Dicing and Divination in Early China
by Mark Edward Lewis
Links between gambling and divination exist in many cultures. As both activities involve an attempt to predict the future and a choice of actions based on those predictions, it is not surprising that the psychology, terminology, procedures, and even the implements of these two activities often overlap. Thus casting dice and winning money on the basis of which sides come up is a form of gambling, but casting tallies and deciding actions on the basis of which sides come up is a standard form of divination in Chinese temples. Spinning a wheel, drawing lots, dealing cards, and a whole range of other actions is used alternatively to gamble or to divine. While this overlap figures throughout the world, the specific forms that it takes and the manner in which these are incorporated into broader discourses is distinctive to each culture. These thus provide a useful ground for cross-cultural comparisons.
At the origins of Western civilization the ancient Greeks recognized the strong links between gambling and divinatory practices. These links are most clearly embodied in the mythical figure of Palamedes, who was credited as inventor of both dice and several forms of divination, as well as other types of gambling, of the alphabet, and of numbers. The mythology of this figure has been the subject of a useful discussion by Marcel Detienne that appears in a study of Greek ideas about the origins of writing in relation to the human voice. The very name Palamedes, which derives from the same root as "palm" and suggests skill in the manipulation of the world, indicates the multiform resourcefulness and the cunning intelligence which the Greeks called metis, Palamedes figures in the poem Cypria in the epic cycle as a rival and mirror image of Odysseus, who shares the latter's mutability and cunning. Palamedes's cleverness exposed the ruse by which Odysseus attempted to avoid departing for Troy, thus earning him the latter's enmity, While at Troy he took charge of laying out the Greek forces and instituted the use of guards. He also introduced the alphabet for use as tokens in enumerating and distributing supplies, and he introduced dice and other forms of gambling to amuse the troops left idle by the unfavorable winds at Aulis. In the end he was destroyed by Odysseus in a ruse that involved the use of the writing he himself had introduced. However, he also used a written message carved secretly on an oar to alert his brother of his unjust fate and prepare the way for vengeance achieved by his family through the manipulation of false signals.
As Detienne has suggested, these tales of Palamedes, where dicing and divination converge, are a complement to the inventions of Prometheus. Whereas Prometheus gave humans fire and the other means of meeting their physical needs, Palamedes endowed men with the means of escaping from difficult situations and crises, of successfully analyzing situations marked by aporia. As the man who introduced the alphabet for use in marking and publicizing standardized units of measure, Palamedes represents that aspect of writing where it overlapped with numbers, in a world where letters were still used as numerals. Letters, dice, the tokens used in gambling or in calculations, as well as the osselets tossed in gambling and in forms of divination were all linked by the Greeks as forms of using number and measure to make sense of the world. All these were attributed to Palamedes. This same overlap between writing, number, and gambling also figures in Plato's accounts in the Phaedrus of the inventions of the god Thoth--creator of writing, geometry, astronomy, dice, and board games--and the remarks of the old man in Plato's Laws who notes that the use of chips and counters in games of chance places them on a par with the sciences that deal with calculating the quantities and measures of grandeur that constitute the world. As Detienne notes, the same word in Greek could apply to tallies used in arithmetical calculations, voting, games, and divination. The differences between tables for calculations and those for gaming are so small that archaeologists cannot always distinguish them. Thus the overlap in the mythology of Palamedes was carried over into terminology and physical culture.
In the Greek world the overlap between gambling and divination figured in accounts of the manipulations of cunning intelligence as opposed to the pure certainties of geometric proof, the role of calculation and number as means of guiding actions in the world, and the links between writing and the manipulation of physical tokens or tallies. One striking element of these accounts was the questionable, almost immoral, character attributed to the masters of gambling, divining, and the manipulation of signs. Just as the endlessly inventive cunning of Palamedes or Odysseus was both admirable and threatening, so the powers of the alphabet could be mobilized either to communicate the truth or to deceive. Palamedes, as Detienne notes, is a figure who demonstrates the dangerous powers of sealed messages and secret writings. This hiding and unveiling of meanings is also central to the divinatory act.
While no single mythic figure unites the realms of writing, divination, astronomy, and games of chance in early China, these fields are brought together in several texts. The most important of these deal with the origins and structure of the Yi jing. The trigrams and hexagrams had originally been constructed from numbers manipulated for the purpose of divination. In the late Warring States commentarial texts found at Mawangdui or preserved as the "Ten Wings" they were still analyzed in numerical terms. However, in the same texts the hexagrams were described as the prototypes of written graphs and as visual depictions of the structure of the universe. Tallies identical in form with those used to create hexagrams were also used for arithmetic reckonings and, according to the Sunzi, for calculating the balance of forces in military campaigns. Thus the manipulation of the hexagrams, along with the stories of their origins and uses, brought together the fields of divination, number, cosmology, and writing. And evidence recently found in tombs shows that divination with the Yi jing was also related to gambling.