When the members of the household are treated with stern severity, there has been no failure. When wife and children are smirking and chattering, the economy of the family has been lost.
I Ching
WITHIN THE TOWERING WALLS of the city of Babylon, the king, resplendent in royal regalia, raises his hand. A hush falls over the crowd of nobles and officials, assembled in the huge temple courtyard.
Outside, the ordinary people go about their daily business, blissfully unaware that what’s about to happen could change their lives completely. No matter: they’re used to this, it’s the will of the gods. There’s nothing to be gained by worrying or complaining. They seldom even think about it.
The bārû priest waits at the sacrificial altar, knife in hand. A sheep, carefully chosen according to the ancient rituals, is led in on a short rope. The animal senses that something unpleasant is about to happen. It bleats and struggles to free itself.
The knife slashes across its throat, blood spurts. The crowd gives a collective moan. When the blood has slowed to a trickle, the priest makes a careful incision and extracts the sheep’s liver. Laying it reverently on the blood-spattered stone, he bends over and studies the severed organ closely. In the crowd, people hold their breath. The king strides a few paces to the priest’s side. They confer in low voices, gesturing and occasionally pointing at some feature of the excised organ – a blemish here, an unusual protrusion there. The priest places wooden pegs into holes in a special clay tablet to record their observations. Apparently satisfied, the priest confers once more with the king, then steps back respectfully while the king turns to face his nobles.
When he announces that the omens for attacking a neighbouring kingdom are favourable, they cheer in triumph. Later, on the battlefield, some may see it all rather differently, but by then it will be too late.
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN LIKE that. We know very little about the Old Babylonian Kingdom, even at its end around 1600 BC, but something roughly along these lines must have been a common event in that ancient city. Babylon was famous for it. The Bible tells us2 that ‘the king of Babylon stands at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination; he shakes the arrows, he consults the household idols, he looks at the liver.’ The Babylonians believed that specially trained priests, known as bārû, could interpret a sheep’s liver to foretell the future. They compiled a huge list of omens, the Bārûtu. For practical reasons, and to provide quick answers, the bārû made do with a shorter summary in an actual divination. Their procedures were systematic and laden with tradition; they inspected specific regions of the liver, each with its own meaning, each symbolic of a particular god or goddess. The Bārûtu still exists as more than a hundred clay tablets incised with cuneiform writing, and it lists more than eight thousand omens. The wealth of information the Babylonians believed to be encoded in a single organ from a dead sheep is extraordinary in its diversity, obscurity, and occasional banality.
The Bārûtu has ten main chapters. The first two deal with parts of the unfortunate animal other than the liver, while the remaining eight concentrate on specific features: be na, the ‘station’, a groove on the left lobe of the liver; be gír, the ‘path’, another groove at right angles to the first; be giš.tukul, the ‘fortuitous markings’, a small protrusion, and so on. Many of these regions were further subdivided. The omens associated with each region were stated as predictions, often historical, as though the priests were recording previous associations between regions of the liver and the events that unfolded. Some were specific: ‘Omen of King Amar-Su’ena, who was gored by an ox, but died from the bite of a shoe’. (This obscure statement may refer to a scorpion bite when he was wearing sandals.) Some still ring true today: ‘The accountants will plunder the palace.’ Others seem specific yet lack key details: ‘A famous person will arrive riding on a donkey.’ Others were so vague as to be practically useless: ‘long-term forecast: lament’. Some regions of the liver were classified as unreliable or ambiguous. It all looks highly organised, and, in a strange way, almost scientific. The list was compiled over a long period, repeatedly edited and expanded, and copied by later scribes, which is how it has come down to us. Other evidence survives too. In particular, the British Museum has a clay model of a sheep’s liver from the period 1900–1600 BC.
We now call this method of foretelling the future hepatomancy – liver divination. More generally, haruspicy is divination by the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals (mainly sheep and chickens), and extiscipy is divination using organs in general, focused on their shape and location. The methods were taken up by the Etruscans, as shown for instance by a bronze sculpture of a liver from 100 BC, found in Italy, which is divided into regions marked with the names of Etruscan deities. The Romans continued the tradition; their term for a bārû was haruspex, from haru = entrails, spec- = observe. The practice of reading the entrails is recorded in the time of Julius Caesar and Claudius, but ended under Theodosius I around 390 AD when Christianity finally displaced the last vestiges of older cults.
WHY AM I TELLING YOU this, in a book about the mathematics of uncertainty?
