CLASSICAL CORNER

FORTEANA FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD COMPILED BY BARRY BALDWIN

306: VIRGIL TIPS (NOT VIRGIL TIBBS) “And (as I open the book at random again): ‘A barrier to rational thinking, in anything like a final sense, is continuity, because of which only fictitiously can anything be picked out of a nexus of all things phenomenal, to think about’” – Damon Knight, Introduction to Fort’s Books. Knight is here practising bibliomancy of a sort. Divining one’s future from opening a book and finding a specific passage was one of various ancient attempts to detect an individual’s future, as do moderns with horoscopes and the like. It may be seen as the literary equivalent of Tarot cards or planchette and Ouija Boards, these latter two being employed in the later Roman Empire (FT262:23). First come the Sortes Homericæ, sentences plucked from a…

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Fortean Times (Digital) - 1 Issue, 454

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