Divination

"Many witches and wizards, talented though they are in the area of loud bangs and smells and sudden disappearings, are yet unable to penetrate the veiled mysteries of the future."

- Sybill Trelawney



Divination was a branch of magic that involved attempting to foresee the future, or gather insights into future events, through various rituals and tools.

Human divination
Witches and wizards who are born with the rare natural gift for prophecy are known as Seers. Non-Seers can learn divination methods, but their success varies. Divination is taught as an elective subject from the third year on at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Learned wizards and witches seem to regard the practice of divination with scepticism. Hermione Granger once described it as "woolly" and "a lot of guesswork," Minerva McGonagall thought it was "one of the most imprecise branches of magic," and before he decided to take on Sybill Trelawney as Divination professor at Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore was inclined to scrap the subject altogether.

Centaur divination
Centaurs have a way of practising divination distinct from that of humans, apparently mainly based around observing the movement of planets, moons, and stars, which they had been doing for centuries by 1996. It can take up to a decade for centaurs to understand what these celestial portents meant. They may attempt to narrow their prediction of when an event will take place by burning certain herbs, such as sage and mallowsweet, and looking for various shapes and symbols in the fumes.

Centaurs seem to have had a low opinion of human methods of divination. Firenze, who taught Divination at Hogwarts, described what "humans call fortune-telling" as "self-flattering nonsense," and voiced the belief that humans obsess over mundane, day-to-day predictions because they are "blinkered and fettered by the limitations of [their] kind."

Known methods

 * Astrology — observing the movements of planets and stars
 * Bird entrails — unknown
 * Cartomancy — reading cards, including playing cards and tarot cards
 * Crystal-gazing — looking into a crystal ball
 * Dream interpretation — analysing the meaning of dreams
 * Fire-omens — unknown, possibly related to observing flames
 * Heptomology — unknown, possibly related to the number seven
 * Palmistry — reading the lines on a person's palm
 * Ornithomancy — unknown, possibly related to birds
 * Ovomancy — cracking open eggs and observing which way the yolks fall
 * Tessomancy — reading tea leaves
 * Xylomancy — analyzing pieces of burning wood

Appearances

 * Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
 * Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (film)
 * Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
 * Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
 * Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film)
 * Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (video game)
 * Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
 * Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (video game)
 * LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4
 * Pottermore