Hello beautiful people, and welcome back on the route! 🙂

Today, on our journey of discovery through the beauties and curiosities of our beautiful planet,  we’re going back in time!

To do what? – you might ask…well…

Today we are going to delve into the unknown!

While traveling in the past decade, every now and then something caught my eyes: people around the world have so so sooo many traditions that originates from popular belief and ancient myths!

Bolivians reading coca leaves, Peruvians going around the house with incense blessing every room, Cuban pouring rum on the floor before celebrating, Japanese people observing how the Sakura flowers flow into the rivers, africans reading the migratory birds patterns…

Today I’ll bring you through basically every continent, to look at one strange little habit that every single human culture seems to share: the need to read the unknown!

Reading the unknown, the future, what’s coming… it is something that fascinates every human!

Economists try to anticipate the markets, meteorologists the weather, but even us, in our small little lives, we are used to think about the future and all the future scenarios that might or might not come true in front of our eyes 🙂

When you are traveling, that is even more true:

Will the weather hold? Is this the right turn? Should we stay another week or move on? Will hotels be fully booked?

Nowadays we have weather apps and Google Maps and thousands of other apps for that.

But for thousands of years, people had nothing of the sort, and they were facing much bigger questions than “left or right at the roundabout”.

So they got creative…. Really creative!

They read bones, leaves, stars, birds, dreams, numbers and cracked turtle shells, all to get the same thing we still want today: a little less fog about what’s coming 🙂

Below are 9 of the most fascinating ways humans have tried to do it, with a few facts along the way that genuinely surprised me while putting this together.

Let’s dive right into it! 🙂

1. Reading Dreams

The Oldest ‘What Does It Mean?’ of All

Have you ever woken up completely convinced a dream was trying to tell you something?

Congratulations, you’re in extremely good company.

People have been doing exactly that for at least 6,000 years.

In ancient Egypt and Greece for example, dreams weren’t just brain noise.

They were treated as messages: from ancestors, from spirits, sometimes straight from the gods.

Last year we were visiting the British museum in London, and we surprisingly stumbled upon the world’s oldest surviving dream manual is an Egyptian papyrus called the Dream Book (Papyrus Chester Beatty III).

As it was explained by our audio-guide, the papyrus was written around the reign of Ramesses II, roughly 1279–1213 BC, and it lists about 108 different dreams, each marked simply as “good” or “bad”.

The bad ones were literally written in red ink so you’d spot the danger faster (lol) 😅

Every entry starts with the same line: “If a man sees himself in a dream…”

And the interpretations are wonderfully specific…

Dreaming of submerging in a river? Good, it means being cleansed of all evils.

Seeing your own face in a mirror? Bad, it means a second wife is coming (make of that what you will, I don’t know exactly what it meant ahah).

The point of all this was never a literal translation though…

A dream image stood in for something else.

Teeth falling out meant anxiety, a snake could mean deep fear… or ancient wisdom instead, depending entirely on the dreamer and the dream-reader xD

What I find amazing is how little this instinct has changed.

Some 3,000 years after that Egyptian scribe, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and argued our dreams hide our buried wishes and fears. His former student Carl Jung went a step further, calling dreams symbolic letters from the unconscious.

Different ages, yet similar thoughs… and to all of us even today, once in a while happens a dream so strong to which we are unconsciously brought to give meaning!

Quick Tip: If a dream keeps nagging at you, the simplest old trick still works best: keep a notebook by the bed and write it down the second you wake up, before it dissolves. If you believe in dreams and would rather have someone help you untangle the symbolism, today there platforms like Nebula who can connect you with readers who work with dream imagery and personal stories:)

2. Oracle Bones

The Ritual That Accidentally Invented Chinese Writing

As a Chinese student, this is hands down, my favourite story in the whole article.

Over 3,000 years ago, during China’s Shang Dynasty, royal priests practised something called “scapulomancy”.

The method was strict and a little brutal. A question was carved into the flat shoulder blade of an ox or the underside of a turtle shell. Then a red-hot metal rod was pressed into it until the bone cracked.

That sharp crack was treated as the voice of the ancestors answering back. The king read the shape of the splits to decide if the omen was good or bad, then the bones were carefully kept as official records rather than thrown away.

So far, fascinating yes, but you might be thinking it was probably expected…

Let’s fast-forward to 1899 now. 

