What is bibliomancy?

What the method is

Bibliomancy is the practice of divination using books: a book is opened at random, a passage is selected, and it is read as an answer, omen or guidance for the question in hand. Its name combines the Greek elements for book and divination, and stichomancy is a synonym for it.^61221314

A common procedure is to hold a question in mind, open the book at random, and read the first passage that meets the eye. Some versions instead have a seeker point with a closed eye or trail a finger in slow circles until the moment of stopping.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

Roman and late antique forms

Divination with lettered tablets was practiced at ancient Praeneste in Italy. The tablets were later replaced by phrases from books inspired by the Muses, especially Homer, Hesiod and Vergil, a form called rhapsodomancy. Eventually a copy of Homer or Vergil was opened at random and the first words to catch the eye were treated as the answer.¹

Sortes sets were usually little tablets or counters drawn from a sitella or urn, according to Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. The Astrampsychi, a late antique text, allowed a user to choose a question from 92 and then a number from one to ten, leading to one of 1,030 responses.¹⁸¹⁹

Textual evidence of sortes practices dates back to ancient Greece and Egypt and continues into the early Middle Ages. The Homeromanteion papyrus from Oxyrhynchus instructs petitioners to know the days for consulting, to pray and speak an incantation, and to throw dice three times.¹⁹

Christian and Islamic use

By the early Middle Ages, some Christians adopted the idea of flipping randomly through Scripture for answers, and the Psalter was a common choice. Dictionary accounts say many early Christians substituted the Bible and Psalter for Homer and Virgil, and many Christians consulted the Bible in this way.²⁰¹⁸

In the Islamic world, the practice of fāl included opening the Quran at random, and Iranian bibliomancy often used the Divan of Hafiz. Hafiz could be consulted by opening it to a random page and taking either the first lines the eye fell on or the last ghazal on the page.¹⁵²¹¹⁰

Mehmed Celebi, a guild head of image-based diviners in Istanbul, had seekers pick a random image and improvised verses on it, according to Evliya Celebi's seventeenth-century account. Kalender Pasha's Falnama for Sultan Ahmed I attached fixed written prognostications beside each image.¹⁰

Church councils and later use

Medieval councils repeatedly condemned the Sortes Sanctorum, and critics in the late medieval and Reformation eras described bibliomancy as a superstitious practice that confused chance with God's guidance. Christian leaders co-opted and condemned it as part of a complex relationship with the dominant religion.¹⁸²⁰⁸