Astragalomancy

Marked astragali (talus bones) of sheep and goats are common at Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeological sites, particularly at funeral and religious locations.

[3] The practice of contacting divine truth via random castings of dice or bones stretches back before recorded history.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed bone "dice" (hakata) used by the Shona people of southern Africa.

Another branch of cleromancy sometimes compared to astragalomancy is pessomancy (also known as psephomancy) – a type of divination which uses colored or marked pebbles rather than numbered dice.

[7] Astragalomancy was performed in Ancient Greece through the rolling of Astragaloi and subsequent consultation of "dice oracles", tables of divination results carved into statues or monoliths.

[8] Astragaloi are the marked and cut off knucklebones of sheep, or similarly shaped imitations in bronze or wood that served as divination dice in the ancient Greek world.

The text's standard construction of the inquirer then is one who has come from a foreign place to the oracle, puts the business or activities he wants to conduct to the god, and then receives an answer.

Others such as the Sanskrit pāśaka are four sided rectangular dice, and date from the eighth to the tenth century with evidence from manuscripts.

There is a recently published Tibetan manuscript containing both a divination manual and a legal text, suggesting an interconnectedness between the two practices.

[14] The contents can be summarised as follows: The Dalai Lama is reported as using the mo, balls of dough in which have been placed pieces of paper with possible "choices" written on them, to help in making important decisions.

Lha-Mo's connection to dice throwing is apparent in a story in the Beun-mo bka'i than-yig, a religious text.

In this story, Lha-Mo appears in the guise of a fortune teller multiple times, and ritually throws dice in each apparition, eventually healing a queen who was sick.

[18] The lamas of the Lha-Mo cult, the “Dpal-Idan dmag-zor rgyal-mo'i sgo-nas” still perform a dice throwing ritual for divination today, called ‘mo’.

He invokes the gods Śakra, Brahmā, and the four heavenly kings[24] as well as other spirits, and instructs you to sit facing west.

The game is traditionally played with llama bones, as they are believed to have a special power to attract the soul of the deceased.

[30] For some Amazonian societies, the symbol is more powerful as the corpse of the deceased is placed in a hollowed tree called a canoe.