onomancy

{{Short description|Fortune-telling based on a person's name}}

File:Onomantic table from the Secretum Secretorum.jpg]]

Onomancy (or nomancy) is divination based on a subject's name. Onomancy gained popularity in Europe during the Late Middle Ages, but is said to have originated with the Pythagoreans in antiquity.{{cite book |editor1-last=Melton |editor1-first=J. Gordon |title=Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology |date=1996 |publisher=Gale |isbn=081035487X |page=954 |edition=4th}} Several methods of analyzing a name are possible, some of which are based on arithmancy or gematria.

An early example of onomancy is found in the Secretum Secretorum. The system given there involves adding up the numerical values of the letters in the names of two antagonists, dividing the total for each person by 9, and comparing the remainders with a table which predicts the victor.{{cite book |last1=Ryan |first1=William F. |title=The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia |date=1999 |publisher=Pennsylvania State University Press |isbn=0271019670 |pages=314–316}}{{refn|Most European versions of the Secretum Secretorum omit the onomancy, but it is present in the Russian translation, a Spanish translation from the 13th century, and one English version which may have been derived from the Spanish.{{cite book |last1=Burnett |first1=Charles |editor1-last=Gibson |editor1-first=Margaret Templeton |editor-link1= Margaret Gibson (historian) |editor2-last=Heslop |editor2-first=T. A. |editor3-last=Pfaff |editor3-first=Richard W. |title=The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-century Canterbury |date=1992 |publisher=Pennsylvania State University Press |isbn=0947623469 |pages=166–167 |chapter=The Prognostications of the Eadwine Psalter}}|group=lower-alpha}}

In China and Taiwan, onomancy is known as 姓名學 (Chinese: xìngmíngxué), and in Japan, onomancy is known as 姓名判断 (Japanese: {{Transliteration|ja|seimei handan}}). They are similar, and can take several forms, but the most popular is based on the character strokes in the subject's written name, and the result number will be modulo 81, the remainders 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 45, 47, 48, 52, 57, 58, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68 are “lucky” numbers.{{cite book |last1=Miller |first1=Laura |editor1-last=Roberts |editor1-first=Glenda Susan |editor2-last=Kawano |editor2-first=Satsuki |editor3-last=Long |editor3-first=Susan Orpett |title=Capturing Contemporary Japan: Differentiation and Uncertainty |date=2014 |publisher=University of Hawaiʻi Press |isbn=978-0824838683 |page=255 |chapter=The Divination Arts in Girl Culture}}