January 15, 2025
Michelle Aroney on an Exhibition on Divination at the Bodleian Library
We are delighted to speak with Michelle Aroney, co-organiser (with David Zeitlyn) of the exhibition “Oracles, Omens, and Answers” at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Aroney is a historian of science and religion at Magdalen College, while Zeitlyn is Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford and an initiated Mambila nggam dù spider diviner. Divination is indeed the subject of the exhibition, drawing deeply on the Bodleian’s collections and beyond. This exhibition is brilliant. I suggest in the interview that it may be the sign of a wider interest in divination in the academic context, and even that scholarship may be entering a “divinatory moment”; we shall see if my prognostication is fixed in the ineluctable course of fate, or proves rather to be ill-starred.
If you would like to contribute to ongoing research on how people use divination (the questions they ask, and what they do with the results), there is an online questionnaire at https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/using-oracles-questionnaire from 1 Dec 24 until 30 April 2025.
Download Michelle Aroney on an Important Exhibition on Divination at the Bodleian
Works Cited, &c.
Check out the exhibition online here. It ends 27 April, 2025.
In the interview we discuss how one can get a Cameroonian nggam spider-divination through the magic of digital media. Why not “Ask the Spider Today“?
For Aquinas on astrology, see Darrel Rutkin in the recommended reading below.
The necromantic manuscript mentioned is Bodleian MS Rawl. 252 (fifteenth century, Latin and Middle English); the spooky pentagrams can be seen below, on fols 28v-29r:
