Habitual coin flipper.

That subtitle was a mouthful wa’nit? lol.

Apologies in advance if this essay is a lil on the lengthy side. It couldn’t be helped.

Today, I want to discuss divination and its often overlooked or outright refuted foundational utility in Black Culture. We’re taking a break from social critique, but fret not, my concrete soapbox will be back on occasion.

Divination is often superficially regarded as baseless games of chance or fanatical superstition. A great many of the old anthropological research efforts written to account for divination systems in a global sense, but especially in the context of African/African Diaspora divination systems, are/were written by agnostic researchers seeking the study of religious systems to purport these functions as un-objective evidence to the illegitimacy of the Christian Church.

Philip M. Peek of African Divination Systems cites from Nuer Religion by Anthropologist EE. Evans-Pritchard that “Most anthropologists were raised in strongly religious homes, but as adults they became atheists or agnostics for whom religion was an illusion( Evans-Pritchard 1965:15) Why then would they study religion?

They sought, and found in primitive religions a weapon which could, they thought, be used with deadly effect against Christianity. If primitive religion could be explained away as an intellectual aberration, as a mirage induced by emotional stress, or its social function, it was implied that the higher religions could be discredited and disposed of in the same way. (Evans-Pritchard 1967:15)”1

So we start right out of the gate with— color us surprised— personal bias-informed, institutionally-supported research by academics who supposedly only wanted objective, fact-based accounts of these systems and their functions within their work. We see that to this day; We can’t escape YouTube thumbnails of “investigative journalists” with a camera and a t-shirt microphone, documenting the religious or magic-using faction of a tribe or homogenized society in a distant land (that they freely traveled to, with sustained disdain masked as skepticism, might I add), with which their pretentious derision drips throughout the exposé (okay, I lied, put your clothes back on, there will be some social critique). Unfortunately, this cultural insensitivity is the case much of the time; however, in their academically-funded crusade against their upbringing (because let’s keep it a buck here and call it what it is — Evans-Pritchard did), they failed to recognize (or more so intentionally rejected) the way divination has played a part in the development and social structure of the world as we know it. Divination informs familial, societal, and cultural structure in ways easily overlooked due to connotative meaning. I want to focus on its impact, support, and influence on the Black community.

And…well, how it has kept us alive.

Let’s talk about some key elements that substantiate the point before we get to it.