The lamp is turned low, and the table has been cleared of everything that does not belong to this hour.
A square of dark cloth lies open across the wood. Beside it rests a small bag of undyed linen, worn soft at the mouth by years of the same three fingers.
Something shifts inside it when it is lifted. Stone touching stone, a dry and patient sound, like the first rain arriving on a roof.
You loosen the cord. You hold the lots closed in your fist until they give up their coldness and take the heat of your palm.
Then you open your hand and let them fall.
Whatever the cloth receives, it is yours to read, because you were the one who taught these small things how to speak.
A Handful Thrown Down
Casting lots is the plainest of the divinations. A set of small marked objects is thrown across a cloth, or drawn blind from a bag, and read by which ones surface and how they lie.
There is no deck to shuffle, no chart to draw, no borrowed alphabet to memorise before the first question may be asked.
Among the ways of asking gathered in divination in Wicca, this is the one that costs the least at the counter and asks the most of the maker.
The price is paid in patience rather than coin. A bought deck arrives already fluent, murmuring its meanings before you have even cut it. A set of lots arrives mute. It sits in the bag with nothing to say and waits for you to give it words.
A cast is used when you wish to see a matter laid out in front of you on a flat surface, at arm’s length, instead of turning and turning inside your own head at three in the morning.
Roads That Are Already Made
Two older systems stand close to this work, and neither of them belongs inside it.
The runes are a script with a recorded past of their own and a long body of meaning attached to each letter, and casting them is a discipline in its own right, set out in casting the runes.
The ogham is an Irish alphabet whose letters carry the names of trees, with its own order, its own woods and its own way of falling, described in the ogham few.
Both are inherited. What follows is not. This is a set with no ancestry but your own hand, and that is the whole of its character.
Why a Set of Your Own
A bought system hands you a finished language, and every reading begins with a small act of translation. You see the card, you recall the page in the book, and only then do you look at your own life.
A set you have made removes that middle step. The word on the lot is already a word you use.
This is not a claim of greater power. A hazel disc with a river scratched into it is not stronger than any other object on any other table. It is only nearer, and nearness is worth a great deal at midnight when the question is difficult and the mind is tired.
Such a set also keeps you honest. Nothing in a homemade oracle pretends to have arrived from elsewhere. The meanings came from you, and the discipline of the practice is that you hold to them once they are written down.
The Bodies of the Lots
Lots want to be alike in the hand and unlike to the eye.
Flat river pebbles are the old favourite: cool, dull, close-grained, lying in the palm like small grey coins of the water. Short billets of hazel or ash, dried and split so that one face is pale and the other keeps its bark, do the same work and fall with a lighter clatter.
Clay discs pressed flat by the thumb and baked hard will take a mark beautifully. So will sea-worn glass, plain wooden circles from a craft box, buttons cut from one card, or broad dried seeds.
Keep them close in size and weight. A lot that is heavier than the rest announces itself through the cloth of the bag, and a blind hand is not truly blind once it can feel a favourite.
If you gather from a shore, a wood or a riverbank, take few, take from where the taking causes no loss, and check what is permitted where you live before you fill a pocket.
A first set asks for very little:
- Nine to thirteen small objects of one kind — pebbles, wooden discs, split sticks or clay tokens
- A dark cloth about the width of both forearms, hemmed or simply cut clean
- A drawstring bag of linen, wool or cotton, deep enough for a hand to search it blind
- A marking tool that will not rub away: waterproof ink, an acrylic paint pen, or a wood-burning pen for timber
- A notebook kept for the lots and for nothing else
Marking Them Without Making Dust
Mark the surface. Do not cut into it.
Grinding, sanding, drilling or tumbling stone at home throws dust into the air of a room, and the dust of certain minerals is genuinely hazardous to breathe — the fibrous ones above all, along with those carrying lead or arsenic. That entire hazard, and the stones it applies to, is laid out in stones that must not touch water. The short rule is the safe one: no cutting, no sanding, no grinding, no dust.
Ink and paint ask nothing of your lungs. A steady pen on a dry pebble, left overnight to harden, will outlast years of casting.
Wood takes a burning pen well, but a burning pen makes smoke. Work at an open window with the air moving, never in a small closed room, and remember that birds kept in a house are exceptionally vulnerable to fumes of any kind.
Whatever you use, let it cure completely before the lots go into the bag. Otherwise the lining will take the print of every word you drew.
Giving Each Lot a Word
This is the long work, and it cannot be hurried through in an evening.
Each lot carries one word, and the best words are the plain furniture of a life. Nouns you could point at. Things with weight, temperature and a smell.
Avoid the great abstractions. A lot that means transformation means everything, and a lot that means everything answers nothing.
A set that serves well might read like this:
- The road — movement, leaving, what has not yet arrived
- The door — an opening, a choice, a threshold uncrossed
- The hearth — home, rest, what feeds you
- The coin — money, work, the price of the thing
- The knife — a cut, a parting, a truth said plainly
- The well — the hidden, the deep, what has not been spoken aloud
- The crow — news, a watcher, a message on its way
- The seed — a beginning, something buried, patience
- The thread — a bond, another hand already in the matter
- The flame — desire, urgency, what refuses to wait
- The stone — delay, weight, what does not move
- The moon — change, timing, the dream and the tide
Write the list into the notebook and date the page. When a meaning widens through use, add the new sense beneath the old one. Never quietly replace it. A set whose words drift to suit the answer has stopped being an oracle and become a mirror flattering its owner.
