Different cultures, across the world and across the centuries, have come up with different divination techniques. (Divination is the art of predicting the future, if we can call it art. It's fortune-telling.) The ancient Romans had, among others, two really bizarre divination techniques (well, I suppose they're all bizarre): the observation of birds' flight and the inspection of the entrails of a dead animal.
I don't know how either one worked, but the second one seems to me more puzzling. With birds' flight at least you have three variables:
1. The type of bird
2. The number of birds
3. The direction or trajectory of the flight
That gives you some room for interpretation, however baseless and arbitrary. But what exactly did people see in the bloody entrails of a dead animal? Don't they all look the same, a disgusting mess of guts and organs?
Divination is not confined to the past. In fact it's still going strong. When you go to a temple in Taiwan, you'll see some people tossing two little wooden blocks (shaped like moon crescents) on the floor. Each piece of wood has a flat side and a rounded side. If both pieces land on the flat side or the rounded side, it means that the deity disagrees with whatever it is that you asked. If the blocks land one flat and one rounded, it's thumbs up. (I would've thought it'd be the other way round.) It's just a slightly more elaborate form of coin-tossing.
(A word of advice. If the temple is crowded, as they sometimes are, watch out for pickpockets. You might walk out of the temple spiritually enriched but materially impoverished.)
This sort of divination only allows for a yes or no type of question, obviously. So while you can ask if you should get a haircut, or if the Detroit Lions will win the Superbowl next year (and I can tell you now that ain't gonna happen), you can't ask for the lottery numbers, or what you should have for dinner (unless you go through all the options one by one).
For a more nuanced response, bibliomancy is the way to go. Bibliomancy is a form of divination where you pick, completely at random, a passage from a book, and that passage is supposed to give you guidance.
The most popular books for this purpose are the Bible, the Quran and the Torah. People have also used Homer's epic poems and the complete works of William Shakespeare, but you can use any book (or books) you want, really.
Personally I use Chris Claremont's run on The Uncanny X-Men (1975-1991). Everything you need to know about life is right there. (Although, admittedly, a lot of the advice that you get seems to involve annihilating people through the use of superpowers. I mean, I would, but unfortunately I don't have any superpower. I really think I should have superpowers, though.)
A form of bibliomancy popular in medieval times was called sortes virgilianae, where you picked passages from Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid. Virgil was a Roman poet (well, I say Roman, but he was from northern Italy), and The Aeneid tells the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas, whom the Romans liked to believe was their distant ancestor. (Of course it's all mythology.)
Quick digression. When Dante, in the Inferno, imagines that he's visiting Hell, it's Virgil that acts as his travel guide. While, on the one hand, the fictional Dante is full of praise for his companion (a praise that reflected real-life Dante's sentiments about Virgil), as evident from this shameless brown-nosing:
O light and honor of the other poets,
May my long years of study, and that deep love
That made me search your verses, help me now
You are my teacher, the first of all my authors
And you alone the one from whom I took
The noble style that was to bring me honor
on the other hand Dante still put Virgil in Hell, being a pagan. (As far as Dante was concerned, anyone who lived before the advent of Christ ended up in Hell, regardless of their conduct on Earth.) What an ungrateful bastard. Thanks a fucking bunch, Dante! Go find your own way out of Hell. Good luck with that. And no, I'm not telling you where the rapists are. (That was me doing Virgil, in case that wasn't clear.)
Back to bibliomancy. Nowadays, if you'd like to consult Virgil you don't have to buy The Aeneid. There's a website. Every time you open the web page it gives you a different quote at random. (The website uses an old English translation from 1907.)
Of course I regard any form of divination as cow poop. But while bibliomancy serves no purpose whatsoever as far as divination goes (nothing does, given that there's no such thing), perhaps it has some usefulness as a sort of psychological experiment.
You get some really vague response from the book, something that could mean pretty much anything, and then you interpret it in a way that suits your wishes, thus revealing what you really thought all along. (That's how those who claim to be clairvoyant prey on gullible people. You want to keep it as vague as possible.)
A while ago I found this job online. I wasn't sure if I should've applied for it or not (I was obscenely underqualified for it), so I thought I'd ask Virgil (or, rather, the website's logarithm). I got a really weird, sinister, ominous quote about death and destruction. Either Virgil was telling me not to apply for the job, or he foretold my own death and destruction. I went with the first one.