A Chinese scholar named Wang Yirong falls ill and is sold a traditional medicine called “dragon bones,” old bones meant to be ground into powder and swallowed.

Except his weren’t ground up yet…

When Wang, who knew ancient scripts, received his “dragon bones”, he noticed strange symbols carved all over them.

Those symbols turned out to be the oldest known Chinese writing, more than three millennia old!

For years, pharmacies had been grinding up ancient inscribed oracle bones and selling them as medicine, and nobody had realised what they were destroying^^

Let that sink in. People were literally eating the earliest chapters of Chinese history as a cold remedy: mindblowing to say the least! ^^

Today these bones are studied at places like Cambridge University Library, and they’re the reason we know so much about Shang kings, eclipses and harvests.

Quick Tip: The Chinese character for “to divine” (卜, bǔ) is thought to be a little picture of one of those bone cracks, and is even said to echo the cracking sound 🙂

3. The I Ching

The 3,000-Year-Old Book Hiding in Your Computer

If oracle bones were the dramatic version, the I Ching is the elegant one.

The I Ching, or “Book of Changes” in English, is one of the oldest surviving texts on Earth, used for at least 2,500 years in China and still consulted today.

The whole philosophy of this ancient book fits in one sentence: nothing stays fixed.

Everything is always changing!

The book is built on Yin and Yang. Yin is receptive, yielding, dark, inward. Yang is active, bright, outward. Each gets drawn as a line: a solid line for Yang, a broken one for Yin.

Stack six of those lines and you get a figure called a hexagram. There are exactly 64 of them, each with a name, an image and a piece of commentary.

Traditionally you’d toss yarrow stalks to build your hexagram. These days most people just flip three coins, ask their question, and read what comes up.

Say you’re wondering whether to quit your job. If your reading lands on Hexagram 39 (which represents Obstruction), the answer is, gently… probably not yet 😅

In 1703, the great German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, the man who co-invented calculus, was sent a diagram of those 64 hexagrams by a missionary in China.

He looked at the broken and solid lines, and recognised his own invention staring back at him: binary code. Read each broken line as 0 and each solid line as 1, and the 64 hexagrams line up perfectly with the binary numbers 0 to 63.

The same system of ones and zeros running the device you’re reading this article right now, was sketched out, in a different costume, by Chinese sages 3,000 years ago: crazy, isn’t it? 🙂

Quick Tip: You don’t need yarrow stalks to try it. Three coins (heads = 3, tails = 2), tossed six times, builds you a hexagram in about two minutes. It’s a surprisingly nice way to slow down and actually think a decision through. 😎

4. Greek Augury

Reading the Birds (and the Words We Still Use)

The Ancient Greeks and Romans must have lived on their nerves, because their stories are packed with omens…

Their gods, they believed, sent messages through the natural world. And their absolute favourite messengers were birds!

Certain birds belonged to certain gods (the owl to Athena, the eagle to Zeus), so the way birds flew, fed and called could all be read as a sign. The priests who did this reading were called “augurs”.

There’s a famous Trojan War tale where a snake devours a sparrow and her chicks during a sacrifice, and a seer uses the scene to predict exactly how long the war will last. (He was right, apparently.)

Now here’s the part I love, because it’s hiding in plain sight in English.

Every time you say something is “auspicious”, you’re using a word that literally meant “bird-watching” in Latin (auspicium, from avis = bird).

And when a president is inaugurated? That word comes from Roman officials being installed in office only after an augur had checked the birds for approval. The bird ritual faded, the word stayed.

Even the founding of Rome supposedly came down to birds: Romulus and Remus settled their argument over where to build the city by counting vultures in the sky.

(The Greeks also went a grislier route, slicing open sacrificed animals to read their livers and guts for divine approval. We’ll leave that one there 😅)

5. Rune Casting

Yes, Your Phone’s Bluetooth Is Named After This

Up in the cold north, the ancient Germanic and Norse peoples had their own system: runes.

Runes were letter-like symbols carved into stone, wood, bone or metal. They were an alphabet, but each symbol also carried a deeper meaning. Fehu stood for wealth and prosperity. Kenaz stood for knowledge and insight.

In Norse mythology, runes weren’t invented by people at all. The god Odin was said to have hung himself from the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine nights to win their secret wisdom, then gifted them to humankind.

Many Vikings trusted rune casting to read the future, though the meanings were never fixed. So much depended on finding the right person to interpret them.