Divination shows that the deep human desire to foretell the future goes back a long way. Its roots are no doubt far older, but the Babylonian inscriptions are detailed, their provenance secure. History also shows how religious traditions become ever more elaborate as time passes. The records make it abundantly clear that Babylonian royalty and the priesthood believed in the method – or, at the very least, found it convenient to appear to believe. But the long interval during which hepatomancy was practised suggests that the beliefs were genuine. Even today, similar superstitions abound – avoid black cats and ladders, throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder if you spill some, a broken mirror brings bad luck. ‘Gypsies’ at fairgrounds still offer to read your palm and tell your fortune, for a financial consideration, and their jargon of fate lines and the girdle of Venus is reminiscent of the Bārûtu’s esoteric classification of the marks on a sheep’s liver. Many of us are sceptical about such beliefs, others grudgingly concede that ‘there might be something to it’, and some are absolutely certain that the future can be predicted from the stars, tea leaves, lines on a human palm, tarot cards, or the casting of yarrow stalks in the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes.
Some divination techniques are elaborated in systems just as complex as the Bārûtu of old Babylon. Plus ça change... The famous person arriving on a donkey is reminiscent of the tall dark stranger of modern horoscopes in tabloid newspapers, a prediction vague enough to be associated with sufficient possible events to ‘confirm’ it, yet specific enough to convey an impression of arcane knowledge. Leading, of course, to a secure income for the fortune-teller.
Why are we so obsessed with predicting the future? It’s sensible and natural, because we’ve always lived in an uncertain world. We still do, but at least we now have some understanding of why and how our world is uncertain, and to some extent we can put this knowledge to good use. Our forebears’ world was less certain. An earthquake was not anticipated as slippage of rock along a geological fault, which can be monitored for a dangerous level of stress. It was a chance act of nature, whose unpredictability was attributed to the whims of powerful supernatural beings. At the time, this was the simplest and perhaps the only way to make sense of events that happened at random, with no obvious reason. Something must cause them, and it had to be something with a will of its own, able to decide they should happen, and with the power to ensure that they did. A god or a goddess was the most plausible explanation. Deities had power over nature; they did whatever they wanted to, when they wanted to, and ordinary mortals were stuck with the consequences. At least, with gods, there was some prospect of propitiating them and influencing what they did – or so the priesthood maintained, and there was no advantage in questioning authority, let alone disobeying. Anyway, the right magical rituals, the prerogative of royalty and the priesthood, might open a window into the future and resolve some of the uncertainty.
Behind all this was an aspect of the human condition that arguably singles out our species from most other animals: time-binding. We’re conscious that there will be a future, and we plan our current behaviour in the context of our expectations of that future. Even when we were hunter-gathers on the African savannahs, the tribal elders knew that the seasons would turn, animals would migrate, and different plants would be ready for use at different times. Distant signs in the sky heralded a coming storm, and the earlier you noticed them, the more chance you had of taking shelter before the storm arrived. By anticipating the future, you could sometimes mitigate some of its worst effects.
As societies and their technologies became more advanced, we bound time ever more actively, with increasing accuracy and reach. Nowadays we get up at a specific time during the working week, because we want to catch the local train, to get to our workplace. We know the time that the train should leave from the station; we know when it’s supposed to arrive at its destination; we arrange our lives to get us to work on time. Anticipating the arrival of the weekend, we book tickets to the football, the movies, or the theatre. We reserve a table at a restaurant several weeks ahead because it’s going to be Esmerelda’s birthday on Saturday the 29th. We buy Christmas cards in the January sales because they’re cheaper then, and put them away for the next eleven months until we need them. Then we desperately try to remember where we put them. In short, our lives are heavily influenced by events that we think are going to happen in the future. It would be difficult to explain our actions without taking that into account.
As time-binding creatures, we know that the future doesn’t always work out as expected. The train to work is late. A thunderstorm knocks out our internet connection. A hurricane sweeps through and devastates a dozen Caribbean islands. An election doesn’t turn out the way the polls forecast, and our lives are turned upside down by people with whom we profoundly disagree. Not surprisingly, we place considerable value on predicting the future. It helps us protect ourselves and our families, and it gives us a feeling (however illusory) of being in control of our destiny. So desperate are we to know what the future holds that we’re suckers for one of the oldest con-tricks in the book – people who claim to have special knowledge of future events. If a priest can influence a god, he can arrange for a favourable future. If a shaman can predict when the rains will come, at least we can get ready in advance without wasting too much time waiting. If a clairvoyant can cast our horoscope, we can keep an eye open for that tall dark stranger or donkey-borne celebrity. And if any of them can convince us that their abilities are genuine, we will flock to use their services.
Even if it’s a load of old tosh.
WHY DO SO MANY OF us still believe in luck, destiny, omens?
Why are we so easily impressed by arcane symbols, long lists, complicated words, elaborate and archaic costumes, rituals, and chants?
