5 things we learned from Harry Potter: A History of Magic

Divination is for the indecisive

You might have already guessed it from the disparaging way reasonable people (i.e. Hermione and Professor McGonagall) talk about the practice of Divination in Harry Potter, but Rowling confirms her low opinion of it here.

“Free will is the abiding principle of the Harry Potter books, not prophecy,” she says of the subject. Indeed, every Potter fan knows it is our choices that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities. But it turns out that Divination was actually a really old way of helping people make decisions, according to the curators of the Museum of Witchcraft based in Cornwall.

It goes back as far as 1192 BC, the year in which a set of animal bones in The British Library’s 150 million-plus collection are dated back to.

These bones, used by the leaders of the ancient Shang dynasty in China, are in fact the oldest artifacts in the British Library’s collection and can be dated specifically to Dec. 27, 1192 — the night of a lunar eclipse.

An eclipse of any kind was supposedly a bad omen (don’t tell Professor Trelawney) and the bones were inscribed with questions before being heated to crack — the cracks were supposed to be answers from ancestors.

Rowling may say that her view of Divination is that it works once-in-a-million, but she still accepts that it is part of what makes us believe in magic — it’s a way of making sense of the world.

And if animal bones are not your thing, however, may I direct you to the tried-and-tested Phoebe Buffay method of decision-making. Works every time.