Dice and Divination in the Early Middle Ages: Teaching with the Carolingian Sortes Sanctorum

Dice and Divination in the Early Middle Ages:
Teaching with the Carolingian Sortes sanctorum

The dice are cast on the ground, but they are governed by the Lord.
Sortes mittuntur in sinu sed a Domino temperantur (Prov. 16:22)

In the ninth century, parish priests had many tools at their disposal to help their parishioners to deal with the insecurities of rural life in the hinterlands of northern Europe: prayers to protect them from inclimate weather; blessings to ward off cattle disease; and handbooks for making fortuitious predictions based on the phases of the moon or the direction of a thunderpeal. Among the prognostic tools at the disposal of parish priests was a text known as the sortes sanctorum (“the lots of the saints”). The sortes was a divination manual that comprised 56 answers keyed to the roll of three six-sided dice. In the presence of a priest, a petitioner directed a sincere question to God and rolled the dice. The priest then interpreted the question by consulting the answer in the sortes sanctorum keyed to the numbers yielded by the petitioner’s dice roll. This interactive presentation introduces the troubled history of divination in the ancient Christian tradition and the late antique models for the sortes. It then invites audience members to take part in the divination process to demonstrate the didactic benefits of this text in the classroom. With a roll of the dice, this engaging exercise encourages students to imagine and empathize with the precariousness of the life of rural parishioners in early medieval Europe.