ST Lee Gallery, Oxford, UK
Until 27 April 2025
There can be few happier disciplines than the history of science: the study of how people did the best with what they had and, generation by generation, accreted better and better models of the way the world works. We used to call this “progress”, and it beats me why we can’t carry on using the word and just accept that its processes are way more curious, complicated and contradictory than we supposed.
Oracles, Omens and Answers, in the tiny ST Lee Gallery at the back of the Weston Library, part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, isn’t about how we got better at prediction, but more how the desire for personal control over tomorrow drives soothsaying mischiefs, from horoscopes to cartomancy (which uses playing cards) and necromancy to Ouija.
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The moral is that before we sneer at prognostication methods of the past, we need to take a long, hard look at our world, with its huge investments in predictive AI and futurology departments blooming at elite universities such as Oxford, Stanford in California and Aarhus in Denmark.
The Bodleian’s small exhibitions have a history of punching well above their weight. was my favourite, while Tutankhamun: Excavating the archive, despite its wee size, proved a major contribution to the centenary celebrations of the discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb.
My first thought was that Oracles, Omens and Answers had bitten off more than it could chew. Put Cameroonian spider divination next to Joan Quigley’s paperback account of her time as astrologer at the White House during Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president, and you are spreading your argument about the nature of prediction very thin indeed.
Still, the longer I spent among tarot cards, China’s prophesying yarrow stalks, Yemeni sand divination tables and articles in 1980s astrology magazines, the more I found myself dwelling on the big questions. For example, which divination systems presume the world is deterministic, and which are stochastic, making forecasts about likely events on the basis of past data? I was startled to discover that necromancy is stochastic. It is powered by the advice of demons who, doomed to walk Earth since before Adam and Eve were turned out of the Garden, are presumed to know a thing or two about how things might turn out.
The exhibition gave me a visceral sense of why astrology has dominated the history of prediction
Here is another big question. Does the distinction the Roman poet Cicero made, in 44 BC, between divinely inspired predictions and artful forecasts, hold up? The show’s co-curator, David Zeitlyn, is an expert on African spider divination and is keen to point out that arachnids moving marked leaves about in a pot is as much a practical randomisation method as a mysterious echo from the “beyond”.
And what about those intricate, medieval sortes – texts used for divination – with their cardboard cogs and paper dials? Are they making random-number forecasts easier for non-experts or dazzling rubes with layers of mathematical obfuscation?
I went in thinking that the show was a wild selection of amusing tidbits and walked out wondering about fate and chance, trust and power. Being a 91av type, I had expected rather more about prediction and big data – MIT’s large language model-powered cartomancy booth was a bit gratuitous, and really the show’s sole disappointment.
Still, the positives far outweighed the niggles and I left much the wiser. In particular, the exhibition gave me a visceral sense of why astrology has dominated the history of prediction. When the night sky is filled with a vast, reliable but (thanks to the motions of the planets) rather complicated clock, why wouldn’t you use it? You would be a fool not to assume a deterministic universe and at least try to connect its motions to earthly events.
Yes, I misled you: this isn’t, after all, a history of science exhibition. Rather, it is about how we started asking the difficult questions that made rational enquiry possible in the first place. To make “progress”, it helps to know where you started from and Oracles, Omens and Answers is an ideal beginning.
Simon Ings is a writer based in London
