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What were the ancient lot books like the Sortes?
Ancient lot oracles were book-based systems in which a consultant chose a question or passage by chance, then read a matching answer. The Sortes Astrampsychi used 92 questions and 1,030 answers, while Vergilian and Sanctorum forms opened a poet's or Bible's text at random.
Facts checked on against 14 sources, 9 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.
Key facts
Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.
| 2nd–3rd century CE | Naether dates the Sortes Astrampsychi to this period, and the text is thought to perhaps originate in the 2nd century AD.12 |
|---|---|
| Late 2nd century CE | Hadrian is recorded as consulting Vergil this way, a practice the author traces to the beginning of the second century.34 |
| Early 4th century | The biblical sortes is noted from this period onward.3 |
| 5th–6th century | The Gospel of the Lots of Mary, a Christian text with repeated warnings against doubt, is dated to this span.5 |
| Sixth century | Winnefeld published Latin sixth-century oracles from a palimpsest at St Gall, in which answers come in blocks of twelve.6 |
| 9th century | The sortes sanctorum was among the prognostic tools available to Carolingian parish priests in northern Europe.7 |
| 1610s–1920s | Vergilian sortes were still used in early modern England and into the early twentieth century.34 |
How the Sortes Astrampsychi worked
The Sortes Astrampsychi, also called the Oracles of Astrampsychus, is a Greek oracular collection that the consultant worked through in a set order. The client chose one of 92 questions, drew a number from one to ten, and the sum with the question's number pointed to one of 1,030 answers. The professional looked up the matching oracle in the book.589
Van der Horst describes the same mechanism in more detail: the enquirer adds a self-chosen or drawn number to the question number, and the sum is found in a list of oracular gods. A concordance number after the god's name marks the decade of ten possible answers. The theory behind the method held that the god's action placed the right number in the consultant's mind or hand.110
The answers are mixed together, a look-up table is prefixed, and some answers match no question. Commentators describe this as a way to confuse the user, and Browne's reconstruction notes that possible outcomes were spread widely so they could not easily be collected.29
Lot books beyond Astrampsychus
Roman and earlier Italian practice used lots as a standard way to learn future events. Smith's Dictionary says the sortes were usually small tablets or counters thrown into a sitella or urn of water, and sometimes were thrown like dice. The word was applied to any verbal response of an oracle.11
Divination by drawing lettered tablets at random, usually by a child, was practiced at ancient Praeneste. The tablets were later replaced by phrases taken from inspired books, especially Homer, Hesiod, and Vergil, a form called rhapsodomancy. Eventually readers opened a copy of Homer or Vergil at random and took the first words that caught the eye as an answer.3
Harris describes a divination method from Attalia in Pamphylia, recorded in Kaibel's Epigrammata Graeca, where oracles were selected by throws of knucklebone dice. The die was an ancient knuckle-bone with rounded ends.6
The Vergilian and Christian forms
Augustine described opening a New Testament codex at random in his Confessions and finding Romans 14.1, and he later warned against such consultations in Letter 55. Christians replaced the poets with the Bible, and the Gospels or Psalter were opened in difficult situations.31112
The sortes sanctorum, or 'the lots of the saints', was a divination manual of 56 answers keyed to a roll of three six-sided dice. The petitioner posed a sincere question to God and rolled the dice in the presence of a priest, who then read the matching answer, as Scott G. Bruce describes it.7
Harris reports that the sortes sanctorum in Codex Bezae were written at the foot of the pages containing the Gospel of Mark, in Greek, and that a Latin system from a tenth-century Abbey of S. Germain manuscript was similar. Harris proposes the consultant selected a number and turned to the attached sentence in St. John's Gospel.613
Later Christian and Egyptian lot texts
In late antiquity, the Astrampsychi's questions were adapted for a Christian context. The Christianized version replaces the Greek gods with God, Christ, and the saints. In the copies that survive, suggestions to ask a pagan deity become requests to ask Noah or Gabriel.512
What the tradition holds
How practitioners describe it, in their terms. Described, not endorsed.
