Favomancy is a form of divination that used to be practized by seers in Russia, and in particular, the Ubykh people. The practice involves throwing beans on the ground and interpreting the patterns in which the beans fall; it is therefore a type of cleromancy. Russian methods of favomancy may still exist; however, since the departure of the Ubykhs from the Caucasus in 1864, details of exactly how Ubykh soothsayers interpreted the patterns formed by the beans are lost.

Etymology

Favomancy comes from the Latin faba "bean" and formed by analogy with the names of similar divination methods such as alectromancy. The Ubykh term for a favomancer simply means "bean-thrower", and later became a synonym for all soothsayers and seers in general.

References

• Vogt, H. 1963 Dictionnaire de la langue oubykh. Universitetsforlaget: Oslo.
• Tsapina, O. 2002 Something Old, Something New: Continuity and Modernization in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Available from jhu.

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