And here’s the fact that makes runes weirdly modern.

Look at the Bluetooth logo on your phone right now. That little symbol is a bind rune: two Viking-age runes merged together.

It’s the initials of Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, a 10th-century Danish king who united warring tribes into one kingdom. When engineers in the 1990s built a technology to unite different devices, they named it after him, and stamped his runic initials (ᚼ and ᛒ) on every Bluetooth-enabled gadget on the planet.

So a thousand-year-old Norse king is quietly riding around in billions of pockets today. Ahah, since I heart this story, now I think about this every time my headphones connect 🙂

6. Coca-Leaf Reading

The Living Andean Tradition

Let’s cross the world to South America, where reading coca leaves is still very much alive among the Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Andes.

The belief is that the coca plant is a sacred messenger, a gift meant to help people stay in balance with each other, with their ancestors, with nature and with the earth itself.

The reading is done by a trained practitioner called a yatiri. They cast the leaves, then study how they fall: the orientation, the grouping, the colour, the condition of each leaf. Meaning comes from the whole arrangement, not a single leaf.

What I find lovely is that it’s usually not about predicting some dramatic future.

It’s more about the present: figuring out which relationships are out of balance, which obligations have been neglected, and how to gently set things right again.

Personally, out of fun I asked a witch to predict my future: she said I would have stayed all my life with my girlfriend of that time (we broke up 3 months after), and we would have had 2 babies (never had one yet with no-one xD).

I guess, they mostly say to people what they want to hear, to make them feel good and at ease 😉

Said that, coca is so woven into Andean life that the leaves are also offered to Pachamama (Mother Earth) and to the mountain spirits, in ceremonies of gratitude. It’s less fortune-telling and more a way of staying connected to everything around you 🙂

7. Numerology:

Pythagoras, a Secret Society,

and a Fear of Beans

Numbers feel cold and objective to us, yet to the ancients, they were alive with meaning!

The big name here is the Greek mathematician Pythagoras (yes, the triangle guy from high-scool xD).

His famous claim was simple and enormous: “All is number.” He believed numbers were the hidden architecture of the entire universe.

And his followers, the Pythagoreans, took this very seriously. They were basically a secret society built around maths, with some genuinely odd house rules.

One of them: a strict taboo against eating beans 😅 Nobody’s fully sure why, but the rule was real, and they lived by it.

There’s even a legend that when one member discovered irrational numbers (numbers that can’t be written as a neat fraction), it so rattled the group’s worldview that he supposedly didn’t survive the revelation. Probably a tall tale, but it tells you how much numbers mattered to them.

Here’s a fact that surprises most people, though.

The numerology in magazines today, the kind that turns your name and birthday into a single “Life Path Number”, isn’t really Pythagoras’s system at all. That letter-to-number method was mostly invented in the late 1800s and then attached to his famous name for prestige and marketing^^

Still, the basic idea is ancient and global. Egypt, India, Babylon and China all played with the symbolic weight of numbers. A 3 for creativity and growth, a 5 for change and freedom, and so on… 

Scientific? Not really. Fascinating? For many, incredibly!

8. Astrology

Why We Say ‘Disaster’,

‘Jovial’ and ‘Influenza’

European astrology has shadowed Western life for two thousand years, and it rests on one core belief: that the movements of the planets and stars mirror patterns down here on Earth.

At the centre of it all sit the 12 signs of the zodiac, each tied to questions we never stop asking: Who am I? Why do I act like this? Where am I in my life?

Even me, as a person who never read an horoscope in his life, I found historical and cultural details about astrology so irresistibly curious: astrology is so buried inside everyday our language, even long after most people stopped believing in it, that is crazy!

Don’t believe me? Then, check out the etimology of those words:

• “Disaster” comes straight from dis-astro: a “bad star.” A catastrophe was literally an event happening under an unlucky alignment.

• “Influenza” is Italian for “influence.” People once blamed epidemics on the influence of the stars, and the name stuck to the illness forever.

• Feeling jovial? That’s the cheerful “influence” of Jupiter (Jove). Saturnine and gloomy? Blame Saturn. Mercurial and quick? Mercury.

We’re all walking around quoting astrology every single day without realising it, ahah.

