Sortes virtuales: a comparative approach to digital divination

Divination, or at least that branch of it that was once called inductive divin­ation, may perhaps be considered an early form of information technology: it involves an input of information as well as an output of information, and between them, there is a process of random access to a kind of retrieval system. At any rate, divination has proven to be almost the ideal form of religious practice for the internet; in principle, at least, an act of divination may be fully accomplished on a personal computer. This paper comparatively explores a number of perspectives on these relatively recent developments, which may possibly also help us towards a more qualified understanding of traditional forms of divination.