How To Interpret Divinations Using Bones?

Bone reading, also known as bone scrying or casting the bones, is an ancient form of divination found in various cultures worldwide. It is believed that the bones themselves hold valuable insights into a person’s past, present, and future. In a typical session, the patient or diviner throws bones on the floor, with ancestral spirits controlling the pattern. The “bones” may include animal vertebrae, dominoes, dice, coins, shells, and more.

Bone divination involves throwing bones onto a mat, animal hide, or a circle drawn in the dirt, and the resulting patterns are interpreted. No bone or pairing can be read in isolation, but must be read first as part of the four principal bones and then in conjunction with the accessory bones. There are multiple ways to read bones, including working heavily with ancestors for a more interpreted reading or using both hands to release the bones.

Bone sets are collections of items that mean something to the reader and cast in a way to read fortunes. They get thrown onto a circle and read intuitively based on the combination of pieces, the direction they point, and how centered they are to the reader. Some of the best bone readers use a marked cloth and a handful of bones, but the method used is unimportant if it yields reliable results.

The bones are considered on a timeline from left to right, with the bones on the left representing the past, those in the middle the present, and the bones on the right representing the unknown. The practice of divination by using scapulae or speal bones (shoulder blades) is most widely practiced in China and the Sinosphere as oracle bones.

What bones are used for divination?

Oracle bone divination was a popular practice in ancient China, particularly during the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600-1046 BCE). Bones like cattle scapulae and turtle shells were used for divination, with diviners burning them and interpreting the cracks. The interpretation of these bones is unknown, but archaeologists can study the inscriptions on the bones to learn about ancient religious practices. The process ensured the authority of ancient kings and allowed communication with ancestors.

Sacrifices to ancestors were believed to ensure favorable outcomes for the living world. In fall 2022, students in ARCP291 East Asian Archaeology attempted to recreate the oracle bone-burning process by burning holes on cow and sheep scapula with wooden sticks. Although they were able to make small cracks in the sheep scapula, they struggled to produce cracks in the thicker cow scapula.

What bones represent spiritually?

Bones are not only the foundations of our bodies but also sacred signifiers in various cultures, representing potential for regeneration and stories of past, present, and future. Interpreting these bones can be seen as ritualized spiritual archaeology, allowing individuals to connect the present to the unknown worlds we inhabit. African cultures have rituals that connect the living to their ancestors, as bones can exist longer than their flesh. These bones can be both fearful and fascinating, as they hold unresolved psyches.

Stories that access this part of our souls are impactful, with ghost stories being the subject of movies, novels, and plays. These stories often employ the trope of the ghost story, as seen in August Wilson’s plays and African American folk tales. Bones and stories offer us opportunities to confront our naked selves and confront the truth that we will eventually be stripped of our once-important roles.

What animal bones were used in divination?

Oracle bones, pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron, were used in pyromancy during the Late Shang period in ancient China. A recent count estimated there were about 13, 000 bones with over 130, 000 inscriptions in collections in China and fourteen other countries. Divincers would submit questions to deities regarding weather, crop planting, royal family fortunes, and military endeavors. These questions were carved onto the bone or shell in oracle bone script using a sharp tool, and then heated until the bone or shell cracked due to thermal expansion. The diviner would interpret the pattern of cracks and write the prognostication on the piece.

Pyromancy with bones continued into the Zhou dynasty, but the questions and prognostications were increasingly written with brushes and cinnabar ink, which degraded over time. The oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, using an early form of Chinese characters. The inscriptions contain around 5, 000 different characters, many of which are still used today. These known characters comprise much of the core vocabulary of modern Chinese and provide important information on the late Shang period, including the Shang royal genealogy.

When discovered in the late 19th century and deciphered in the early 20th century, these records confirmed the existence of the Shang, which had been subject to scrutiny by the Doubting Antiquity School.

How do you read an oracle bone?

Oracle bones were employed in divination practices, wherein diviners would engrave queries, drill holes, and subject the bones to heat until fissures emerged. These fissures were then interpreted to ascertain the answer to the posed question.

What emotion is stored in the bones?

The bones in the body store various emotions, such as grief, stubbornness, self-confidence, and sexual abuse. If any bone is weak, so is the rest of the body. The marrow in bones produces blood that feeds every cell, and if a negative emotion is stored within a bone, the marrow continues to produce blood that circulates that emotion to every cell. This can lead to weaker white blood cells that protect against illness or even attack the body, as seen in cancer and immune diseases. This is why certain emotions may appear over and over again, even years after they are believed to be healed. Addressing these bones may help tackle the core issues of physical and emotional health.

What do the bones mean in divination?