Oh, and one more for the doubters: because the Earth slowly wobbles on its axis, the constellations have drifted by roughly one whole sign in the two thousand years since the zodiac was set. So the star sign on your birthday chart and the actual constellation the sun was in… don’t quite line up anymore 😉

9. Tarot:

The Fortune-Telling Deck

That Began as a Card Game

We finish in Renaissance Italy, with the most recognisable one of the bunch: the tarot!

And straight away, the biggest surprise of all: tarot wasn’t invented for fortune-telling!

In the mid-1400s, wealthy Italian families like the Visconti and Sforza of Milan commissioned beautiful hand-painted decks to play a trick-taking card game called tarocchi, a bit like a fancy ancestor of bridge. 

The oldest surviving deck, the gorgeous Visconti-Sforza tarot from around 1450, painted in gold leaf, lives today partly in the Morgan Library in New York.

For its first three centuries, tarot was simply… cards. (And in parts of France, Austria and Italy, people still play tarot as a normal card game to this day!)

The fortune-telling came much later. In 1781, a Frenchman named Antoine Court de Gébelin published a theory that the cards secretly held ancient Egyptian wisdom. He had zero evidence, but the romantic idea caught fire, and tarot’s mystical second life began:)

The deck most readers use has 78 cards in two groups:

• 22 Major cards (like The Fool and The Wheel of Fortune), standing for the big, fateful turns of a life.
• 56 Minor cards, dealing with the everyday stuff: small worries, moods, choices.

Today many people specialised in reading tarots, making it one of the most elaborate services of modern divination available today. Here you can see a list of tarot cards and find a community of passioned people around them 🙂

How it works? In a reading, the reader shuffles, lays the cards in a set pattern, and each position means something different: one for your past, one for your present, one for a possible future. Then they read the whole picture together 🙂

So… Why Do We

All Keep Doing This?

Here’s what struck me most after going down this rabbit hole.

Nine wildly different cultures, separated by oceans and thousands of years, all landed on the same instinct. Birds in Greece, bones in China, leaves in the Andes, stars in Europe. Different tools, identical urge to read the future!

The answer I gave to myself, is that the human brain is a pattern-finding machine!

Our brains like to hunt for meaning everywhere, sometimes where there isn’t any, because spotting patterns kept our ancestors alive!

A rustle in the grass might be the wind, but the ones who read it as a lion lived longer… pure evolutionary traits!

Add to that the simple, universal discomfort of not knowing what’s coming. Uncertainty is genuinely hard for most humans to sit with.

So we reach for anything that gives us a feeling of control, a sense that tomorrow can be read, nudged, prepared for, even if just for entertainment!

When thinking throughly about it, we never really stopped attempting to read the future!

We just swapped the priests for new specialists.

A king once read animal guts before a battle.

A CEO now reads spreadsheets and market forecasts before a product launch!

The tool went from a liver to a laptop, but the question underneath (“what happens next, and am I ready?”) is word for word the exact same.

Some of these old systems are also still genuinely alive.

Ifá for example, a Yoruba divination tradition from West Africa, is recognised by UNESCO as cultural heritage of humanity and is practised by millions today, from Nigeria to Cuba to Brazil.

On the other hand, some modern diviners now even take consultations over WhatsApp;)

Conclusions 🙂

And here we are at the end 🙂

What I love about putting a list like this together is realising how little has actually changed about us humans. Yes, the ages changed, our technology changed, our clothes and our world, but innermost we are the same as we were thousands of years ago, namely…humans!

Nowadays we like to think we’re the rational, app-powered generation that left all this behind.

But the moment things get uncertain (a big decision, a move, a leap into the unknown), we still look for a sign, a system, a second opinion from somewhere (even if that’s just google!).

Whether it came from a turtle shell, a star chart or a deck of painted cards, every single one of these traditions was really doing the same quiet thing: giving a person permission to stop, ask the question honestly, and actually sit with it for a moment before deciding.

That pause might be the most human thing we’ve got. And it’s the real reason these practices have never really gone away, at least the way I see it 🙂

Before you go, I’d love to ask you:

• Have you ever had a tarot, astrology or dream reading done? Did any of it land?
• Which of these 9 traditions surprised you the most?
• Is there a divination practice from your own culture I should’ve included?

Let us know in the comments below! 😀

And here are a few other articles you might enjoy next:

• 7 Surprising Curiosities about Life in Tokyo (that make you Think)
• 7 Surprising Fun Facts about Love and Relationships in China
• 7 Surprising Curiosities About Athens (Beyond the Acropolis)

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article! 🙂