About
Created by Theia and Linnea Pearson-Vogel. Translation from Fritz Graf; see the bibliography for details.
This is a emulator of the Sortes Alearum (sortes, Latin for ‘lots’, and alearum from Latin meaning ‘dice’), an ancient lot oracle.
Casting the Lots
Lot oracles were a method of divination in antiquity using an element of randomness to answer a specific query or concern by selecting from a list of pre-written responses. Some lot oracles had a set of predefined questions with randomly chosen answers, and others, like this one, had a list of general answers for any question. The randomness of the roll provides the space for the divine to enter the conversation. Ancient sources discuss various kinds of lot oracles; some are skeptical of their efficacy or feel that they represent mere chance, not the divine. Not necessarily the most popular or high-prestige form of divination, they were popular enough that we have many examples from antiquity. This tradition carried on into through the Middle Ages in a Christianized form, bearing many similarities to its older, pagan relatives, despite mixed reactions from Church figures.
Sortes Alearum
The Sortes Alearum specifically is a set of texts found as epigrams carved on stone pillars at sites along southwestern Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey. On the pillars would have been fifty-six messages, each corresponding to a particular combination of die rolls. Five astragaloi (sheep’s knucklebones) would be rolled as dice. While more irregular and organic than cubic dice, each has four distinct sides, so there are fifty-six possible combinations. The four sides are labeled as one (called the Chian), three, four, and six (two and five are excluded), so that each set of opposite sides adds up to seven. The supplicant or interpreter then takes the sum of all numbers rolled and uses it to find the corresponding message, which were listed in order of sum. There is a message for each possible roll, and each one has words of advice and a divine figure associated with it, such as Zeus Olympios or Aphrodite. The text found on the main page is all directly from these translated epigrams.
Interpreting the Rolls
In “Rolling the Dice for an Answer” (the primary source for this project and the source of all the translated text), Fritz Graf writes that many of these oracle sites may have been in public spaces, such as by a town gate or agora. They may have been frequented by merchants and those who traveled for business, explaining the heavy focus on commerce in many of the fortunes. While oracles and divination were commonly the province of the god Apollo, whose most famous oracle was in Delphi, this one seems to have been linked with Hermes as well, who is associated with travel and commerce, as well as with chance.
These fortunes seemed to have resonated with their specific audience in their time. Perhaps they may still ring true today then, as life in our highly-connected and mobile modern era is, compared to the largely agrarian context of antiquity, seemingly more dependent than ever on the kind of randomness and chance which comes from frequently moving around and relying on the whims and fortunes of strangers for financial success.
Bibliography
- Graf, Fritz. Rolling the Dice for an Answer. In Mantikê, 51-97. Vol. 155. Religions in the
Graeco-Roman World. 2005.
- The excellent source for the translations and background information specific to the Sortes Alearum.
- Luijendijk, Annemarie, and William E Klingshirn.
My Lots Are in Thy Hands: Sortilege and Its Practitioners in Late Antiquity. Vol. 188. Religions in
the Graeco-Roman World. Brill, 2018.
- A fantastic work on many aspects of all kinds of lot divination (also called sortilege) of the period, across many regions and cultures, and with references for translations where they are available.