The following conclusions must be noted.
First, with respect to divinatory lots and other auguries, it is a grave sin to inquire into hidden crimes by haruspices, auguries, or divinatory lots. For these things cannot be known in that way without the aid of a demon. Therefore a certain man who had tried to know a hidden thief by an astrolabe, even without the intention of invoking a demon, was suspended from the ministry of the altar for a year as one who had gravely sinned, and that by grace and dispensation, because according to common law he ought to have been suspended forever.
Second, it is equally a mortal sin to try to predict future contingents by auguries or lots; therefore a sentence of excommunication was issued against clerics.
[margin: Decretals on sortilege; canon law on clerical suspension and excommunication; Thomas Aquinas, Secunda Secundae, question 95, articles 6-7, on divination and lots]
Third, although it is not a mortal sin to observe such things unless someone gives faith to them, nevertheless it is always extremely dangerous to direct one’s actions according to them, even if one in no way believes them. The reason is that God very justly permits such persons to perish badly; and the Devil often draws people through such things into greater ones, and deceives them in more serious matters. At the least, by these things a person acquires a very bad habit, disposed very closely toward unbelief.
Several examples scattered here and there have shown how harmful it usually is to consult demon-worshipers. I add now another from the Chronicle of the Scots. They narrate that Natalogus, the thirtieth king, sent to diviners the very man by whom the king was afterward killed, in order that he should ask about victory, the king’s life, and the kingdom. The man received this response from a certain old woman: the king would not live long; danger threatened him not from an enemy but from familiar persons. When he pressed her to say from whom, she added: from you. The man cursed the woman. When he was returning home, this thought entered his mind: that it would be neither possible to conceal the response nor safe to reveal it, lest he be made suspect before the king, a wicked man who indulged his own fear. Therefore it was safer to kill the tyrant with the thanks of many than to preserve him unharmed with very grave danger to his own head. As soon as he returned home, having obtained a private meeting to disclose the responses of the diviners, he killed the king, who had entered the twelfth year of his rule, and freed his country from slavery and himself from danger. Buchanan narrates this; but why he calls it a story more neatly made up than plausible, I do not understand. For although that old woman, or rather the demon himself, could not have known this without revelation, nevertheless God used the demon’s malice in this way. For those words were most cleverly arranged so that this soldier, whose headlong spirit and ready hand did not escape the demon, would be driven to the thought of killing the tyrant. Whether the matter turned out successfully or badly for him, the murderous spirit would feed itself either on the death of the tyrant or on the death of the attacker and consultant. Does Sacred Scripture not supply us with a similar impulse of mind and a similar tyrannicide in Hazael the Syrian in 4 Kings 8?
[margin: Chronicle of the Scots and Buchanan, book 4, folio 35, on Natalogus; 4 Kings/2 Kings 8 on Hazael]
In the same Scotland, malicious lots promising Banquo the kingdom brought him destruction. For he was killed by Macbeth or Macabeus; and for Macbeth himself too, divinations of fortune-tellers brought death as the reward of cruelty. They had persuaded him that he would be unconquered until a certain forest, far away from there, approached the castle where Macbeth lived, and that he would not fall by the hand of one born of woman. To give credibility to similar prophecies, when the demon already foresaw that he would be conquered and killed by a stronger and very hostile enemy, he persuaded the soldiers to carry very large branches before them, so that they gave the appearance of a forest; and he sent against Macbeth as striker Macduff, who was not born but cut from his mother’s womb. Boece describes these things at length. Buchanan laughs at them as a fable of witchcraft or a mime from the Atellanes; but these things wonderfully express the customs of a demon, and contain nothing which cannot happen or is not accustomed to happen. Olaus and others tell similar things about the stratagem of forests, and histories are full of the false oracles of demons.
[margin: Buchanan, book 7, at the beginning, and Hector Boece on Banquo, Macbeth/Macabeus, and Macduff; Olaus on moving forests]
Fourth, the same must today be said of the consultatory lot by which we inquire what is to be done or judged by us. This too is prohibited under anathema. It is proved, because one may not inquire into such things except from God; but God does not want us to investigate his will by lots, but to seek it from the doctrine of the Church, Sacred Scripture, our superiors, and other learned and pious men. It is mortal when something superstitious is applied, or certain faith is given to the lot. But if both were absent, and without any superstition someone simply by lot inquired into the will of God, believing the lot only probably, it would be a venial sin.
[margin: Canon law on lots and the chapter sortes, cause 26, question 5]
Up to this point the discussion has concerned foreknowledge that is altogether lawful, treated in chapter 1, or altogether unlawful, treated in chapter 2. It remains now to discuss the kind which is sometimes lawful and sometimes unlawful. We call it conjectation. This is either physical or natural, or political and civil, which retains the name of lot.