The Book of African Divination

The Book of African Divination
Raymond Buckland and Kathleen Binger
Destiny Books
ISBN: 0-89281-364-4
Occult, Divination
Reviewed by Dr. Tami Brady

Over the years, I have collected a number of different tarot decks spanning a variety of different themes and beliefs systems. I was intrigued with the idea of The Book of African Divination as I did not have any African perspectives in my collection. I was pleasantly surprised as I found this set to be truly different from my other tarot decks.
There are a number of unique aspects in The Book of African Divination. This book examines the wide range of divination techniques such as the divining bowl, divination tablets, bone divination sets, and seashell divination throughout several traditional African societies such as the Venda, the Zulu, and the Yoruba. Each of these methods comes with instructions on how to create the equipment needed for these methods, how to undertake such fortunetelling methods, and how to interpret the results.
In addition to this very interesting and useful information, the set comes with a deck of 80 cards to be used for the Tikar Spider Divination. Though these cards can be used in traditional tarot card layouts, traditional West African ways of choosing cards are also explained. I have to admit, I found these methodologies much more fun.
It is of note that the methods discussed in this book tend to have a family-relationship focus as opposed to some fortune telling methods that focus on career, power, and money making activities of an individual.