Tacitus & Divination

The Casting Spreads in this Guidebook are modern, and so is almost all rune divination practised today. That is worth knowing, not a reason to stop. This page sets out what the historical record actually says, and where the modern methods came from.

What Tacitus wrote Attested

Around 98 CE the Roman historian Tacitus described the Germanic peoples in his Germania. Chapter 10 is the passage every rune book cites:

Auspicia sortesque ut qui maxime observant: sortium consuetudo simplex. Virgam frugiferae arbori decisam in surculos amputant eosque notis quibusdam discretos super candidam vestem temere ac fortuito spargunt. Mox, si publice consultetur, sacerdos civitatis, sin privatim, ipse pater familiae, precatus deos caelumque suspiciens ter singulos tollit, sublatos secundum impressam ante notam interpretatur. Si prohibuerunt, nulla de eadem re in eundem diem consultatio; sin permissum, auspiciorum adhuc fides exigitur.

Augury and divination by lot no people practise more diligently. The use of the lots is simple. A little bough is lopped off a fruit-bearing tree, and cut into small pieces; these are distinguished by certain marks, and thrown carelessly and at random over a white garment. In public questions the priest of the particular state, in private the father of the family, invokes the gods, and, with his eyes towards heaven, takes up each piece three times, and finds in them a meaning according to the mark previously impressed on them. If they prove unfavourable, there is no further consultation that day about the matter; if they sanction it, the confirmation of augury is still required.

Latin: Tacitus, Germania 10. English: tr. Church and Brodribb (1876), public domain. The phrase ter singulos tollit is read either as "takes up three, one at a time" (the usual modern reading) or as "takes up each piece three times" (as here).

What it does and does not tell us

• It does show that some Germanic peoples cast marked lots, around the end of the first century, with a prayer and a look to the sky.
• It does not say the marks were runes. Tacitus never mentions runes, and his account is older than the oldest securely dated runic object (a comb from around 150 CE).
• It gives no meanings for the lots, and no meanings for positions. Every "position" in a modern spread is a modern addition.
• Lots were one method among several. In the same chapter Tacitus describes reading birds, the neighing of sacred white horses, and a duel with a captured enemy.

In the medieval sources Later tradition

Medieval poems and sagas are full of rune magic: victory runes carved on a sword-hilt, runes on a drinking-horn against poison, runes miscarved on whalebone that make a girl ill. None of them describes reading the future from runes. The Eddic poem Völuspá says the three Norns, whose names are often read as past, present, and future, "scored on wood" as they set the fates of men; that image, not any recorded rite, lies behind the modern Nornic spread. The nearest thing to runic divination in the whole medieval record is a late stick from Bergen (1375 to 1400) that conjures Óðinn, called there the greatest among devils, to name a thief.

Where the modern methods come from Modern

• The Nornic method and the Tacitus-style casting cloth come from Edred Thorsson’s Futhark (1984). He added a white linen cloth, which Tacitus does not mention, and the three positions: the root of the matter, its present condition, and what should come about.
• The nine-rune cast, where runes are thrown and those landing face-down are not read, follows Kveldulf Gundarsson’s Teutonic Magic (1990).
• The Dodona method comes from Karl Spiesberger’s Runenmagie (1955), where it was laid out for an eighteen-rune row. The Guidebook offers that original and a 24-rune adaptation.
• Rune stones drawn from a bag, reversed meanings, and the blank rune were popularized by Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (1982), which he himself called "non-conventional" and noted that the ancient divinatory meanings "are lost to us".

None of this makes the spreads less useful. It makes them modern, and now you know whose.

Sources for this page

• Tacitus, Germania 10; tr. Church and Brodribb (1876)
• Völuspá 20 and Sigrdrifumal 6 to 7, in Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923); Egil’s Saga, tr. Green (1893)
• Bergen stick N B241: Rundata (Scandinavian Runic-text Database)
• Thorsson, Futhark (1984); Gundarsson, Teutonic Magic (1990); Spiesberger, Runenmagie (1955); Blum, The Book of Runes (1982; 1985 printing, pp. 12, 24)

— Evander Blackwood