SHOULDER-BLADE DIVINATION.
Giraldus Cambrensis, seven hundred years ago, speaking of the Flemings of South Pembrokeshire, in his “Itinerary through Wales,” says:—“It is worthy of remark, that these people, from the inspection of the right shoulder of rams which have been stripped of their flesh, and not roasted, but boiled, can discover future events, or those which have passed and remained long unknown. They know, also, what is transpiring at a distant place, by a wonderful art, and a prophetic kind of spirit. They declare also undoubted symptoms of approaching peace and war, murders and fires, domestic adulteries, the state of the King, his life and death. It happened in our time, that a man of those parts, whose name was William Mangunel, a person of high rank, and excelling all others in the aforesaid art, had a wife big with child by her own husband’s grandson. Well aware of the fact, he ordered a ram from his own flock to be sent to his wife as a present from her neighbour; which was carried to the cook and dressed. At dinner the husband purposely gave the shoulder bone of the ram, properly cleaned, to his wife, who was also well skilled in this art, for her examination; when, having for a short time examined the secret marks, she smiled, and threw the oracle down on the table. Her husband dissembling, earnestly demanded the cause of her smiling and the explanation of the matter; overcome by his entreaties, she answered, ‘The man to whose flock this ram belongs has an adulterous wife, at this time pregnant by the commission of incest with his own grandson.’ The husband, with a sorrowful and dejected countenance, replied, ‘You deliver indeed an oracle supported by too much truth, which I have so much more reason to lament, as the ignominy you have published redounds to my own injury.’ The woman thus detected, was unable to dissemble her confusion, betrayed the inward feelings of her mind by external signs; shame and sorrow urging her by turns, and manifesting themselves, now by blushes, now by paleness, and lastly (according to the custom of women), by tears.
The shoulder of a goat was also once brought to a certain person instead of a ram’s, both being alike when cleaned, who, observing for a short time the lines and marks, exclaimed ‘Unhappy cattle that never was multiplied! Unhappy likewise the owner of the cattle, who never had more than three or four in one flock!’
Many persons, a year and a half before the event, foresaw by the means of the shoulder bones the destruction of their country after the decease of King Henry the First, and selling all their possessions, left their homes, and escaped the impending ruin. In our time, a soothsayer, on the inspection of a bone, discovered not only a theft, and the manner of it, but the thief himself, and all the attendant circumstances; he heard also the striking of a bell, and the sound of a trumpet, as if those things which were past were still performing. It is wonderful, therefore, that these bones, like all unlawful conjurations, should represent by a counterfeit similitude to the eyes and ears, things which are past as well as those which are now going on.”
It is evident that the Celts, as well as the Flemings, knew something of Shoulder-bone Reading, for J. G. Campbell, in his “Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands,” an interesting book presented to me by Countess Amherst, states that this mode of divination was practised, like the augury of the ancients, as a profession or trade; and Pennant, in his “Tours in Scotland,” 150 years ago, says that when Lord Loudon was obliged to retreat before the Rebels to the Isle of Skye, a common soldier, on the very moment the battle of Culloden was decided, proclaimed the victory at a distance, pretending to have discovered the event by looking through the bone; and Sir S. R. Meyrick, in his “History of Cardiganshire,” writing one hundred years ago, says that the remains of this custom still existed in Cardiganshire in his time; “but the principal use made of the bone is in the case of pregnant women. The shoulder bone of a ram being scraped quite clean, a hole is burnt in it, and it is then placed over the door of the apartment in which the pregnant woman is, and she is told that the sex of her offspring will be precisely the same as that of the first person who shall enter the room.”