Interpreting the cracks in the scapula of a sheep

Throughout history, men have used a huge variety of methods to predict the future or divine proper plans of action. Wiki has links to several dozen forms of "--mancy."

I encountered a new one while reading The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman who became the Last Khan of Mongolia, by James Palmer.

"One of the most popular fortune-telling methods was to heat the shoulder bones of sheep and interpret the resulting cracks, and Ungern heeded the oracular bones when time came for the attack, choosing what was supposed to be a 'propitious day', 26 October [1921].

Heating "oracle bones" is a form of pyromancy, apparently most popular in the Orient. Since large, flat bones were needed, the scapula (of sheep, oxen) was favored, along with the plastrons and sometimes the carapace of tortoises. Pits were drilled in the bone, and then

An intense heat source was then inserted in a pit until it cracked. Due to the shape of the pit, the front side of the bone cracked in a rough 卜 shape. The character 卜 (pinyin: bǔ or pǔ; Old Chinese: *puk; "to divine") may be a pictogram of such a crack... The diviner in charge of the ceremony read the cracks to learn the answer to the divination. How exactly the cracks were interpreted is not known.

More at the Wiki link. The book is a biography of Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a near-psychotic Lutheran sadist opium addict. I've included the book in my recommended books category, but it will probably only appeal to a few people interested in Chinese, Russian, or general military history because it's quite dense with historical data and military strategy. There are, however, a variety of tidbits of general interest in addition to the oracle bones, such as...

• In the 19th century, it was possible for a Russian to be born in two different years. Ungern was born in 1886 by the Western Gregorian calendar and in 1885 by the Russian Julian one. (p.11)
  
• Warfare in the Siberian/Mongolian region incorporated the use of "armoured trains" which would roll into town and blow opponents to smithereens. (p. 104-5)
• Cholera and typhus epidemics were minimized by ordering "those unlikely to recover to be shot in the hospital in order to prevent further infection." (p. 114) Soldiers who caught bubonic plague were poisoned by their commanders (p. 136)
• During the Russian Civil War, Bolsheviks tormented the White officers by "boiling the skin off their hands in imitation of gloves." (p. 140)
• In the early days of aerial combat, bombs were "accompanied by rains of sharp nails, shaken out of the planes in boxes by the Soviet aviators." (p. 216)