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Every practitioner, at some point in their career, will find themselves
explaining haruspicy to someone who has made up their mind before the
conversation has begun. A colleague at a family gathering. A neighbour who
has noticed the van. A journalist who has filed the piece in their head
already. Dealing with sceptics is not, strictly speaking, part of the work —
but it is an occupational reality, and how you handle it reflects on the
profession as a whole.
This is not about converting anyone. That is rarely a productive aim, and
pursuing it tends to make the encounter worse for both parties. The goal,
more modestly, is to leave the exchange without having damaged your
reputation, antagonised a potential client’s social circle, or said something
you will later regret in a car park.
Understanding What Scepticism Usually Is
Most scepticism directed at haruspicy is not philosophically rigorous. It is
not the considered position of someone who has read the literature, examined
the historical record, and arrived at a reasoned dissent. It is, in the
majority of cases, a reflex — shaped by unfamiliarity, by vague cultural
associations with the macabre, and by the entirely understandable assumption
that anything involving organ tissue must be either medical or alarming.
Recognising this matters because it changes your approach. You are not
debating an informed opponent. You are, more often, managing a mildly
uncomfortable social moment. The appropriate tool is not argument. It is
composure.
There is a second category of sceptic worth distinguishing: the professional
sceptic, by which we mean the council official, the environmental health
officer, or the letting agent who has received a complaint. These encounters
require a different register entirely — one covered in more detail in our
guidance on when
council officials visit and dealing
with police calmly and respectfully. For the purposes of this article,
we are concerned with the everyday social variety.
The First Thirty Seconds
How you respond in the opening moments of a sceptical exchange tends to
determine how the rest of it goes. The temptation — particularly if you are
tired, or if this is the fourth time this month — is to meet dismissiveness
with sharpness. This is understandable. It is also almost always
counterproductive.
A calm, unhurried response signals that you are not embarrassed by what you
do and that you have no need to defend it aggressively. This alone disarms a
significant proportion of casual sceptics, who are often testing for a
reaction rather than genuinely seeking information. If there is no reaction
worth having, the conversation frequently moves on of its own accord.
Avoid the phrase “it’s not what you think” — it implies that what they think
is a reasonable basis for judgement, and it puts you immediately on the back
foot. A more neutral opening is simply to describe the practice plainly and
without apology. Haruspicy is the interpretation of animal organs — most
commonly the liver — as a means of divination. It has a documented history
spanning several thousand years across multiple independent cultures. That is
factually accurate and, stated calmly, tends to give the other person
something to actually respond to rather than simply react against.
How Much to Explain
Gauge your audience. A brief, accurate description is appropriate for most
social settings. A detailed account of hepatic zone mapping, or a walk-through
of the Babylonian clay liver models held at the British Museum, is appropriate
for rather fewer. Most people who ask what you do are not requesting a
tutorial — they are establishing whether you are someone they can talk to
normally. Answer that question first.
If the person shows genuine curiosity — which does happen, more often than
you might expect once the initial wariness passes — then you can go further.
Explaining the interpretive framework, the anatomical reference points, the
way different regions of the organ correspond to different areas of inquiry:
this can be genuinely interesting to someone approaching it with an open mind.
Practitioners who are comfortable explaining the technical foundations of the
work, including the role of secondary
indicators such as the spleen, often find that curiosity replaces
scepticism once the practice is understood as a coherent system rather than
a vague mystical gesture.
What you should avoid is over-explaining in response to hostility. Providing
an increasingly detailed justification to someone who has no intention of
updating their view does not serve either of you. It signals anxiety about
the legitimacy of the practice, which is not a signal you want to send.
Dealing With Ridicule
Ridicule is less common than reflexive scepticism, but it does occur. The
person who makes the joke at your expense in a group setting, the comment
designed to get a laugh rather than engage seriously. This is perhaps the
most socially awkward category of encounter, because responding directly
risks looking wounded, while ignoring it entirely can read as acceptance.
The most effective response is usually a brief, dry acknowledgement followed
by a pivot back to the substance. Something in the register of: “People tend
to find it surprising at first” — said without particular feeling — and then
a straightforward sentence about what the practice actually involves. This
neither validates the joke nor escalates into a confrontation. It simply
declines to play.
What does not work: attempting to match the humour, which tends to undermine
the seriousness with which you approach your own practice; or delivering a
lecture on the cultural history of hepatomancy in a tone that suggests the
other person has committed an offence. Neither position serves you well. The
first makes the joke seem endorsed. The second confirms whatever unflattering
assumption prompted the joke in the first place.
Knowing When to Disengage
Not every sceptical encounter needs to be resolved. Some people are not
going to come around, and some conversations are not worth prolonging. The
ability to disengage without drama — to say, without heat, that you are happy
to discuss it further another time, and then to actually stop discussing it —
is a professional skill that takes some practitioners longer to develop than
others.
There is no obligation to justify your practice to every person who questions
it. Other professionals in adjacent fields — astrologers, reflexologists,
practitioners of various complementary therapies — encounter the same dynamic,
and the ones who manage it most effectively tend to be those who have made
their peace with the fact that not everyone will be persuaded, and who have
stopped treating each sceptic as a problem that needs solving.
Your energy is better spent on clients, on continued study, and on the
professional community. The question of how haruspicy is perceived in the
broader culture is a long one, and it will not be settled in a conversation
at a neighbour’s barbecue. If the subject of public communication interests
you, our guidance on wording
promotional materials and on legal
obligations during public demonstrations covers the more formal end of
that challenge.
A Note on Social Media
Online scepticism operates by different rules, and the social costs of
responding badly are higher. A poorly judged reply to a dismissive comment
can spread in ways that a private conversation cannot. The general principle
holds — composure, accuracy, brevity — but the threshold for disengaging
should be considerably lower. Threads do not resolve. They accumulate. If the
exchange is not going anywhere constructive after two or three exchanges, it
almost certainly will not.
The practitioners who have built the most durable public profiles in this
field tend to be those who present their work clearly and consistently, engage
with genuine questions, and decline to be drawn into disputes with people
whose primary interest is the dispute itself. That is not passivity. It is a
considered allocation of attention.
The practice speaks for itself, in time, to those who are open to it. Your
job is not to force that conversation — it is simply not to close it off
prematurely through an exchange that could have been handled better.
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