The Collaborative International Dictionary
Divinatory \Di*vin"a*to*ry\, a. [Cf. F. divinatoire.]
Professing, or relating to, divination. ``A natural
divinatory instinct.''
--Cowley.
Wiktionary
a. Pertaining to divination.
WordNet
adj. resembling or characteristic of a prophet or prophecy; "the high priest's divinatory pronouncement"; "mantic powers"; "a kind of sibylline book with ready and infallible answers to questions" [syn: mantic, sibylline, sibyllic, vatic, vatical]
based primarily on surmise rather than adequate evidence; "theories about the extinction of dinosaurs are still highly conjectural"; "the supposed reason for his absence"; "suppositious reconstructions of dead languages"; "supposititious hypotheses" [syn: conjectural, supposed, suppositional, suppositious, supposititious]
Usage examples of "divinatory".
The games were partly, sometimes wholly, diversional, but generally they were in large part divinatory, and thus reflected the hazardous occupations and low culture-status of the people.
You make a step forward by cultivating wisdom, strength, temperance, and justice, and finally you arrive at acquiring the purifying virtues: we try to separate the soul from the body, we learn to evoke the godsnot to speak of the gods, as the other philosophers did, but to act upon them, causing rains to fall through a magic sphere, setting amulets against earthquakes, testing the divinatory powers of tripods, animating statues to obtain oracles, summoning Asclepius to heal the sick.
Thus the divinatory scenes had an obvious pragmatic value, for they were thought to represent a view of acts performed by others, acts to which one would have had no access by ordinary means.
I already knew what the jipuri is and does, for small quantities of it were imported even into Tenochtítlan, where it was called peyotl and where it was reserved for the exclusive use of the divinatory priests.
So I paid him an amount of gold dust that would amply have reimbursed him for several days' and nights' study of his divinatory books.
Since a name-giving tonalpoqui would never deign to consult his divinatory books for a slave-born child, even if the parents could afford it, no such child ever had a real and registered name.