haruspicy

Riemschneider, Die akkadischen und hethitischen Omentexte aus Bogazkoy [Dresden, 2004], xlviii) that the collections of haruspicy oracles found at Hattusa (CTH 548-56) arrived there via Hurrian intermediaries, as demonstrated by the extensive use in them of technical terms in the Hurrian language.

His time traveller was fortunate to witness a ritual involving haruspicy, or the reading of livers.

These unnamed priests, who consulted and interpreted a sacrifice that turned out to be against the emperor's project, were probably haruspices, experts in the Etrusca disciplina; the legal recognition of Christianity was not in their best interest, all the more so in that famous contemporary Christian intellectuals, such as Origen, overtly criticised haruspicy. Alexander esteemed the haruspices and accepted their advice, which resembles that of privileging haruspicy and traditional divination over and against foreign cults, which Cassius Dio probably intended to give to the same emperor in Maecenas' speech to Augustus (Dio 52, 36) (23).

You can attempt to read along with the haruspicy that James Wood passes off for book criticism in The New Yorker to know all you need to know of that book--that it is self-importantly self-dissatisfied.