Faith in reliable methods of predicting the future, whether by regression analysis, astrology or reading entrails, is a human constant. The ability to know the future lends a veneer of confidence to the present. I knew a guy who lived to play the horses. The remainder of his life – that is, when we wasn’t studying the Daily Racing Form or placing a bet – was time to be endured. He divided the world into Champs and Chumps. “Champs,” he explained, “can see into the future. I’m a Champ. You’re a Chump.” This time of year, pundits adopt a similar taxonomy and apply it to the approaching new year.
Apropos of nothing except wondering what Robert Burton had to say about Christmas, I was
browsing in The Anatomy of Melancholy and came upon this in the section
devoted to “Symptoms of Love”:
“’Tis their only desire,
if it may be done by art, to see their husband’s picture in a glass, they’ll
give anything to know when they shall be married, how many husbands they shall
have, by cromnyomantia, a kind of divination with onions laid on the altar on Christmas
eve, or by fasting on St. Anne’s eve or night, to know who shall be their first
husband, or by amphitormantia, by beans in a cake,
&c., to burn the same.”
It's easy to laugh at cromniomancy
(the preferred modern spelling), but consider the daily horoscope still
published in some newspapers. Or the faith in data science, which in certain
quarters has assumed the authority of a secular religion. Amphitormantia is a
variation on favomancy – throwing beans and reading the future in the resulting
pattern on the floor. The women described by Burton were seeking knowledge of
something important – their future husbands – unlike op-ed writers. Burton goes
on:
“This love is the cause of
all good conceits, neatness, exornations [OED: “the action of adorning,
the condition of being adorned; decoration, embellishment”], plays, elegancies,
delights, pleasant expressions, sweet motions and gestures, joys, comforts,
exultancies, and all the sweetness of our life.”
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