Casting lots

The simplest divination there is — and the only one whose central mechanism, deliberate randomness, is defensible on entirely secular grounds.

What it is

Cleromancy: producing an answer by a randomising device. Drawing marked stones or sticks from a container, throwing bones or dice, dividing arrows, opening a book at random, tossing a coin.

It is the least ornamented practice in this section. There is no image to interpret, no symbol system to learn, no skill to acquire. The device answers.

Where it came from

It appears everywhere, and it appears early.

The Hebrew Bible treats lots as a legitimate channel of divine will. The Urim and Thummim carried in the high priest's breastpiece were used to obtain answers; land was allotted among the tribes by lot in Joshua; Jonah is identified as the cause of the storm by lot; Proverbs 16:33 states that the lot is cast into the lap but its decision is from the Lord. In Acts 1:26 the apostles choose Matthias to replace Judas by lot — the last such instance recorded before Pentecost, after which the practice largely disappears from Christian usage.

Africa has some of the richest surviving traditions: the Yoruba Ifá system with its 256 figures, southern African bone-throwing sets, and Malagasy sikidy, all of which combine randomised generation with an elaborate interpretive corpus.

Greece and Rome used lots both sacrally and administratively, and this is where the story becomes interesting.

How it is done

An object or objects are randomised and the result read against agreed meanings — yes or no, this option or that, guilty or innocent, which of us goes.

What we can and cannot say

We can say there is no evidence that a lot conveys any information about anything.

And we can say that casting lots is nonetheless the one practice in this section with a serious secular defence — because ancient Athens built a democracy on it.

Most Athenian public offices were filled not by election but by sortition: random selection from among eligible citizens. The kleroterion, a stone slab with slots for identity tokens and a tube of black and white balls, was a purpose-built allotment machine, and fragments of them survive in the Agora. Juries of several hundred were empanelled by lot, and the Council of Five Hundred was chosen the same way.

The reasoning was explicitly political rather than religious. Election, the Athenians argued, favours the wealthy, the well-connected and the eloquent, and therefore tends toward oligarchy however democratic its form. Selection by lot gives every citizen an equal chance, cannot be bought, cannot be campaigned for, and produces a body that resembles the citizenry rather than its elite. Aristotle records the view directly: lot is democratic, election is oligarchic.

That argument has not gone away. Modern citizens' assemblies — used in Ireland on constitutional questions, and in various forms elsewhere including Australia — select participants by lot for precisely these reasons, and there is a substantial contemporary literature on sortition as a democratic mechanism. Jury selection is the survival most people encounter.

We can say randomisation has further defensible uses, set out under what divination is: breaking deadlock, removing the decision from any faction's hands, and — in genuine strategic situations — being unpredictable, which game theory treats as a mixed strategy.

We can say the religious and the practical readings coexisted comfortably for most of history and were not always distinguished. A procedure that removes human will from a decision can be described as letting the gods choose or as ensuring nobody chose, and the same throw serves both.

We cannot say which is happening in any given case, and the ambiguity was probably always part of the appeal. What can be said is that of all the practices on this site, this is the one where the mechanism does something real — just not the thing it is usually credited with.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is done

What we can and cannot say

Further reading