A Celebration of Magic: Ancient and Modern will be held on Saturday, November 12 at the Penn Museum. The celebration follows the Penn Symposium on Divination. Spells or curses, lucky numbers or lucky charms—do you believe in magic?

If your answer is yes, no or somewhere in between, find out more about magic as practiced throughout time at the Penn Museum’s Celebration of Magic: Ancient and Modern, from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. this Saturday. Guests are invited, if they dare, to meet with a tarot carder or a palm reader, explore the practice of divination around the world through expert talks and a workshop on Etruscan divination, make a magic amulet to take home and join a guided tour of the Museum’s newest exhibition, Magic in the Ancient World. The event is free with Museum general admission.

All Things Divined

The Penn Museum’s public Celebration of Magic follows a free, open scholarly symposium, Divination in the Ancient World, organized by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ancient Studies, running Thursday evening November 10 and all day Friday, November 11 in the Museum’s Rainey Auditorium. While the belief in divination—the possibility of learning the future and/or the will of the god(s)—has long been prevalent throughout the world, scholars tended to avoid studying it until recently.

“The subject of divination was once looked down upon as superstition and not worthy of academic consideration,” noted Grant Frame, conference organizer and co-curator of the Museum’s Magic in the Ancient World exhibition. “Modern scholars have come to see that studying the practice of divination can provide rich insights into the fears and belief systems of ancient peoples. It’s important, also, to note that those divination practices had real effects on people’s behavior.”

Several leading ancient studies scholars share their insights on divination practices in short talks at Saturday’s public celebration: Peter Struck, associate professor of classical studies at Penn (Ancient Greece and Rome), scholar Ann Guinan (Mesopotamia), and Adam Smith, associate curator, Asian section (China). Jean Turfa, consulting scholar in the Mediterranean section and author of Divining the Etruscan World, offers an Etruscan Divination Workshop. Guests will learn how to read the future from the entrails of sheep, detect messages from the gods in the flight of birds, lightning or thunder in the sky and use the power of writing to reveal the future by casting the runes, which were developed from the Etruscan alphabet.