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The first records of Asian fortune-telling are from Ha, Yin period around B.C. 4000. They decided important national matters by the shape of cracked turtle shell and animal bones.
All the wisdom of Asian fortune-telling is compiled in The Book of Change. This book explains the constant change of natural phenomenon, and so is sometimes known as reference on cosmology rather than fortune-telling. Even though phenomena such as "autumn follows summer," or "sunrise follows sunset" are changing constantly. The principle itself, however, is unchangeable. The Book of Change applies this principle to human life. The interpretations of human life in this book began with picking up chopsticks and divination signs. Lao-tzu and Confucius, however, reinterpreted the book as a philosophy explaining the law of world. Before then it was just a fortune book.
While The Book of Change focuses on the harmony of Ying-yang, the Four Pillars emphasizes the relation of the Five Elements - metal, wood, water, fire, earth - plus Ying-yang.
The Four Pillars takes dominating position in oriental philosophy. It is a kind of fortune-telling that begins from your birth year, month and hour.
Shamanism is also an important kind of fortune-telling. Mongolians, in particular, use Shamanism more often than Chinese. The Shaman gets a spirit from all the souls residing in nature and predicts one's destiny through that spirit.
In the west, the main kinds of fortune-telling are alchemy, astrology and tarot. A common kind of astrology, known as a horoscope, predicts human life through understanding the movement of heavenly bodies. It became the main fortune-telling method in the West since the first appearance in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. Tarot has also been used frequently for fortune-telling, together with astrology.
The list of other fortune-telling methods is very long: naming science, Fungshwei, dream interpretation, palm line reading and so forth. The main idea of naming science is that human life is influenced by name, so that checking out a person's name will tell you about his or her past up to now. The theory of life's being determined by name is not persuasive, so it is used as a supporting way for other methods of fortune-telling. The main idea of Fungshwei is that nature and its change are deeply related to the happiness of human life. This implies that you can predict a human's lights and shadows by judging features of mountains, land, water. The story of how Sung-gye Lee, the first king of the Chosun dynasty, leaned on Fungshwei when he decided Hanyang as a capital city is famous. Direction science is the theory that people have to know the direction of fortune to be well off. Dream reading is the theory that dreams can foresee the future. Neither of them is persuasive.
As modern society has too much variability and is very competitive, people need something to rest on to overcome the uneasiness. That's the reason fortune-telling is very popular even today.
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