# Augury *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 13 May 1997* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Joel Priddy *13 May 1997, 13:12* vizcacha, I don't recall if anyone other than Silk actually makes any divinations during sacrifice, but I also don't recall anything to give the impression that Silk had noteworthy talent at augury. Of course, this could simply be the publics inability to judge between true predictions and false ones. After all, every paper in the country carries a horoscope. If anyone out there were actually writing an accurate one, who would notice? I do seem to recall (more of my vague recollections... I really need to buy my own copies of these books) Silk or Incus actually commenting how cut-and-dried reading guts were. It doesn't seem to me to be based on an intuitive interpretation, but a categorical reading of specific signs. I think Silk even mentions what some specific signs were that indicated specific readings. Unless the gods use mantis' pink laser to rewrite the augur's entire memory of studying the practice (and that of all other augurs as well, lest they pick up on discrepancies while talking shop), I think this keeps pointing to genuine, actual divination going on here. Vizcacha, you mentioned Mint's telepathy (please provide more information on this, it sounds intriguing and isn't anything I picked up on myself). If Briah's physics allows for telepathy and astral projection/ possesion (ala Mucor), then I suppose there could be a whole host of psychic powers floating out there. And since we've seen in _Urth_of_the_New_Sun_ that the time stream folds all over itself, psychic precognition could easily be an available ability. But might be an overkill explanation. BTW, on re-reading the above message, I just caught the accidental "cut_and_dried" pun. I apologise, I really do. JOEL (Vironese name is a toss-up between gizzard and cephalothorax. BTW, following matis' lead, it seems that we're all from the e.e. cummings subdivision of Viron) Oh, and one last thing- I came across the name Urbis in The_Urth_of_the_New_Sun_ last night, in a story from the brown book ("The Tale of Town that Forgot Fauna"). Granted, this is probably just a general term for "city" in Urth's peculiar take on antiquated language, and probably doesn't mean a thing, but I thought I'd mention it In case this helped anyone else reach any break-throughs in additional Urth-Whorl connections. ---