Scatomancy is the reading of a person’s fortune by examining their bodily excrement, or by examining those of an animal. It is also known as spatalomancy, spatilomancy, copromancy, and spatalamancy.

Scatomancy is literally “divination by excrement”. The process by which excrement is scrutinized is referred to in modern medical terminology as a stool test (or, rarely, “scatoscopy”) and is used to detect many conditions including some varieties of cancer.

The OED gives the following quotations:

1569 J. SANDFORD tr. Agrippa’s Van. Artes lxxxiii. 145b, For this cause Scatomancie, Oromancie, Drymimancie, be called the divinations or Prognostications of Physicians, gathered by ordures and urines. 1861 READE Cloister & H. xxvi, I studied at Montpelier… There learned I Dririmancy, Scatomancy, Pathology [etc.]. 1897 in Syd. Soc. Lex.

Other methods of divination mentioned by Agrippa, in De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium, include “oromancie,” i.e. uromancy, divination by urine.

• “scatomancy definition | Dictionary.com”. dictionary.reference.com. Archived from the original on 2009-03-05.
• “scatoscopy, n.”. OED Online. September 2021. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/172147 (accessed September 30, 2021).
• Gilleland, Michael, Scatomancy June 12, 2008 https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2008/06/scatomancy.html

History

In ancient times scatomancers were often influential members of their community called upon to assist in medical diagnosis and trial by ordeal. 

In one of scatomancy’s forms, popular in ancient Egypt, kleptoparasitic dung beetles were employed. These insects were held sacred and immortalized by the Egyptians. They shape, roll and weave dung balls as a sexual display and courtship attractor. The beetles speed and behavior, as well as the appearance of the dung balls, were all taken into consideration for the prognostications.^{[citation needed]}

• “Dung and excrement and ordure and filth and feces and coprophilia and coprophagous and scatological and scatology”. Archived from the original on 2009-06-28. Retrieved 2009-04-05.

The examination of feces and urine by physicians and folk medicine practitioners has been performed since ancient times. Medicine men and women made predictions as well as diagnoses from feces examination, resembling today’s medical professionals and laboratories.

Miscellaneous

As he bestowed every one of the powers, the leader also gave out medicine powers. He would point to the center of a person’s body, to the heart, which is the seat of thought and emotions, and proclaim what that power would be. Typically, Coyote misunderstood this gesture, assuming that the leader was pointing to his stomach. Thus, by virtue of the creative force granted to his thoughts, Coyote received a special power different from other beings. The representatives of his power lived in Coyote’s intestines until he summoned their help. At that moment, they came out and took the form of five feces or, as polite Colvilles say, turds. Coyote called them his younger siblings and asked their advice, which they always gave wisely, although each encounter ended with Coyote, suddenly brilliant, claiming that their help was superfluous because, after all, he had known what to do all the time. If his younger siblings were slow or reluctant to offer advice, he bullied them into cooperation by threatening to cause a rainstorm which would melt them.

Jay Miller’s introduction to Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories (Caldwell: Caxton, 1933; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. xii:

• Gilleland, Michael, Scatomancy June 12, 2008 https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2008/06/scatomancy.html

Samuel Butler refers to the practice in Hudibras

Your modern Indian magician
Makes but a hole in th’ earth to piss in,
And straight resolves all questions by’t,
And seldom fails to be i’th’ right.

Samuel Butler, Hudibras 2.3.609-612

Further reading

• Schaffer, Guy Reading feces, from scatomancy to coprology, https://histmed.collegeofphysicians.org/reading-feces-from-scatomancy-to-coprology/
• Dictionary of the Occult. Caxton Publishing
• Dunwich, Gerina. A Wiccan’s Guide to Prophecy and Divination. Carol Publishing Group
• Pickover, Clifford A.. Dreaming the Future: The Fantastic Story of Prediction. Prometheus Books
• Spence, Lewis. An Encyclopedia of Occultism. Carol Publishing Group
• Walker, Charles. The Encyclopedia of the Occult. Random House Value