Nomancy
Alternatively Nomency, Onomancy, and Onomantics.
From the Greek onoma ('name') and mantia ('prophecy'), it is a method of divination and prophecy by interpreting a person's name.
The notion that an analogy existed between men's names and their fortunes is supposed to have originated with the Pythagoreans.
"Two leading rules in the science of Onomancy were first, that an even number of vowels in a man's name signifies something amiss in his left side; an uneven number a similar affection on the right; so between the two, perfect sanity was little to be expected. Secondly, of two competitors, that one would prove successful the numeral letters in whose name when summed up exceeded the amount of those in the name of his rival; and this was one of the reasons that enabled Achilles to triumph over Hector." Edward Smedley, The Occult Sciences (1855).
Variant forms of Nomancy are Onomantics, where a person's character is the focus of the divinatory pursuit, and Onomatomancy, where the results of letter interpretation are applied to numerological and/or gematric systems.
In Thomas Dyche and William Pardon's New General English Dictionary (1740), an entry for Nomancy states:
"A pretended divination or foretune-telling, by the disposition of letters that form a person's name."
Simple modes of this type of divination were very popular in Europe and England in the Middle Ages, where they were associated with love and marriage. There were various methods for a young lady to foretell the name or initials of her future husband, and/or how soon the marriage will take place. If three young maidens sharing the same name sit at a table together, one of them will get married before year's end. To divine your future love, write the candidates names on slips of paper and . . . there may be more than hundred different ways to prophetically select the appropriate slip of paper and/or name of one's potential sweetheart; roll them up inside pieces of bread and throw them into a bowl of water the first one that rises up is the correct one; put the slips of paper on a table and blow on it the one that remains on the table is the appropriate one; throw the slips face down into a basin filled with water, the first slip that turns face up is the chosen one; if none of them turns, none of those will be your love, but somebody else, and so forth.
Most of these Nomantic practices endured to modern times, and its techniques hardly changed. Sometimes the term Nomancy is also used for divination by a person's features.
See Acutomancy, Divination, Coscinomancy, Cleidomancy, Augur, Stoichomancy, Dowsing, Tarot, Heptameron, Demonology, Sortilege, Demonomancy, Tephramancy, Anemoscopy, Eromancy, Austromancy, Chaomancy, Roadomancy, Capnomancy, Pyromancy, Meteormancy, Ceraunoscopy, Casting Black Magic Spells, Commanding Spirits, The Tarot Store, The Chakra Store, Divination & Scrying Tools and Supplies, and The Pyramid Collection.
Sources: ; (1) Dunwich, Gerina, A Wiccan's Guide to Prophecy and Divination, Carol Publishing Group; (2) Shipley, Joseph T., Dictionary of Early English, Littlefield, Adams & Co. Publishers; (3) Hellweg, Paul, The Insomniac's Dictionary: The Last Word On The Odd Word, Ivy Books; (4) Walker, Charles, The Encyclopedia of the Occult, Random House Value; (5) Johnstone, Jane, and Pilkington, Maya (editors), The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Fortune Telling, Sterling.
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