How Many, and the Empty Lot
Small sets read cleanly. Twelve or thirteen is generous. Nine is enough for a first year, and nine learned deeply will tell you more than thirty half-remembered.
The counts that recur through the craft — three, seven, nine, thirteen — sit easily in the memory and carry a long association with the work, which is reason enough to lean on them.
Leave one lot entirely unmarked.
The blank is not an ill omen. It is the honest edge of the set: the place where the question has not finished forming, or where the answer is not owed to you tonight. Many casters, when the blank surfaces first, simply gather the lots back into the linen and put the cloth away until another hour.
The Cloth and the Field of the Cast
The cloth is not decoration. It is the thing that turns a scatter into a reading.
A plain dark square, laid flat, gives the lots a country with a centre and an edge. Some casters chalk or stitch three faint rings: the inner for what is present and pressing, the middle for what is approaching, the outer for what is still distant and may yet turn aside.
Others quarter the cloth by the elements. North for the solid body of the matter, east for what is thought and said, south for what is wanted, west for what moves underneath in feeling.
Choose one arrangement and keep it. A field that changes between castings teaches you nothing, because nothing in it ever repeats.
Making the Set Yours
New lots are only objects, cool and unacquainted with you.
Most casters mark the beginning with a short consecration — a cleansing, a naming of purpose, a first cast thrown for nobody at all. The rite proper, along with what to do about a set that came to you second hand and how to retire one whose work is finished, belongs to making a tool yours.
After that, handling does the greater part. Carry them in a pocket for a week. Let them learn the warmth of you.
The Question Held Before the Throw
Lots answer the shape of a question rather than its wish.
Ask whether he will come back and the cloth is handed nothing it can hold. Ask what you are not seeing in this, and the cloth is handed a whole landscape. The craft of framing is set out in asking well, and it is worth more than any correspondence table.
Speak the question once, aloud, over the closed bag. Or write it at the head of the notebook page before a single lot has moved.
Then let it go. A hand that already knows the answer it wants will throw to find it.
Four Ways of Casting
- The full cast. Every lot is warmed in the hand and released together over the cloth. What lands face up speaks; what lands blank side up is waiting. This gives the widest picture and the most crowded one.
- The drawn three. Three lots are pulled blind from the bag and set down in the order they came: the root of the matter, its present shape, where it tends. Quiet, quick, good for an ordinary evening.
- The single lot. One drawn at first light and carried in the pocket all day, not as a prophecy but as a lens. You notice what it names.
- The cast onto rings. A small handful thrown across a marked field, read by distance from the centre as much as by meaning. This is the method that rewards a well-made cloth.
Reading the Fall
Look at the entire cloth before naming a single lot.
Notice where the weight has gathered. A tight cluster in one quarter says the matter is concentrated there, whatever the words in the cluster happen to be. A lone lot far out on the linen speaks with an odd, thin authority.
Lots that come to rest touching are read together, as one compound word rather than two separate ones. The coin against the door is not the coin and the door; it is a price attached to an opening.
A lot lying face down is present in the matter but not yet at work in it. Split sticks and long lots point, and what they point toward is part of what they say.
A lot that rolls off the edge of the cloth is not part of the answer. Treat it as the thing you have already set aside, whether wisely or not.
Then read the whole thing once, plainly, in a sentence you would be willing to say aloud to another person. Anything you cannot say simply, you have not yet understood.
Living With the Set
Cast once for a question, and once only. Throwing again until the cloth agrees with you turns an oracle into an echo.
Write down the date, the question, the lots, their positions and your reading. Leave a space beneath it. Weeks later, return to that page and fill the space with what actually happened. That returning is where the skill is built, and there is no shortcut past it.
Keep the lots in the bag and the bag somewhere dry and dark — a drawer, a shelf, the shadow beneath the altar cloth. The linen will take on the smell of the wood it sleeps in. The lots will polish one another over the years until some old favourite is smooth as a thumbnail.
Give the set a full season before judging it. A new oracle is always clumsy, and so is every hand that holds one.
What the Lots Will Not Do
They do not diagnose. They do not name an illness, weigh a medicine, settle a contract, decide a court date or price a decision that belongs to your waking judgement.
If a question circles something heavy — your health, your safety, harm you are thinking of doing to yourself, a fear that will not lift when the lamp is turned up — set the lots down and take it to a person qualified to help. That is not a failure of the craft. It is the craft recognising its own edge, which is the most useful thing it ever does.
And a fall you dislike is only a fall. Stones hold no opinion of you. A dark cluster on dark cloth is a picture to be considered, never a sentence passed.
Later, the bag is drawn shut, the cloth folded along its familiar creases, the lamp turned up again.
The lots go back into the dark to cool, keeping between them the shape of one evening’s question.
They will not remember it. You will.
That is the whole bargain of an oracle made by hand. The meaning was never inside the stones, and yet the stones are how you found it.