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An Introduction to Astragalomancy

Paganicon 2025

At the upcoming Paganicon 2025, I'll be teaching a workshop in Astragalomancy: divination by the casting of knucklebones.

As divinatory systems go, one could characterize this one as quick and deep. I can (and will) teach you the basics of the Bones in five minutes.

So what do I plan to do with the remaining 55 minutes of the workshop? Easily told.

Context, context, context.

In the waking time between first and second sleeps, I lie abed alert, drawing up the story arc of the forthcoming workshop.

In so doing, I come to the heart of the Old Ways.

What is that, you ask?

Listen, and I'll tell you.

The Horned speaks in many ways, but perhaps most clearly through the Bones.

(They come, after all, from His own Body.)

Who is the Horned? The God of Witches.

Who are the Tribe of Witches? The People of the Horned.

Listen, and I'll tell you.

It's paradigmatically Neo-Pagan behavior to rip gods, practices, and concepts from their cultural contexts and claim them for our own, we whose natal gods, practices, and concepts were torn from us long ago.

Behold: the violated becoming, in turn, the violator.

This we do even though, in so doing, we strip said gods, practices, and concepts from that which makes them truly pagan.

Behold, I will tell you all of paganism in three words.

Even as a callow first-time reader of Dante's Divine Comedy, I could readily see the major design flaw in the overarching architectonic symbolism of that soaring cathedral of a masterpiece.

It makes Lucifer the—literal—center of the universe.

Like Dante, I too had my own selva oscura experience.

He, though, wanted to find his way out of the dark forest.

Me, I sought a way in.

Forests can be literal or figurative. Mine were both.

The self, too, is a dark forest: one that it took me long to find the courage to enter.

In the end, desperation drove me.

Walking God

When the First Ancestors came to America, they found paths.

Before ever human had set foot on ground, paths were already laid down.

The Horned, god of witches, made them.

Wherever the ancestors went, they found ways, ways worn by no human foot, ways that spoke with the wisdom of the Land.

The Horned, god of witches, made them all.

For this, we call Him the way-god.

Roads, streets, trails, paths, ways: anything that links one place to another.

All are His, for He made them.

All His paths lead somewhere.

Why is the Animal God, He Who Is All Animals, god of roads?

Easily told.

Him that we call the Horned is a walking god.

Animals move from place to place. It is what we do, our outstanding characteristic.

When we go, we rarely go aimlessly. Where we go, we go for a reason.

Our paths lead from one place to another.

They speak with the wisdom of the Land.

In the days of my anguished adolescence, I would go to the woods at night.

Having stashed my shoes under a fallen tree, I would walk the deer-paths, barefoot, until the roaring in my head grew silent, until the I of I had entirely disappeared, and become one with the forest.

(In the darkness, bare feet will always find the path.)

In this way, my life was saved.

Feline Faun

Two centuries before witches were first accused of worshiping the Animal Man with an anal kiss, the same accusation was leveled against the Cathars of southern France: Cathars being thus, in effect, proto-witches.

According to medieval French cleric Alain de Lille, the Devil appeared to them in the form of a huge black cat or, interestingly, of a man with the fur-covered legs of a cat.

In witch-trial documents of later centuries, the Devil is said not infrequently to take the form of a black cat, usually with tail raised: all the better to kiss you with, my dear.

(In 1682, Devonshire witches Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards told the judges that he appeared to them as a lion.)

To the best of my knowledge, though, the man with cat legs—think feline faun—was unique to the Cathar vision.

Though the Animal God of the witches generally shows himself forth as one of the prey species by which we humans live, and have always lived—hence horned—neither is it unknown for him to take the form of a predator: each new form a revelation. Carved in mammoth ivory, the Lion Man is one of Europe's oldest images.

He is indeed a roaring lion, our god, our ancestors' god, stalking and roaring up and down the world.

As once again in our age and day he raises up a people to himself, let no one be surprised to behold him, once again, on feline paws.

Why "buck naked"?

Here's what we know about the expression. It's American; it dates from the early 19^th century; it's definitely not a euphemism for “butt-naked”, which expression doesn't turn up until the 1950s.

So, what's so naked about a buck?

700 years ago, “buck” referred specifically to a he-goat, but with time the term has come to be used for the males of several different species, including deer, rabbits, and (humorously) humans. But, America being America, and the deer being the American animal par excellence, in American usage “buck” has come to mean a male deer preeminently.

(Except to romantic pagans of Ye Olde Renn Fest variety, for whom every deer with antlers is a “stag,” and all big black birds, crows included, “ravens.” Gods, folks.)

So why would a buck be more naked than any other animal?

Well, consider a buck in flight. The tail goes up, exposing a white patch for others to follow.

Exposing also, well...other parts that aren't usually exposed. Um, sensitive parts, intimate parts.

That's pretty naked.

But there's more.

I don't need to tell you that the god of the witches goes by many names: names like “Old Buck.”

“I love you more than I love God,” my first boyfriend once told me.

Then he freaked out, because it was true.

Two young priests-in-training—me to the Horned, he to Christ—trying our best to follow our respective loves, in a time of discountenance for love of man for man.

In the end, the cognitive strain became too great for him to bear. It never occurred to him what from the start seemed obvious to me: that he best loved one by loving the other as well.

So we went our separate ways: him to his priesthood, god and people, me to mine.

We're now both nearer death than birth. My life has been the happier, I think. He has a pension, though.

Do some loves exclude others? Do we not, in loving others, love our gods as well?

For the Horned, for Him Who is all animal life, surely so. And for Christ?

To me, who maybe have no right to an opinion, it seems that perhaps a case could be made. Gods help me, I'm no longer so convinced as once I was that, in the end, my boyfriend's god and mine are even so different, after all.

The Oldest Oracle

Long, long ago, the Horned gave us the bones, and taught us how to read them.

Here's how.

What you'll need: five astragali (“knucklebones”).

First, you need to establish a “ground.”

1. Spread the casting-cloth on the ground, or

2. At need, with the tip of your finger, draw a circle in sand or dust.

Above the “ground,” hold the five knucklebones between your two hands.

Call in your heart to the Horned, Lord of Lots, state your question, and request an answer.

Phrase your question in such a way that it can be answered Yes or No.

Drop the bones onto the “ground.”

Disregard:

Any bone that falls outside the ground.

Any bone that lands on its side.

How to read:

Each knucklebone will show either a bump or a hollow.

Bumps = yes. Hollows = no.

Five bumps = definite yes.

Five hollows = definite no.

Four bumps = probably yes.

Four hollows = probably no.

Three bumps = Yes, but.

Three hollows = No, but.

Equal number of bumps and hollows = The bones decline to answer.