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My High Priestess

Bone, Shell & Object Divination · The Living Archive

Knucklebones, Dice and Lots: A History of Casting for Answers

Tradition:
Astragalomancy and dice divination
Context:
Ancient Greece; Tibet
Period:
Ancient and later

In the account of the ancient traveler Pausanias, someone seeking an answer approaches an image of Heracles near Bura in Greece. The person prays, takes four casting pieces from the supply beside the god, and throws them onto a table. A written tablet provides an interpretation for the resulting figure.1

It is a wonderfully concrete description. The place, the prayer, the pieces, and the text all have a role. An ordinary-looking throw becomes part of asking a deity a question.

Knucklebones and dice have participated in several kinds of human activity, including games and religious consultation. Their history offers a particularly interesting way to explore the relationship between chance, a physical result, and an interpretation.

What is a knucklebone?

The Greek word astragalos, plural astragaloi, names the small bone associated with these objects. Historical examples include actual sheep or goat bones as well as imitations in other materials. The Getty holds a greenish glass example from the eastern Mediterranean, dated to the first century BCE through the first century CE. Its maker used a mold to reproduce the form of a natural bone.2

Unlike a familiar six-sided cube, a knucklebone has an irregular shape. Its form influences which positions it can take and how readily it lands in them.

The object is therefore part of the mechanics. Substituting another kind of die can change the physical behavior, even when a later reader thinks the devices look broadly similar.

Toys, offerings and transitions

The Acropolis Museum holds a bone inscribed with the name of Leto and dated to 150–86 BCE. Its account discusses knucklebones as children's toys, as objects used in divination, and as dedications connected with the transition out of childhood. It explicitly leaves uncertain the reason divine or heroic names were inscribed on some examples.3

This range is an important part of their history. The same general kind of object could enter play, an offering, or a consultation. It did not carry one permanently fixed function wherever it appeared.

An inscribed name can invite us to think about the closeness of play and divine presence, but uncertainty about an object's particular use should remain uncertainty. A dedication is already meaningful without being turned into an oracle it may never have been.

An oracle you could consult through a tablet

Pausanias's account of the Heracles oracle shows how a throw could point to an existing interpretation. The answer was associated with the figure produced by the cast and written on the tablet.1

For a modern reader, that may be more recognizable than expected. A result directs the user to a piece of language. The divine question and the material procedure are connected through a reference system.

It is worth keeping the setting in the picture. The person is consulting Heracles, not merely performing an abstract random experiment. The prayer and the god's image help define the act and the authority the participant understands the answer to have.

Numbers and the shape of chance

Historian Tatiana Bur discusses archaeological evidence that some astragaloi were shaved or filled to alter their surfaces. She interprets such modifications as attempts to make possible throws more evenly distributed, while observing that they did not create perfectly equal probabilities. Her study also discusses an Anatolian system in which five knucklebones produced combinations associated with fifty-six oracle responses.4

The example brings technical skill into the religious setting. Practitioners worked with material constraints: shapes, surfaces, combinations, and an interpretive scheme.

The relationship between chance and sacred meaning was something people could organize through objects. Their activity involved thinking about how an answer could become available through the physical world.

Tibetan dice divination in a ritual setting

The resemblance between two throws does not mean they belong to the same tradition. Tibetan divination supplies its own religious and textual histories.

Jan-Ulrich Sobisch's FAU research describes a dice-divination text associated with the protectress A phyi, also commonly written Achi, composed around the end of the seventeenth century. The ritual begins with a tantric sadhana, a deity practice, and includes mantra recitation and casting. The longer interpretive portion evaluates the result and prescribes responses to unfavorable possibilities.5

The same account identifies concerns such as lost property, disputes, and lawsuits among the questions the practice could address. These are ordinary difficulties situated within a particular Buddhist ritual world.

The prescription of a response is especially revealing. The consultation concerns how a person might act as well as what might happen. Reading the cast can lead into further religious activity.

A Book of Omens on the Silk Road

Another form of cast-and-text interpretation survives in the Old Turkic Irk Bitig, or Book of Omens. The British Library dates the manuscript to the ninth or tenth century CE. Its account describes sixty-five omens associated with combinations represented by red circles; the procedure involves repeated throws of a four-faced casting rod. The manuscript uses Old Turkic runic characters, a script distinct from northern European runes.6

Here, too, an object and a text work together. A physical sequence leads into language preserved in a book. The manuscript's survival lets us study that relationship rather than infer a procedure from casting objects alone.

The Greek, Tibetan, and Old Turkic examples belong to different historical settings. What makes them rewarding to consider together is a precise shared question: how can a small, contingent physical event become an answer a person is prepared to interpret?

Their responses give us different combinations of place, prayer, sacred presence, technique, and text. The cast is brief. The worlds of meaning around it are extensive.

Key terms

Astragalos / astragaloi (Bone, shell & object divination)
Singular/plural terms for a knucklebone or an object shaped like one, encountered in historical gaming and divinatory contexts.
Astragalomancy (Bone, shell & object divination)
Divination involving knucklebones.
Cleromancy (Bone, shell & object divination)
Divination by lots. The form of the lots and interpretation depend on the method.

Sources

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