone. Roosters, for instance, “have a knowledge of the stars” and “give or withhold the most favorable omens.” As if their celestial prowess were not impressive enough, Pliny attests to their political might: “Cocks hold very great power over the government of the world,” he notes, on account of “their entrails and innards, as acceptable to the gods as the most costly victims.”But the practice of augury went beyond the merely aviary. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder devotes an entire chapter to the biology of birds, providing a detailed description of each kind-size, wingspan, habits of predation-and, when applicable, its divinatory import. In the ancient world, augury described the act of discerning the future from the behavior of birds: their feathers, their entrails, their patterns of flight.