The Haruspex

or: how we read the headlines like we used to read entrails

Next week the kickstarter for my upcoming novel about witches, The Sapling Cage, goes live. You can sign up to be notified when that happens, but of course I’ll post about it here too.

The Haruspex

When I used to hitchhike, walking miles along interstates, I saw an awful lot of strange things by the side of the road. Trash, mostly. Empty cans and piss jars. Condoms. A shockingly high number of cell phones… especially considering this was the era before smart phones. 

I didn’t have a phone myself, so I used to carry a run-over cell phone I’d found by the side of the road. It was smashed up with its circuit board exposed. Whenever a phone rang while I was hanging out with people, I’d pull this clearly trashed phone out, look at it, and say “nope, not me.”

I was very clever back then.

I was also fairly superstitious back then—and I suppose I am again now, with some good decades in between during which I was more rational. Back when I was hitchhiking, whenever I saw a dead bird, I took it as an omen. A dead bird by the side of the road meant another hour before the next ride. This math actually always worked out, by coincidence or by magic.

I went by the name Magpie, and I was sure that the day I found a dead magpie by the side of the road was the day that I would die. Fortunately, I never found a dead magpie, and this Magpie got to grow into a Margaret.

The more precarious your life, the less that’s under your control, the more you might go looking for omens, for magic. 

I believe in magic again. It’s different, this time around. My belief in magic had developed an awful lot like my belief in the divine has: I believed in it, then I was too smart for it, then I realized it was metaphor, then I realized that metaphor is useful. These days, I believe magic is metaphor and metaphor is real. Reality is nothing but three metaphors in a trench coat. And both the single God and the pantheon of gods are metaphors too, and therefore real.

I no longer look for omens much, except in my dreams where I know they’re metaphors. But when I was looking for those birds, I found them everywhere. And I had a pretty bad run of it as a hitchhiker.

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A group of crows is called a murder. A group of ravens is called an unkindness. The collective noun for a group of magpies, though, is a tiding. We’re clearly the friendliest of the corvids.

Well, a group of blue jays is a “band,” and that’s fine, but just not half so interesting.

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Just to explain the title of this piece, a haruspex, for people who don’t keep track of “names for ancient roman pagan practices,” is a person who reads omens in the entrails of animals. Or, you know, in this case, the presence of dead animals by the side of the road.

Or news headlines and social media posts.

The plural of haruspex is haruspices. The practice itself is called haruspicy.

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Now I have a home larger than my backpack and when I do travel, I’m the one picking up hitchhikers. But my decision to live where I do was built on omens too. I looked at the dead animals of the news and said: “bad times are coming” and got myself a brick house in the mountains. Crisis, by my reading of the omens, lies in wait just around the corner.

Of course, I’m not the only one who has read those omens, or who will tell you about them. There’s a whole corner of YouTube where men with shaved heads (I couldn’t tell you why, they’re not skinheads) post new videos every week with headlines like “it’s not a matter of if but of when” and “it’s all over” and “we’ve reached the point of no return.” It’s strange how we hit the point of no return every week.

The videos themselves, at least those run by better hosts, often offer useful analyses of current events and are fairly level-headed, except for the conclusion that the sky is falling. Which, demonstrably, it keeps not doing.

And most likely, if I’d ever run across a dead magpie, I would have been fine.

Of course, the sky does fall, every day, for people across the world. And a friend of mine was murdered while hitchhiking.

Once a month, I collect all the doom and gloom apocalyptic news I run across and co-host a podcast episode we call This Month in the Apocalypse, as part of the podcast Live Like the World is Dying. I spend my time warning people about the end of the world the same as those men on YouTube. I’m not here to say I’m better than them, but to point out the obvious: when you go looking for signs of crisis, you will find crisis after crisis. You will find real crises, which are worth pointing out and drawing lessons from.

You think you’re collecting puzzle pieces and putting them together to reveal the picture on the box, but you’re actually collecting legos and trying, desperately, to put them together to form something useful. It’s not that the crises we discuss aren’t real, it’s that the picture we’re putting together is not so accurate as we’d like.

No one can tell the future, not with haruspicy, not through science, and not by compiling the headlines from a bunch of newspapers around the world. But the active practice of studying patterns to foretell possible futures, whether we see those patterns in entrails or headlines, has a certain value. I call us all haruspices not to put us down, but to draw attention to the arcane and imperfect nature of our practice.

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You, reading this, might think this is all a bit silly. You might put faith in neither witchcraft nor YouTube. But you too are susceptible to this pattern where you conflate “what might become” with “what is.”

