Idler Festival : A Babylonian Liver Divination

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The Idler Festival is a weekend of philosophy and merriment, comedy, talks, music, workshops and salons in the bucolic surroundings of Fenton House and gardens near Hampstead Heath.

You’ll be entertained and enlightened by the Idler’s favourite thinkers, comedians, writers, and musicians. There’ll be swing dancing and Renaissance dancing, walks, singing, ukulele, beekeeping and plenty of time to loaf under the apple trees.

A Babylonian Liver Divination

Selena Wisnom’s new history of Mesopotamia, The Library of Ancient Wisdom, shows how the civilisation has had a profound and largely unacknowledged influence on the modern world. Mesopotamia, not Greece and Rome, was the real birthplace of “Western” knowledge as we understand it today. At the Idler Festival Selena will be carrying out a live liver divination in the manner of ancient Babylonians, a predicting method that she assures us works.