Onomancy is divination by eggs. The word derives from ancient Greek OON «Egg» and Manteia «guessing».

Also called ovomancy, ovamance, ooscopy

Historical importance

The divination was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome. According to Reverendo John Hale in A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (a modest inquiry into the nature of witchcraft), the girls who starred in Salem’s trials played to guess the future using eggs and a glass to determine the profession of their future husbands.

It seems that this was a common way of divination used by girls in New England at the end of the 17th century.

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General folklore about the divination of the egg and «tales of old»

• An egg with double yolk means an unexpected pregnancy or a family death.
• If you break the yolk when the morning egg cascar, the rest of the day will not do well.
• It is said that an egg with the bloody yolk is a sign of imminent death.
• You will soon hear good news if you accidentally fall an egg and break. The news will be bad if you fall an egg and do not break.

How to do occult?

There are several methods to perform a reading with oomancia.

First, the client can choose an egg from those provided by the reader or bring one from home.

Usually, the egg must be reasonably fresh. Next, the client can hold the egg in the hand while concentrating in his question or the reader can pass the egg through the client’s body to tune the egg to the customer’s energies before starting reading.

The readings can be made using only the egg white, with the yolk separated from it. The egg can be cracked and separated, or the peel can be drilled and the clear blow through the hole.

The clear can be dropped in hot water or a temperate surface, so that it is partially or totally smelled, or can be read raw, swirling in cold water or spreading through a flat surface. In the clear forms that the reader interprets similar to molybomancy or carromancy.

In many cases, the yolk is also used. A yolk with blood stains, for example, can confirm that a client suffers some spell or evil eye.

Onomancy has been used to discover information about the fetus. The egg is passed through the mother’s belly and then breaks on a flat surface. A double (or triple) yolk indicates a multiple delivery. Blood spots predict possible abortion or complications in pregnancy. In his life as Tiberiosegún Gayo Suetonio calm, Livia Drucilla incubated an egg with his own hands to determine the sex of his son (14).

Boil and die eggs

Other divination methods consist of boiling and dyeing eggs. The egg can be boiled in colored water and peeling, examining the marks left on the surface of the white by the dye that is filtered through tiny cracks in the peel. symbols They can also be dyed, boil in clear water and break gently, examining the peel cracks in search of images.

Hoodoo practitioners and traditional healers usually resort to oomancy to check the status of a client that has been treated with an egg cleaning technique, using the same egg that was used for the egg cleaning ceremony.

In the nineteenth century, the girls placed an egg near the fireplace and looked to see if a young man came to pick it up. It would be her husband.

Once the divination is completed, there are several methods to get rid of the egg. I have seen suggestions that the egg is eaten to internalize the message, but this would not be something you want to do if it is not a very pleasant message or if the egg has been previously used to get negative energy. In this case, the egg must be buried, preferably at a crossroads, or left at the base of a tree.

Complementary readings

Egg divination in the Association of Independent Readers and Root Workers