The questions made by the living were very intelligible; but the answers
of the dead were not so easily understood; the priests, therefore, and
the magicians made it their business to explain them. They retired into
deep caves, where the darkness and silence resembled the state of death,
and there fasted, and lay upon the skins of the beasts they had
sacrificed, and then gave for answer the dreams which most affected
them; or opened a certain book appointed for that purpose, and gave the
first sentence that offered.[10] At other times the priest, or any person
who came to consult, took care at his going out of the cave, to listen
to the first words he should hear, and these were to be his answer. And
though they had not the most remote relation to the mutter in question,
they were twisted so many ways, and their sense so violently wrested,
that they made them signify almost anything they pleased. At other times
they had recourse to a number of tickets, on which were some words or
verses, and these being thrown into an urn, the first that was taken out
was delivered to the family.[11] Health, prosperity in worldly affairs,
and all that was intermixed in the good or evil of this world were
regulated by the responses or signs which these equivocal, not to say
less than absurd, means afforded, of prying into the womb of future
events.


AUGURY, OR DIVINATIONS DRAWN FROM THE FLIGHT AND FEEDING OP BIRDS.

The superstitious fondness of mankind for searching into futurity has
given rise to an infinite variety of extravagant follies. The Romans,
who were remarkably fertile in these sorts of demonological inventions,
suggested numerous ways of divination. With them all Nature had a voice,
and the most senseless beings, and most trivial things, the most