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~ Judith Berman, Author and Anthropologist

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Monthly Archives: November 2015

About filomancy

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by filomancer in Filomancy

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According to William Smith’s classic 1875 tome, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (John Murray, London), ancient Greek botanomanteia was “divination by writing one’s own name on herbs and leaves, which were then exposed to the wind, &c.” Phyllomancy is my neologism (maybe) for writing words onto plant leaves, or leaves of paper, and letting the wind blow them away. Maybe it’s a pessimistic metaphor for the writer’s life, but the thing is you don’t have control of your words after you release the pages from your hands. And the image of wind in the leaves is a happy one. (I’ve spelled it filomancy so it doesn’t seem so much like divination by means of Greek pastry, although that would be a happy form of divination too, if you could eat it afterwards.)

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