I believe that Mystics and Seers in the ancient world (and in today’s world as well) must have secretly been Statisticians. They must have used statistics in their daily lives whenever they were helping to “predict” someone’s future. They did this simply by knowing some basic knowledge of who their client was. A perfect Mystic or Seer likely knew everyone in the town or city they lived in. That’s probably why they were able to “accurately” (or closely enough) predict what that person’s future was to hold for them. In addition, they must have seen the probabilities and likelihood of events that can happen in a human’s life span.
Undoubtedly, the best types of Mystics and Seers are those who have “intuition.” Those types of Mystics and Seers utilize both their instincts and their logic. That is possibly one of the deadliest combinations a person can ever wield.
You see, the best Mystics and Seers imbue both the logical and complex world of statistics with the world of solid intuition and common sense. This is what makes them so coveted and even feared.
When I was younger, I always wondered what the magic was behind “Fortune-Tellers.” I always wondered if there was some kind of trick or a hidden secret they knew that I simply would never uncover or understand. But now that I’m older, I’ve come to decipher their secret craft and trade. The answer, however, was definitely not what I thought it would be. But nevertheless, I am convinced that these types of “gifted” people are merely “touched” with the gift to understand and utilize what we call “statistics” in today’s modern world.
Think about it in this context:
When Rome fell from its position of military power and authority over their opposition, I’m confident those who were skilled at “foresight” knew what was about to happen within a couple of years before. Based on any information they could gather from high-Roman society and the general unrest growing even from within their boundaries, they could sense uneasiness. Of course, there are likely many sources that led to the eventual downfall of Rome as an empire. Still, likely, this “predestined” fall was undoubtedly already predicted based on the information many Mystics and Seers had gathered throughout a couple of months.
That’s also probably why many people found Mystics and Seers so mysterious, to begin with. They likely were misunderstood in terms of not understanding how they perceived and took in the information. They likely deciphered scenarios unfolding in vastly different ways than a typical person could at that time. You see, religion was the ruling authority of the ancient world. Thus, mathematics, science, or anything else that had to deal with the scary “logical” side of reality, was banned from the mainstream of many different societies. It wasn’t always this way, but history has a strange way of falling into historical cycles. Repeating history is inevitable to some degree, but that is simply because we are human, and we’ll never truly change who we are.
Statistics, this single branch of the overall mathematics curriculum, is probably one of the most descriptive and arduous math courses one can take in their lifetime. There’s something in-depth about it; knowing the mere probabilities of an event occurring. It’s so mind-stimulating and intense; it undoubtedly makes me giddy with joy just wondering about all of the possibilities out there in the world.
I would certainly love to learn more about this, but I think this post should do it for today. Some things, perhaps, are better left unspoken.
Forever in Your Debt,
Leon R.M. Auguste
Leon R.M. Auguste 