To Divine the Future, the Ancients Relied on These Chance-Based Fortune-Telling Tools

Elizabeth Djinis

History Correspondent

When faced with uncertainty, humans often seek answers, whether in the generalized predictions of horoscopes or in the question-and-answer format of a Magic 8 Ball.

This search for certainty is nothing new. In antiquity, individuals attempting to manage their daily lives grappled with questions that would likely resonate with their modern counterparts: Will I win over the person I desire? Will I succeed in my career? Will I survive this illness? Will I pay back what I owe? Will I be caught as an adulterer?

A second- or third-century C.E. set of papyri found in Oxyrhynchus, an ancient city south of modern-day Cairo, offers answers to some of these questions—or, at least, a set of possible answers. Known as the Sortes Astrampsychi, or the Oracles of Astrampsychus, the text, which is primarily preserved in medieval manuscripts, promised to divine the future in a methodical yet mystical way. Users chose a specific question from a list of 92, selecting the one that most closely matched their situation. Then, they randomly picked a number between one and ten, which, when added to the number of the chosen question, directed them to one of 1,030 potential responses.

The document takes its name from Astrampsychus, a “legendary ancient Egyptian magician” referenced in its introduction who had no actual relationship with the work, writes classicist Mary Beard in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. Though the oracle also claims to boast connections to Pythagoras and Alexander the Great, Beard deems this implausible. In truth, she argues, the Astrampsychi is “an off-the-peg fortune-telling kit” filled with questions that “summed up the problems that were most likely to send people to the cheap local clairvoyant.”

Consultations with such clairvoyants relied on “a process of mystification,” Franziska Naether, an Egyptologist at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany, tells Smithsonian magazine. “The client who goes to the table probably can’t read and write. But going to the codex and looking up the numbers and letters and then the numbers changing would have made quite the impression on the client. The priests must have been modern-day life coaches, because the answer means something to people. It could be bittersweet or ambivalent.”

Scholars refer to tools like the Astrampsychi as lot divination, in part because the Latin word sortes literally means “lots” or “fates.” Textual evidence of divination with sortes, or lots that are drawn to predict the future, dates back to ancient Greece and Egypt and continues into the early Middle Ages.

As the Roman Empire first shunned and then gradually welcomed Christianity in the first through fourth centuries C.E., “pagan” practices like casting sortes were sometimes “transmitted with little alteration” and, at other times, “adapted, particularly for use by Christians or Jews, or more generally updated to fit the situation of their time,” write AnneMarie Luijendijk and William E. Klingshirn in My Lots Are in Thy Hands: Sortilege and Its Practitioners in Late Antiquity. The Astrampsychi itself was “a provocative example,” the authors add, given that the Greek text first rose to prominence under the Roman Empire and was then interpolated into Christian thought, eventually being adapted into the Latin lot system of Sortes Sangallenses.

What set the various sortes apart were both their strategy and their tone. While the Pythia, a high priestess also known as the Oracle of Delphi, spoke in hexameter, “signaling [a] sort of divine origin,” as Luijendijk tells Smithsonian, the Astrampsychi’s answers were generally in prose, lending the volume an intimate yet somewhat colloquial voice.

“These texts address the client in the present tense, in the second person singular in the voice of the oracle, or what Carl Jung, in the case of another divinatory text, the I Ching, called ‘the living soul of the book,’” write Luijendijk and Klingshirn. “Some texts even address the querent repeatedly as ‘O human.’ Often the oracle speaks in the imperative, making the answers exhortations.”

A separate papyrus found in the same ancient Egyptian city as the Astrampsychi offers evidence of the Homeromanteion, an oracle that used verses from Homer to provide guidance on what lay ahead. According to a papyrus housed at the British Library, petitioners had to follow specific steps: “First, you must know the days on which to use the oracle; second, you must pray and speak the incantation of the god and pray inwardly for what you want; third, you must take the dice and throw it three times.”

Much like the Astrampsychi, the lines from Homer were meant to furnish some sort of answer while keeping responses appropriately vague and often ambiguously positive. In one passage taken from the Odyssey, the papyrus implores the asker not to lose hope, saying, “Have courage, heart. You have endured far worse.”

Naether first became interested in the Astrampsychi when she read an unpublished section of the text. “When I started analyzing this oracle, I found out how much it actually had to do with legal life, daily life and advancing in office,” she says. “I found out how technical it actually is.”

Based on an analysis of the Astrampsychi, Naether concluded that roughly 20 percent of its questions centered on property and inheritance. Thirteen percent discussed politics and public office, while 10 percent were related to business transactions. Another 13 percent mused on marriage and love. Some questions dealt specifically with the legal process, asking, “Am I safe from prosecution?” and “Will I defeat my opponent in the trial?”

Overall, writes Beard in SPQR, “the main preoccupation” of the Astrampsychi “is money and livelihood. … ‘Will I be able to borrow the money?’ ‘Will I open a workshop?’ ‘Will I pay back what I owe?’ ‘Are my belongings going to be sold at auction?’ ‘Will I inherit from a friend?’” The classicist adds, “The law, when it is present, tends to be a looming menace, from ‘Am I safe from prosecution?’ to ‘Will I be safe if someone informs on me?’”

