Dobby Gibson

The art of fortune telling, once the domain of charismatic shamans and mysterious savants, is now largely a practice of neoconservative Wall Street analysts and half-baked loonies with crystal collections and too many cats. In this way it is not so different from the art of poetry.

Not exactly true in the Far East, where in many places fortune telling remains a discipline as highly respected as medicine. Once illegal in communist China, it has been regaining popularity as state controls relax. There, fortune telling is not done by self-proclaimed “intuitives” who take Visa or MasterCard, but instead by men (mostly) who combine scholarly tools (calendars, charts, maps) with acts of chance, like the throwing of sticks.

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