Trusting their Guts

I have taken it upon myself to learn all I can about the lost art of haruspicy. It seems the practice the Romans most coveted from the Etruscan culture they destroyed. The emperor Claudius himself was a great believer, writing 20 some volumes on the art and establishing a college for training future haruspicers. The esteemed Universita’ degli Studi di Perugia was founded in the 13th century in part to establish a body of scholars and a methodology with which to investigate how precisely haruspicy—and other divinatory arts—worked. Indeed they must have worked. We are talking two millennia between the Etruscan practice and the founding of the university in Perugia (and that's without dipping back into the Babylonians). I just can’t quite imagine people going to the trouble to wade through a bloody jumble of sheep’s innards if they weren’t getting something out of it. In Piacenza there still exists a bronze model of a sheep’s liver used by the Etruscans as a map for reading a liver much as one might read a palm. This was serious religion—reading sheep’s entrails. The early Christian Church even secretly sanctioned the reading of guts to protect Rome from the Goths. Apparently the practice was not quite as powerful in the hands of Christians because Rome fell anyway. Still it is a lost art we may all do well to reconsider.

It is timely and fortuitous that my recent study of the Etruscans has led me directly to an entire body of literature on the ancient practice of gut-reading. I was feeling somewhat bereft of my morning horoscope after having made a conscious decision to overcome my habitual reading of the daily scope that appears automatically on my home-page. I am by nature credulous so that even when I tell myself I don’t believe what the horoscope is portending, I will nevertheless find myself throughout the day interpreting what’s happening to me through the lens of that small window of text imprinted on my dull pre-coffee morning imagination. January 12th, for instance, was proclaimed by my horoscope to be the most promising day for love in my entire 2007 outlook. Things had been looking rather dim for me on January 11th so this news revived my hopes. When I did not even hear one word from my beloved during the entire day, I found myself crashing into a kind of despair. Did that mean I was out of luck in the romance department until 2008? Of course not! It meant horoscopes are hokey, baloney, a whole lot of hoo-ey. Prophecy is always self-fulfilling or not. Why on earth was I making myself vulnerable and gullible? It was time again to consciously recommit to the eternal now and leave the past and the future to work themselves out as they will.

No sooner do I make my resolution than I pick up a copy of a magazine at the train station. It’s a lovely, somewhat serious revista called Focus Storia—a richly illustrated every-other monthly that focuses on specific themes in history, this issue devoted to everyday life in the Renaissance, replete with a detailed diagram of Bruneleschi’s Dome. My eyes were tired after a long day’s work and I wanted primarily pictures. But what should I flip to right away, but an article entitled (here I translate): From Babylonia to the Zulu—all the strange methods men have used to predict the future. I am not sure I can fit them all on a sidebar to this article, but I will certainly try. What is it with us—needing to know ahead of time what’s going to happen?

I imagined that haruspicy would be the safest of divinatory practices for me take up. After all, how likely am I to find a sheep to slaughter? I am squeamish. Even if I could find a sheep to slaughter, how likely would I be to slash it with a knife and run my hands through the bloody entrails? Surely I would balk and even gag—if not vomit—before arriving at any kind of prophecy about tomorrow. I considered my interest purely academic—after all the pursuit of divinatory knowledge is historically important, the reading of sheep guts especially so. I love reading about the rites and incantations, safe in the knowledge that I will not be the least inclined to fast for three days before taking my own sheep to slaughter.

But, alas, it must be destiny. I have discovered the art is still in practice though it has been updated for modern life! Now haruspicers read egg-yolks. I kid you not. I found a map. I found the rites. The prophets claim that reading egg-yolks is not as popular as reading sheep’s guts used to be; it’s hard to get as excited about cracking an egg as it once was for the tribe to ritually slaughter the sheep and then roast it over a pit for a feast. But egg yolks are no less viable as divinatory tools, are certainly handier and offer the same results.

As fate would have it, it’s Tuesday, a day I don’t take the train to Perugia, the day I also do my grocery shopping. I am out of eggs. I’ve a certain appetite for eggs. I don’t really believe in the reading of yolks and it's precisely because I don't believe that I have to experiment and see what kinds of outcomes result from my looking into them.