The use of bones and other objects can facilitate the diagnosis or determination of a client’s needs or the identification of missing aspects of their life. To illustrate, the bone of a hyena can be used to ascertain the whereabouts of a thief. Baboons are esteemed for their bones, and if they fall facing someone, they are referred to as “bola wamarata.” In the event of death, the ant-bear and baboon fall in the same direction, thereby facilitating a cure.

What is the origin of bone divination?

During the Late Shang Dynasty at Anyang, oracle bones were primarily made from cattle scapulae, used in royal divination rituals and inscribed with the earliest surviving writing in ancient China. These bones were used in royal divination rituals and were protected by copyright laws. The use of cookies on this site is governed by the terms and conditions of ScienceDirect, and all rights are reserved for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.

What do oracle bones tell us?

The author specializes in bioarchaeology, a field that focuses on extracting stories and information from human remains. They study the isotopic ratios of various elements within human bones and teeth to reconstruct a person’s life history. By grinding and slow-cooking ancient bone into gelatin, the author aims to understand the life histories of everyday people.

Yinxu, a city known for its splendor and horrors, is home to a royal cemetery with exquisite bronze and jade artifacts. It also holds evidence of massive sacrificial ceremonies, where over 13, 000 humans and animals were sacrificed during its 200-year occupation. Oracle inscriptions suggest that many of the young men killed in these sacrifices were war captives from the “Qiang”, a group of “barbaric” pastoralists living west of Yinxu. However, since most of these victims were not buried with personal items, it has been challenging to confirm this narrative with physical evidence.

How do sangomas read bones?

The African tradition of throwing bones is a ritual performed by sangomas, who scatter bones in a circle and read their meanings. The term “sangoma” refers to all types of traditional healers in South Africa, with two main types: the sangoma, who focuses on divination, and the inyanga, who works with plants and animals-based medicines. The distinction between the two has become blurred due to western influences. The practice of throwing bones is both a craft and a calling, with the ancient premise being that the sangoma communicates with ancestral spirits on behalf of the healer.

Being called a sangoma is not just a vocation but a “ukutswa” from the ancestors, an ancestral and cultural honor and a major responsibility. The physical practice and items used by the healer vary, but the practice of throwing bones is a significant part of traditional healing in Africa.

Who could read oracle bones?

The Shang Dynasty in China, which spanned from around 1700 to 1045 BCE, is known for its use of oracle bone inscriptions on cattle bones and turtle plastrons. Diviners would submit questions to deities about various aspects of life, such as weather, royal family welfare, warfare, and crops. They would then apply intense heat to the bones with a glowing metal rod, causing them to crack. This process of divination is called bu (or *puk in archaic pronunciation), a word written with a graph depicting a pattern of cracks on a bone. Once the bones had cracked, the diviners could “read” the patterns, enabling them to interpret the answers of the deities.

The Shang archives of divination texts, amounting to nearly 200, 000 inscribed bones, were first discovered in the late 19th century. Chinese pharmacists prized the inscribed bones as potent ingredients for efficacious medicines and grinded them into a powder, which they mixed in their potions and poultices. Scholars began to collect these bones, and systematic excavations were carried out at the “Ruins of Yin” near Anyang in Henan Province. By 1941, over 95% of all oracle bones known today had been excavated.

One of the main puzzles was how the oracle bone arrived at the Museum’s cuneiform tablets. The inscription on the bone seemed to be a reference to the Shang Dynasty, but the author dismissed this idea due to its improbability and the fact that the bones were likely mistakenly placed in a drawer full of cuneiform tablets after being brought out of Asian Section storage for a temporary exhibition dealing with the evolution of writing.

The bone was collected by Langdon Warner in 1913-14 at Xiaotun, a village near Anyang, and was obtained from Harvard as part of an extended series of exchanges from 1955 to 1965. It is difficult to imagine how an item from the Warner Collection, which concentrated almost exclusively on East Asian and Central Asian materials, could have gotten mixed up with Southwest Asian materials at Harvard. Two more factors indicate that the confusion surrounding the bone occurred considerably after 1955.

First, the object was accurately identified as an oracle bone and duly registered when it entered the Museum in that year. Second, the cuneiform tablets of the Museum are in frequent use by Penn’s own scholars and visitors from other institutions.

What animal is known as the bone breaker?

Bearded vultures are large birds found in high-altitude climates, ranging from 3, 300 to 14, 800 feet. They are found in mountainous regions like the Alps, Pyrenees, Caucasus, and Himalayas, as well as the highlands of Ethiopia. These birds have distinctively colored wings with white heads and “beard-like” feathers under their chins, and their wings are yellow or orange, believed to be stained by iron-rich soil. Bearded vultures have unique adaptations for their diet, mainly consisting of bones.

One such adaptation is their highly acidic stomach, which has a pH of less than one, allowing them to digest bones in about 24 hours. This acidic stomach acid is a significant difference from human stomach acid, which has a pH between 2 and 3. 5.