Divination is a normalization of the link between the world of aluna and the physical world. It may be understood as speaking with ancestors, because physical death is not the extinction of life, only its transition from the body, but that alone would be a travesty of it. Nor is it enough to understand divination as a way of receiving messages from gods, though aluna is the Mother, and the Mother is listened to by divining.

Divination is the reading of signs. Since everything that happens is an event in the world of aluna, everything that happens also reflects that world. To put a question is an act in aluna, an act of pure thought, and if it is properly put then its answer is instantaneously present, here in the physical world as well. Divination is the mental process of properly shaping a question, and the highly formal process of reading the answer.

This is not a new idea to us: we have remnants of it in reading the cards or tea-leaves. To us, divination has an air of mystery, and we tend to respond more cautiously, more nervously towards it the more mysterious its trappings, and the more complex it is made. The tarot, rich in complex symbolism, seems deeper than reading tea-leaves; the I Ching, with its elaborate volumes of interpretation for the fall of a few yarrow stalks seems even more impressive.

For the Kogi, anything that is unpredictable could serve as an instrument for reading the answer to a question. Even drumming the finger-tips together may offer a slight element of chance that can be interpreted. But the most highly formalized system of interpretation has been developed for reading bubbles in a bowl of water. A hollow Tairona bead is carefully lowered into the bowl, and from the bubbles that appear on the surface the answer is known.

If the interpretation is a device, an invention, a way of justifying and mystifying authority, then all this is quite meaningless. That might be the conclusion to be drawn from the divinations and counterdivinations that surround disputes like the one over Bernardo's town. But the Kogi world has not fragmented into factions, and disputes over divinations are resolved by further divinations. The Kogi themselves do not regard most Mamas with anything approaching awe; they will commonly complain that a Mama is ignorant and worldly (the two main criticisms which they regard as significant). If a Mama was using divination in an obviously self-interested way, that would be recognized. In fact divinations are seen as having straightforward practical utility in daily life, and not as especially mysterious or mystifying.

Divination would also, of course, be meaningless if there were no higher reality, no world of aluna where all things have their essence and all things are bound together in a single life. Our whole intellectual tradition, scientific, rational, seems to demand a rejection of aluna. But ours is a tradition which says there is only one ultimate test: not 'does it make sense?' but 'does it work?'

Our scientific world-view had no trouble believing in aspirins and electricity because they worked, not because they made sense. The Kogi make all decisions on the basis of divination, and their society has continued to function in the face of pressures which few societies have ever been able to withstand. For them, it works. We have no other way of commenting on it. The question that confronts us is whether our view, that there is nothing beyond the biological and chemical machine, works. Up to now it has seemed to produce spectacular results. But the Kogi see these as short-term benefits on the way to a catastrophe. We are, to them, like people who have jumped off a mountain and, falling fast, are proclaiming our ability to fly. They believe they can see further, and that their own old-fashioned ideas will prove to be right. Unfortunately, they also believe that they are roped to us, and will shortly be yanked to destruction.