From the Astrology Dept: The Ides of March and Google Divination™

Dear BAMystic,

What's up with the Ides of March? Is it a real thing? Something Shakespeare made up? Some band I've never heard of? And what does “ides” mean, anyway?

Yours,

Ida

Dear Ida,

I think the most proper way to answer your questions about this auspicious day, the Ides of March, is to reveal a technique I’ve been developing slowly over the past decade, called Google Divination™. This is the first time Google Divination has been used not only on the BAM Blog, but on the whole of the internet. In other words you should prepare, my dear Ida, for your mind to be blown.

Google Divination is a deceptively simple oracular method. As I address your questions I’ll run you through the divination process step by step. This way you’ll be able to use Google Divination on your own, for any number of future dilemmas. 

Step 1. I consider the question(s) posed by seating myself in front of my computer, or any handheld device with internet capability. Keeping receptive to the Universe, I conjure a phrase to type into the Google Divining Mechanism (or GDM for short). After much deliberation, Ida, the phrase I conjured for you was ides march astrology.

A Trio of Google Diviners

Step 2. This is when things start to heat up. I enter ides march astrology into the GDM and the first result is NeroPrediction.com, which says that

"Beware the Ides of March," ancient Rome's most famous prediction, was a warning given Julius Caesar by the "haruspex" Titus Vestricius Spurinna perhaps a month before Caesar's assassination in the assembly hall of Pompey's theater where the Roman senate was meeting that day.

So now you know, Ida, that the Ides of March was indeed a real thing, not just a Shakespearian invention. To answer your other questions we must move on to the next and final step.

Step 3. At this point our minds need to be nimble and receptive, as we must now conjure other search terms to type into the GDM. The term I conjured to determine whether the Ides of March is a band is ides march band. After entering it into the GDM we see, ah yes, that there IS a band nobody’s ever heard of who goes by that name!

We’re on fire, Ida! Now we just need to figure out what “ides” means. For this search, I reached deep in the recesses of my vocabulary and conjured the phrase ides etymology. After typing it into the GDM, Wiktionary tells us that in the Roman calendar ides was “the fifteenth day of March, May, July, October, and the thirteenth day of the other months.” And, interestingly, “ides” is derived from the Latin iduare, meaning “to divide.”

So there we go, Ida. If you stay focused, sharp, and receptive to the oracular energies swirling always around us—and if you have a good GDM handy—Google Divination™ is a technique useful for all kinds of cosmic problem solving. Just think, if Julius Caesar had an iPhone he could have used Google Divination to save himself from his own assassination. But then we wouldn't have Shakespeare's classic drama about the Roman leader's last days (which, Ida, you should catch when the Royal Shakespeare Company's production plays at BAM next month).

Voila,

The BAMystic

Please send your questions to the BAMystic at jbradshaw[at]bam[dot]org, or post it in the comments.