Why do we fondly imagine that the vast, incomprehensible universe gives a toss about a bunch of overdeveloped apes on a damp lump of rock circling a very ordinary star, just one of the ten to the power seventeen (a hundred quadrillion) stars in the observable region of a presumably even vaster universe? Why do we interpret that universe in human terms? Is it even the kind of entity that can give a toss?
Why do we so readily believe obvious nonsense, even today?
Of course I’m talking about your beliefs, not mine. Mine are rational, firmly grounded in factual evidence, the outcome of ancient wisdom that guides me to live my life the way everyone should. Yours are mindless superstition, lack any factual basis, are supported only by unquestioning deference to tradition, and you keep telling everybody else how they should behave.
You think much the same about me, of course, but there’s a difference.
I’m right.
That’s the trouble with belief. Belief in the sense of blind faith is often inherently untestable. Even when it is testable, we often ignore the results, or, if the test disproves our beliefs, we deny its significance. This attitude may be irrational, but it reflects the evolution and organisation of the human brain. From inside any given human mind, beliefs make sense. Even ones that the outside world considers silly. Many neuroscientists think that the human brain can sensibly be thought of as a Bayesian decision machine (Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister and an adept statistician – more about him in Chapter 8). Roughly, I’m referring to a device whose very structure is the embodiment of beliefs. Through personal experiences and longer-term evolution, our brains have assembled a network of interlocking assumptions about how likely some event is, given some other event. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, it will hurt: likelihood pretty much certain. If you go out in the rain without a raincoat or umbrella, you’ll get wet: ditto. If the sky looks grey but it’s currently dry, and you go out without a raincoat or umbrella, you’ll get wet: well, probably not. Aliens visit the Earth regularly in UFOs (unidentified flying objects – flying saucers): certain, if you’re a believer; definitely not, if you aren’t.
When we run into fresh information, we don’t just accept it. We’d be crazy to: the evolution of the human brain has been heavily influenced by the need to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lies. We judge new information in the context of what we already believe. Someone claims to have seen a strange light in the sky, moving impossibly fast? Clear evidence of an alien visitation, if you believe in UFOs. Misinterpretation, or possibly plain invention, if you don’t. We make such judgements instinctively, often without reference to the actual evidence.
Some of us might grapple with contradictions, as the rational aspect of our brain notices apparent inconsistencies. Some tormented souls lose their faith altogether. Others become converts to a new religion, cult, belief system ... call it what you will. But most of us stick pretty closely to what we were brought up to believe. The ‘epidemiology’ of religion, the way membership of specific sects changes over generations, shows that you catch your beliefs from parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, and authority figures in your culture. And that’s one reason why we often hold strong beliefs that outsiders consider to be rubbish. If you’re brought up to worship the cat goddess, warned every day of the dire consequences that will befall you if you forget to burn the holy incense or chant the proper spells, these acts and the accompanying feeling of satisfaction soon become ingrained. In fact, they’re being wired into your Bayesian decision-making brain, and it may become impossible for you to disbelieve, no matter how contradictory other evidence might appear. Just as a bell push wired to a doorbell can’t suddenly decide to start the car instead. That would take drastic rewiring, and rewiring a brain is extremely difficult. Moreover, knowing which spells to chant distinguishes your culture from all those barbarians who don’t even believe in the cat goddess, let alone worship her.
Beliefs are also easy to reinforce. Positive evidence can always be found if you keep looking and are selective. So many things happen every day, some good, some bad: among them will be events that strengthen your beliefs. Your Bayesian brain tells you to ignore the rest: they don’t matter. It filters them out. Which is why there’s so much fuss about Fake News. The problem is, it does matter. But it takes an extra dose of supercharging for your rational mind to overrule those wired-in assumptions.
I was once told that on Corfu there’s a superstition that when you see a praying mantis, it either brings good luck or bad luck, depending on what happens. This might sound ludicrous (and it might not be true), but when survivors of today’s natural disasters thank God for hearing their prayers and saving their lives, it seldom occurs to them that those who died are no longer present to complain. Some Christian sects interpret a praying mantis as a symbol of piety; others, as a symbol of death. I suppose it depends on why you think the mantis is praying, and of course on your beliefs (or not) about prayer.
Humans evolved to function effectively in a chaotic world. Our brains are crammed with quick-and-dirty solutions to potential problems. Does breaking a mirror really bring bad luck? Experimenting by smashing every mirror in sight is expensive; it achieves little if the superstition is wrong, but we’re asking for trouble if it’s right. So much simpler to avoid breaking one, just in case. Every decision of this kind strengthens a link in the network of probabilities of the Bayesian brain.
