sortilege

plural sortileges

1. countableuncountableWitchcraft, magic, especially as a means of making decisions or predictions.

   ‘Too much evil sortilege,’ Glad always says when someone suggests he open a franchise over Cheat Ridge.

   2001, JT Leroy, Sarah

   3 more examples

   We have therefore summoned to our presence a Jewish woman, by name Rebecca, daughter of Isaac of York — a woman infamous for sortileges and for witcheries.

   1819, Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

   Orthodox believers […] were less happy about using sortilege to coerce God into taking decisions on their behalf.

   1971, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Folio Society, published 2012, page 115

   People who faced difficult decisions or needed insight into the future would consult a diviner, who performed a ritual to locate an oracle in the codex and then interpreted the divinatory text. In Egypt and the wider Mediterranean world, this practice - sortilege - was both common and controversial.

   2014, AnneMarie Luijendijk, “Introduction”, in Forbidden Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum / Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity; 89), Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebek, →ISBN, page 1

   Synonyms: sorcery, thaumaturgy, wizardry, bewitchery, black arts, charmwork, conjuration, conjuring