omens

87:5.9The in­ten­tion and will of the spir­its were stud­ied by means of omens, or­a­cles, and signs. And these spirit mes­sages were in­ter­preted by div­ina­tion, sooth­say­ing, magic, or­deals, and as­trol­ogy. The whole cult was a scheme de­signed to pla­cate, sat­isfy, and buy off the spir­its through this dis­guised bribery.

87:5.10And thus there grew up a new and ex­panded world phi­los­o­phy con­sist­ing in:

87:5.111. Duty—those things which must be done to keep the spir­its fa­vor­ably dis­posed, at least neu­tral.

87:5.122. Right—the cor­rect con­duct and cer­e­monies de­signed to win the spir­its ac­tively to one’s in­ter­ests.

87:5.133. Truth—the cor­rect un­der­stand­ing of, and at­ti­tude to­ward, spir­its, and hence to­ward life and death.

87:5.14It was not merely out of cu­rios­ity that the an­cients sought to know the fu­ture; they wanted to dodge ill luck. Div­ina­tion was sim­ply an at­tempt to avoid trou­ble. Dur­ing these times, dreams were re­garded as pro­phetic, while ev­ery­thing out of the or­di­nary was con­sid­ered an omen. And even to­day the civ­i­lized races are cursed with the be­lief in signs, to­kens, and other su­per­sti­tious rem­nants of the ad­vanc­ing ghost cult of old. Slow, very slow, is man to aban­don those meth­ods whereby he so grad­u­ally and painfully as­cended the evo­lu­tion­ary scale of life.

90:2.5The med­i­cine men put great trust in signs and omens, such as, “When you hear the sound of a rustling in the tops of the mul­berry trees, then shall you be­stir your­self.” Very early in the his­tory of the race the shamans turned their at­ten­tion to the stars. Prim­i­tive as­trol­ogy was a world-wide be­lief and prac­tice; dream in­ter­pret­ing also be­came wide­spread. All this was soon fol­lowed by the ap­pear­ance of those tem­per­a­men­tal shamanesses who pro­fessed to be able to com­mu­ni­cate with the spir­its of the dead.

150:3.86. Div­ina­tion, sor­cery, and witch­craft are su­per­sti­tions of ig­no­rant minds, as also are the delu­sions of magic. The be­lief in magic num­bers, omens of good luck, and harbingers of bad luck, is pure and un­founded su­per­sti­tion.