In the past, these links served us well. It was a simpler world, and we lived a simpler lifestyle. If we occasionally fled in panic from a leopard that turned out to be a bush swaying in the breeze, at worst we looked a bit silly. But today, if too many of us try to run the planet on our beliefs, without respecting objective evidence, we’ll inflict serious damage on ourselves and everyone else.
IN HIS TEENS, THE PSYCHOLOGIST Ray Hyman started reading palms to earn money. He didn’t believe in it, to begin with, but he had to pretend he did, or the clients wouldn’t materialise. He followed traditional interpretations of the lines on palms, and after a while his predictions became so successful – as reported by his clients – that he started to believe there must be something to it after all. Stanley Jaks, a professional mentalist who knew all the tricks of the trade, suggested that as an experiment Hyman should work out what the lines on his clients’ palms meant, and then tell them the exact opposite. He did, and ‘to my surprise and horror, my readings were just as successful as ever’. Hyman promptly became a sceptic.3
His clients didn’t, of course. They subconsciously selected the predictions that seemed accurate, and ignored the ones that were wrong. With everything being vague and ambiguous anyway, hence open to interpretation, believers could find plenty of evidence that palmistry worked. The Corfu superstition about a praying mantis always works, because no subsequent event can possibly disprove it.
Precisely why some ancient civilisations attached so much importance to a sheep’s liver is somewhat mysterious, but hepatomancy is just one weapon in the futurologist’s extensive armoury. As Ezekiel, recorded, the king of Babylon also consulted the household idols – asked the gods. And, a literal weapon, he ‘shook the arrows’. This is belomancy. After the Babylonian era, it found favour with Arabs, Greeks, and Scythians. There were several ways to do it, but all of them used special ritual arrows decorated with magical symbols. Arcane symbolism is always impressive, especially to the less educated: it hints at secret powers, hidden knowledge. Possible answers to a question of high import were written down and tied to different arrows, which were then shot into the air. Whichever answer travelled the furthest was the correct one. Or, perhaps to avoid wasting time tracking down distant arrows, they were simply placed in a quiver and one was drawn at random.
Livers, arrows – what else? Just about anything. Gerina Dunwich’s The Concise Lexicon of the Occult lists a hundred different methods of divination. We’re familiar with horoscopy, predicting a person’s fate from the configuration of stars at their birth; with cheiromancy, better known as palmistry, reading their future from the lines on their palm; and with tasseography – tea leaves. But these merely scratch the surface of humanity’s ability to imagine how the unfolding of the universe might be predicted from everyday objects. If you’re not into reading palms, why not have a go at podomancy, predicting a person’s destiny from the lines on their feet? Or nephelomancy: inferring future events from the shapes and directions of clouds. Myomancy: divination from the squeaks of mice or rats. Sycomancy – do it with figs. Cromniomancy: onion sprouts. Or you can go the whole hog (rather goat or ass) with kephalonomancy, once much used by Germans and Lombards. Sacrifice said goat or ass, remove the head, and bake it. Pour lighted carbon on to the head while reading out the names of suspected criminals.4 When the head makes a crackling sound, you’ve identified the guilty party. Not forecasting the future, this time, but digging out a secret from the past.
At first glance, these methods are so disparate that it’s hard to see any common ground, other than performing some kind of rite with everyday ingredients and decoding the arcane meaning of whatever happens. However, many of these methods depend on the same presumption: to understand something large and complicated, mimic it with something small and complicated. The shapes that tea leaves make in a cup are varied, random, and unpredictable. The future is also varied, random, and unpredictable. It’s not a huge leap of logic to suspect that the two might be linked. Ditto clouds, mouse utterances, and lines on your feet. If you believe in destiny, your fate is predetermined at your birth – so why shouldn’t it be written somewhere for an adept to read? What changes with the date and time of your birth? The motion of the Moon and planets across the backdrop of fixed stars... Aha!
It’s not just ancient cultures, which lacked the extensive scientific knowledge we now have. Many people still believe in astrology. Others don’t exactly believe, but they find it fun to read their horoscopes and see if they turn out to be right. People in many countries, in vast numbers, play the national lottery. They know the chance of winning is very small (they may not appreciate just how small), but you’ve got to be in it to win it, and if you do, your financial worries disappear in an instant. I’m not arguing that it’s sensible to play, because almost everybody loses, but I know someone who won half a million pounds...
The lottery (which takes similar forms in many nations) is a game of pure chance, a view supported by statistical analysis, but thousands of players imagine that some clever system can beat the odds.5 You can buy a miniature lottery machine that spits out tiny numbered balls at random. Use that to choose what to bet on. Inasmuch as there’s a rationale, it must be along the lines of ‘the lottery machine works just like the miniature one, both are random, therefore in some mysterious way the miniature one behaves like the real one’. The large is repeated in the small. It’s the same logic as tea leaves and squeaky mice.