Aleuromancy
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
A species of divination practised with flour. Sentences were written on slips of paper, each of which was rolled up in a little ball of flour. These were thoroughly mixed up nine times, and divided amongst the curious, who were waiting to learn their fate. Apollo, who was supposed to preside over this form of divination, was surnamed Aleuromantis. So late as the nineteenth century the custom lingered in remoter districts. Alexander ab Alexandro : (Alessandro Alessandri.) A Neapolitan lawyer, who died in 1523. He published a dissertation on the marvellous, entitled De Rebus Admirabilibus, in which he recounts prodigies which happened in Italy , dreams which were verified, the circumstances connected with many apparitions and phantoms, which he says that he beheld himself. He followed this dissertation with his celebrated work Genialium Dierum, in which he recounts with much credulity many prodigious happenings. He tells how one evening he set out to join a party of several friends at a house in Rome which had been haunted for a long time by spectres and demons. In the middle of the night, when all of them were assembled in one chamber with many lights, there appeared to them a dreadful spectre, who called to them in a loud voice, and threw about the ornaments in the room. One of the most intrepid of the company advanced in front of the spectre bearing a light, on which it disappeared. Several times afterwards the same apparition re-entered through the door. Alexander, who had been lying on a couch, found that the demon had slid underneath it, and on rising from it, he beheld a great black arm appear on a table in front of him. By this time several of the company had retired to rest, and the lights were out, but torches were brought in answer to their cries of alarm, on which the spectre opened the door, slid past the advancing domestics, and disappeared. Alexander visited many other haunted houses , but he appears to have been easily duped, and by no means the sort of person to undertake psychical research . (See Avicenna .)
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Spence's Encyclopaedia of Occultism described aleuromancy in 1920 as a dying custom, "so late as the nineteenth century" lingering in remote districts, and that is still the position: no revival has occurred, and the word survives mainly in lists of divination methods. The one thing that has moved is the modern habit of pointing to the fortune cookie as the nearest living relative of a message baked in dough, though its actual ancestry runs through the Japanese tsujiura senbei of nineteenth-century Kyoto, taken up by bakeries in California around 1900, not through Greek or Roman practice. The claim that Apollo bore the epithet Aleuromantis is repeated from older compilations and rests on thin ancient evidence.
Written for this edition, 2026.