Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/68

 rebukes the chosen people for practising similar divinations. “My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth unto them .”

Long before this, Jacob had made a different use of rods, employing them as a charm to make his father-in-law’s sheep bear pied and spotted lambs. We find rabdomancy a popular form of divination among the Greeks, and also among the Romans. Cicero in his “De Officiis” alludes to it. “If all that is needful for our nourishment and support arrives to us by means of some divine rod, as people say, then each of us, free from all care and trouble, may give himself up to the exclusive pursuit of study and science .”

Probably it is to this rod that Ennius alludes in the passage quoted in the first book of his “De Divinatione,” wherein he laughs at those who for a drachma will teach the art of discovering treasures.

According to Vetranius Maurus, Varro left a satire on the “Virgula divina,” which has not been preserved. Tacitus tells us that the Germans practised some sort of divination by means of rods. “