Smith's Dictionary says the Sortes Virgilianae arose when verses of illustrious poets were written on small tablets and drawn from an urn, with the verse supposed to apply to the person drawing it.11
Gibbon, as cited in Smith's Dictionary, notes that early Christians substituted the Bible and the Psalter for Homer and Virgil, and that councils repeatedly condemned the resulting Sortes Sanctorum.11
What the evidence shows
What historians, scientists and controlled tests have found.
Naether analysed the Astrampsychi and estimated that about 20 percent of its questions concerned property and inheritance, 13 percent politics and public office, 10 percent business transactions, and 13 percent marriage and love.5
Naether describes the typical client of the Astrampsychus oracles as male, middle-aged, well-off, married, middle class, often travelling, and holding an honorary position. Questions about business and inheritance from a mother or a wife indicate that women as well as men owned property.951
Naether's publication describes the Sortes Astrampsychi as a source for the social history of Egypt, including demography, economy and jurisdiction.8
Kocar argues that two fifth-to-seventh century CE Coptic oracular miniature codices from Oxyrhynchus were produced by Christian ritual experts, probably clerics, for visitors to the church complex of Philoxenus.14
Worked out from the evidence
Not stated outright by any one source. It is worked out from the sources cited.
- The lot books were designed to be used by people with little formal training, since each answer was pre-written and the consultant needed only a question number and a drawn number. The Homeromanteion, by contrast, required users to know Homeric verse well, which marks a difference in how the lot books were meant to function.149
- The lot books show a long continuity in method, from chance selection of tablets and dice in Italy and Asia Minor to opened texts of Homer, Vergil, and the Bible, and the accounts disagree mainly over where the Christian forms began and how much of their content came from earlier pagan books.311
Not yet confirmed
- Why did the Sortes Astrampsychi survive in a Christianised form while other lot books disappeared?
- How closely did the Sortes Sanctorum of the Codex Bezae and St. Germain manuscripts relate to the later Carolingian dice system?
- Did the Sortes Barberinianae form an independent oracle or only a witness to the Astrampsychi?
Sources
Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. Every fact is paraphrased and nothing is copied; Wikipedia is never cited.
- bmcr.brynmawr.edu: Die Sortes Astrampsychi: Problemlosungsstrategien durch Orakel im r�mischen �gypten. Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 3 – Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Read on · University
- roger-pearse.com: The "Sortes Astrampsychi" or "The lots of Astrampsychus" - an ancient fortune-telling manual. Read on · Reference
- encyclopedia.com: Sortes Homericae, Vergilianae, Biblicae | Encyclopedia.com. Read on · Reference
- Internet Archive: Sortes Vergilianae; or, Vergil and to-day, an inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Liverpool. Read on · Primary text
- smithsonianmag.com: To Divine the Future, the Ancients Relied on These Chance-Based Fortune-Telling Tools. Read on · Museum
- Internet Archive: The Annotators of the Codex Bezae (with Some Notes on Sortes Sanctorum). Read on · Primary text
- aha.confex.com: Paper: Dice and Divination in the Early Middle Ages: Teaching with the Carolingian <em>Sortes Sanctorum</em> (139th Annual Meeting (January 8-11, 2026)). Read on · Reference
- mohrsiebeck.com: Die Sortes Astrampsychi. Read on · Reference
- purplemotes.net: oracles of Astrampsychus: understanding fate in everyday life – purple motes. Read on · Reference
- bmcr.brynmawr.edu: Sortes Astrampsychi, II. Bibliotheca Teubneriana – Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Read on · University
- penelope.uchicago.edu: LacusCurtius • Roman Religion — Sortes (Smith's Dictionary, 1875). Read on · University
- gutenberg.org: Curiosités Historiques et Littéraires. Read on · Primary text
- Internet Archive: The "Sortes Sanctorum" in the St. Germain Codex (g1). Read on · Primary text
- bmcr.brynmawr.edu: My Lots are in Thy Hands: Sortilege and its Practitioners in Late Antiquity. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, 188 – Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Read on · University