Papyromancy: Folding the Future
Tuesday February 26, 2008 8:26 AM
There are many lesser-known types of divination. Acutomancy is divination via sharp objects, in which one drops seven needles or pins on a table in order to read the patterns. Aleuromancy is divination via fortune cookies, carromancy is divination via melting wax, and ichnomancy is divination via footprints. Papyromancy is divination via the folding of paper.
The word "papyromancy" is said to come from the Greek word "papyrus," meaning paper, but it's possible that it originated in Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: "Säure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers — the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper." No online examples can be found of divination via rolling papers, perhaps because the word "papyromancy" has more recently been used to describe divination via the folding of paper money.
Most notably, if one folds a U.S. $20 bill in a certain way, it's possible to see images from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The burning Pentagon can be seen on one side, and the buring World Trade Center towers can be seen on the other. Folding the $50 bill in the same way produces an image of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, and folding a $100 bill in the same way produces an image of the smoke rising from the World Trade Center. Other ways to fold the $20 bill reveal the words "OSAMA" and "ARAFAT."
These prophetic images were unfortunately not discovered until after September 11. And apparently, "Some consider folding money to retrodict the past to be nothing more than a parlor game. A true papyromancer, they say, can crumple up any piece of paper, unfold it, and predict the future from the creased lines..."