A proposed bill is not a law. My social media feed (and I contribute to this problem) is full of rage-bait headlines about how “the supreme court decided it’s illegal to protest” (which is a misrepresentation of a real ruling) or how “North Carolina has outlawed wearing covid masks” (which it hasn’t. A bill was proposed and did not proceed, at least at the time of this writing.)

It’s good that we pay attention to proposed laws—they might become actual laws, and they’re a useful indicator for what the right wing is trying to do. But the telephone game of social media takes a story from “a bill has been proposed” to “a bill has definitely passed” easily enough without factchecking, while “we defeated the following bill” doesn’t generate as much rage-bait re-sharing and algorithmic power as “the group of people you hate is trying to pass a bad law.”

I want to emphasize “algorithmic power” in that sentence. With social media, we’re told we have the power and therefore the spread of misinformation is our fault. The constant spread of misinformation is perceived to be indicative of some fundamental flaw in human nature. By this read, those who succumb to rage bait are the problem—or maybe the people who post rage bait are the problem. Rarely do we talk about the actual problem: the greedy motherfuckers who profit off of algorithms designed to maximize engagement and therefore court controversy. 

If I were to write this in metaphor, through a fantasy novel perhaps, I would tell you about decadent kings who live in personal fiefdoms who delight and draw power from human suffering. Liches who feed off of the anger of the masses toiling in the fields below them, sowing misery and reaping despair. (If I defined haruspex, I suppose I should define lich: a type of powerful undead evil wizard from the game Dungeons & Dragons, basically what that transphobic British lady ripped off to create Voldemort.)

But the thing I said about metaphors is that… this is literally what is happening. Well, these tech CEOs are not liches until they upload their consciousness. But the tech billionaires have designed machines that intentionally stir up all the worst sentiments in us, then through a strange alchemy turn that into financial power.

They aren’t some conspiracy. It’s not some shadow council working behind the scenes. They’re open about this. They don’t cackle and steeple their fingers as they imagine the suffering they cause—they’re just doing it for the money.

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A lot of my understanding about how the current social media landscape works, behind the curtain, comes from two of my fellow Cool Zone Media podcasters, Ed Zitron with “Better Offline” and Jamie Loftus with “Sixteenth Minute (of Fame).” I recommend them both, to hear how controversy sells and how the engineers at Meta and X are well aware of that.

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When I compare doomscrolling the news with the haruspices of ancient Rome, I don’t mean to denigrate doomscrolling or reading the news in general. It’s important to pay attention to the bills that are proposed, because so many of them become laws. Sometimes the outrage against a bill can stop it from passing. Sometimes the liches in their castle who set us on the task of harvesting outrage like it’s corn in the field, sometimes they’re brought low by that very outrage.

As another set of mystics from thousands of years ago, the early Christians, put it: “you reap as you sow.”

I pay attention to the bills, but I try to remember that they are proposals, not laws. They are possible futures, not promised ones.

I also pay attention to the countless crises, the droughts and the fires and the storms and the heat waves and the blackouts and the water main breaks. Those are real, with real consequences. It’s also easy, and correct, to put them together into a pattern: things are getting worse. The infrastructure in the US is beginning to collapse, and elsewhere across the world that collapse is much further along.

I can tell you things are getting worse, but I can’t tell you what that means, or if there will ever be a cascading collapse of the whole system. It sure seems likely—but then again, Leftists (especially Marxists) have been promising the collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions for a century and a half.

I can’t, in good conscience, tell you the sky is falling. I can’t tell you to run to the hills and fill your basement with beans and rice. Not unless that’s how you want to live anyway. Because it’s very easy, and feels rational and scientific, to look at all of these crises mounting up and say “the end is just around the corner,” or at least some very dramatic change is.

I even, in my heart, believe that that’s the case. It feels impossible for it to be otherwise.

But then I open YouTube, and see some guy telling me that World War III has already started, and then look outside my window and realize: if it has, it hasn’t reached my holler yet.

I remind myself that I moved to the hills (and yes, filled my basement with beans and rice) so that I can garden. So that when I walk my dog in the morning, we can accidentally startle turkeys and fawns. So that I can spend more time with toads than with people.

I remind myself that the point of preparedness isn’t to survive the end of the world, it’s to survive the myriad crises that crop up, that are becoming more common. 

I remind myself that the apocalypse is here, it’s just not evenly distributed (take a look at the weather in India if you ever want to be sure of that). I try to help people get ready, and I try to get myself ready. And I try not to shout “the sky is falling,” because when you do so, you’re usually wrong.

I also look for omens in my dreams, and more rarely in my waking life. I’ll just remember that omens are no more real than headlines. Which is to say, they are real, but we often put them together reach the wrong conclusions.