Thank you very much for this introduction and for having me today here.

I hope I can bring you some ideas. You are working full time on about divination for me, it's a new interest.

I'm open to your comments and if you have questions feel free to ask whenever you want.

So, today I am bringing a little bit of Mongolia into this course and I will do it talking about some key concepts

that can show how divination and in general the perception of the world changed from the period of the early Mongols

when the Mongols were not yet an empire to the formation of a united empire and then what was their legacy to different parts of Eurasia.

And we will start from the chronological beginning.

So, about divination in Mongol culture has been written a lot. Divination was very important and there are quite a few texts

mostly from a period later than the one I'm researching, a lot from the Qing period, from the 18th, 19th century.

Quite a few in Europe, especially about 30-40 texts related to astrology and divination are kept in the library in Copenhagen

and they have been studied in depth. One of the first scholars, one of the most important to study them was Charles Boden

who is also the one who presented the first categorization, the first kind of formulation of categories for Mongolian divination.

And he divides the types of divination among the Mongols into two types.

That is, divination related to, dependent from astrology and astrological notions and divination independent from astrology.

This second type is again divided into two subcategories that is unintentional divination and intentional divination.

The difference between two categories is in the intentionality or introducing the signs, of course.

The unintentional divination is the understanding of omens and the intentional divination, we will see there are different categories,

but it's basically everything related to signs that are produced by the divination experts.

I have been researching a little bit traces of these kinds of divination in documents related to the early Mongols

and of course the most important text is the Secret History of the Mongols. Perhaps you have heard about it.

It's a text from probably from the half of the 13th century, the date is not sure, and it's about the region of the Mongols

and the region of Czijskan and there is a lot about this kind of unintentional divination.

There are a lot of omens that are mostly related to animals. So for example the barking of dogs or the movement,

how the horses move and so on. And they have quite a symbolic value. So here I have chosen one example that is a little bit,

that is interesting because it's a little bit in between. Dream divination is considered the category of intentional divination,

but in the Secret History of the Mongols we find these omens related to the behavior of animals very frequently as appearance in dreams.

And they have very symbolic meanings because these dreams are prophecies that come always when the charisma of Czijskan must be symbolized.

So this, a little bit of context because this is a very interesting passage. It's the moment when Czijskan separates from his one friend

Jamukha and so basically he's creating a group, he's leaving the society, the social group he's in, and he's putting together a new group

that will be the beginning then of his confederation. And we see that one important aspect of prophecies or omens in general

is that they justify the change of established social structure because here we are speaking about rebellion.

So Kocsi is going against his family ties against the clan to unite Czijskan.

So there is this idea among the Mongols that was also used during the empire that basically divination or prophecy or science

and the understanding of it, they delegate agency. So they basically put the responsibility of social change upon heaven.

One interesting, there are two interesting things here if you want to read the whole text. Of course the color of the animals,

it's not casual, there is always a reference to the white or the yellow, it's a symbol of, well it's a relation to light.

And light is connected to divine charisma and to heaven, so that's why the animals have this color. And one important thing,

if you see the last sentence, that these signs are revealed to Kocsi who is the one having the dream.

So basically this dream doesn't need a mediator, there is no need for a divination expert to interpret this dream.

And this is very characteristic of all the examples we find in the Secret History.

So the fact that the omen is so clear that it doesn't need an expert to interpret it, it's probably related to the kind of source.

We are speaking about the region of Cingiscanum, so it must be clear to everybody that he is the leader and that he is the founder of an empire.

That's why there is always this rhetoric of self-evidence and this stress on the heavenly science.

This is about unintentional divinations. So now let's go a little bit on the side of intentional divination.

There are a lot of different kinds. Here I have put just a few so that you see a little bit of Mongolian language on the screen.

And the scapulimansi, of course, it's the most characteristic and it will be used in the period of the United Empire and even later as a symbol of Mongolian identity.

We will see later that the Mongol emperors are almost expected to practice scapulimansi.

So it's a very Mongolian way of divination.

One interesting kind of divination is the one with coins that you don't need to understand Mongolian, but of course you see that there is a reference to China.

So we see that the divination practices among the Mongols came from different parts. It was very syncretic.