Each of the Astrampsychi’s 92 questions had at least ten possible answers. These responses ran the gamut from highly positive to incredibly negative, but perhaps the most interesting were the ones that expressed a sentiment somewhere in between. Asked whether the petitioner would be estranged from their spouse, the text might say, “You will be reconciled with your wife and you will be sorry,” “You won’t be estranged from your wife until you die” or “You will be estranged from your wife to your advantage.”

“It goes back to this really deep human need to have answers in uncertainty,” says Luijendijk. “How do you lead your life? How should you make these decisions? We have these systems to give you divine sanctification for your answers.”

Even the timing of when to consult the Astrampsychi was a mysterious process governed by a strict set of rules. Over a given 30-day month, Naether points out, the sortes could not be consulted at all on seven different days. On some days, people could only ask questions in the morning or the afternoon.

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The surviving papyri copies of the Astrampsychi and the Homeromanteion are in Greek and come predominantly from northern Egypt. But examples of similar texts exist in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian. According to Luijendijk and Klingshirn, these divination tools have been discovered in such as diverse locations as “the market square of Kremna in Asia Minor, the church at Nessana in the Negev Desert … and a palimpsest manuscript from Gaul.” Another lot-based oracle, the Sortes Alearum, was inscribed on pillars in marketplaces in Asia Minor, bearing questions pertaining specifically to merchants and travelers.

The authors of lot oracles came prepared for petitioners’ implicit doubt. In the Gospel of the Lots of Mary, a Christian text dated to the fifth or sixth century C.E., skepticism is baked into the language. The phrases “don’t doubt” and “don’t be double-minded” appear at the end of many answers, and the book’s opening advises, “Only do not be of two minds.” These warnings speak to the duality of human psychology, in which individuals both want to believe in an external divinity like an oracle and simultaneously acknowledge that these seemingly omniscient beings’ words may not ring true.

“People did doubt them,” Luijendijk says. “But on the other hand, it does seem that people took [lot oracles’ advice] into consideration in making decisions.”

Perhaps for this reason, the sortes’ answers did tend to skew positive, Luijendijk adds, meaning petitioners were more likely than not to receive a version of the answer they wanted.

The desire to know more about the future may be almost universally human, but the ability to divine what lies ahead was certainly not universal, at least in antiquity. The clientele of the Astrampsychi were mainly elites, members of the lower upper class or higher middle class who had access to property and hoped to earn some kind of inheritance from their families, according to Naether.

“There are many questions that concern inheritance—will I inherit from my mother, my father, my uncle?” Naether says. “It’s pretty intriguing that they ask such a variety just about inheritance and about getting richer. Then there are people who have property and who need to work for their money. Will I become a teacher or a magistrate in the city?”

Based on Naether’s experience with related sources in ancient Egypt, she hypothesizes that roughly 20 percent of the Astrampsychi’s clients were women, while the remaining 80 percent were men. In general, ancient Egypt had a more lenient perspective toward the legislative and legal position of women, but this was diminished in some capacity when the region became part of the Roman Empire in the first century B.C.E., Naether says. Some questions dealt with safety in childbirth, like: “Will my child and my wife survive?” A few could only have been asked by the enslaved, presumably those who planned to escape and wondered, “Will I be found during my flight?”

In late antiquity, which academics usually define as between the third and seventh centuries C.E., the Astrampsychi’s questions were increasingly adapted for a Christian context. Inquiries like “Will I be a teacher?” changed into questions such as “Will I travel to the holy places?” Queries that once revolved around romance took on religious undertones, like “Will I be a monk?” Questions previously centered on fame and glory—“Will I become a winner at the holy games?”—now reflected the possibility of religious status: “Will I be a priest?” Perhaps even a bishop?

Luijendijk attributes the longevity of the Astrampsychi in part to its contextual flexibility. “The oracles that were more specific to social and historical contexts become outdated more quickly,” she says. “So there are these oracle texts that have a balance between specificity and generality.”

As Christianity took over the Roman Empire, reactions to lot oracles typically followed one of two different paths, Luijendijk says: backlash, leading to a refusal to engage with pagan practices, or reinterpretation, like the Astrampsychi questions that were reframed for a Christian society.

Historical records suggest that Christians relied on oracles that used this question-based methodology into the medieval era. A passage from the Alexiad, a text that chronicles the reign of Alexius I Comnenus, who presided over the Byzantine Empire from 1081 to 1118, notes the emperor’s reliance on divination when deciding to go to war. The biography’s author, Alexius’ daughter Anna Comnena, reported that her father felt “unable to trust his own judgment and [was] unwilling to rely on his own unaided calculations. … On two tablets, Alexius wrote the question, ‘Should I go out to attack the Cumans?’ On one, ‘yes’ was added; on the other, ‘no.’” A bishop left the sealed tablets on an altar overnight, then picked one up at random and read its verdict out loud. “The emperor accepted the decision as though it derived from some divine article,” Anna noted.

Even today, modern audiences seek a certain kind of divine certainty. Luijendijk, who wrote about the Gospel of the Lots of Mary in My Lots Are in Thy Hands, regularly receives emails from Christian parishioners who want access to the text, thinking it may offer them some kind of spiritual support.

“The Gospel of the Lots of Mary attributes [the lot oracle] to the encounter Mary had with the Archangel Gabriel,” Luijendijk says. “People constantly search for that text, because it seems very Christian and calls itself a Gospel, but the answers are not very Christian. They are applicable in many situations, which keeps the text still so appealing.”