Our walking, talking divining rods

NBA trades as modern divination.

In Classical Japan, shoulder blades of stags were illuminated with fire to divine the future from patterns of cracks and fissures in the bones. To be fair, the Japanese borrowed it from Mongolians, who had been practicing pyromantic scapulimancy since around 3322 BC, according to radiocarbon analysis of bones found at dig sites in Inner Mongolia.

Generals in Ancient Greece employed seers to accompany their armies so that they could perform hiera and sphagia before battles. Hiera — considered more rudimentary, like a Magic 8 Ball for providing answers to “generic” questions — was the slaughter of a sheep to check out its liver, and sphagia involved slitting the throat of a young female goat to discern the future from the animal’s last movements and the direction blood flowed from its body. Most battles didn’t start until the seers delivered their takes.

Geomancy is an ancient Arabian practice of interpreting a set of 16 figures from sand. Catoptromancy is divination using a mirror, a practice likely dating back to the Ancient Egyptians but used in ancient China and India, picked up again in the European Middle Ages, and peppered through contemporary stories like Snow White. There’s oneiromancy (reading dreams), not to be confused with ornithomancy (reading birds); there’s anthracomancy (reading hot coals) followed by turifumy (reading smoke). There’s the big three of tarot, any sort of psychic reading, and astrology, and then there are NBA trades.

Compared to all of these other methods of divination it’s the only modern one, and the only one that’s been made profitable and considered more logical as time goes on. Moreover, unlike reading entrails, NBA trades as a method for predicting the future have grown, in the pantheon of fandom, all the more popular. Though I suppose there’s still something sacrificial about them.

Karl-Anthony Towns being traded to the Knicks in exchange for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo is the kind of high-stakes, modern day sacrificial move that operates on the same ancient logic as divining.