Personification of Chance: Fortuna (Tyche)

Words are only one way to communicate. Buildings, images and statues
are another medium. They are used to send a message while being part of
it. Monuments, everywhere, were built for this purpose. Examples?

Did you notice the NYU Torch? What does it mean?

Personify: to treat something as if it were in the form of a human being:

- In Greek (Latin = Roman) mythology, love is personified by the goddess
Aphrodite (Venus). War by Ares (Mars) etc.

Ares
 Yama, wrathful god (Tibet)

-
-

Iconography studies the identification, description and interpretation of

the content of images. It can be quite complex, as you can see above.

Let us now see a few of these visual representations of fortune, starting

from antiquity till modern times, and let us observe their features
 Anonymous (Holland) Allegory of Fortune. (16th century)

Holding the orb = globe Symbol of power on the world. Held by Jupiter,
by Roman emperor Constantine who introduced Christianity, then by
kings of Europe.
Standing on a globe. Instability or power?
Cornucopia: the horn of plenty
Gubernaculum

Govern
 Wheel of Fortune

See Cherub and Angel.

 French Miniaturist (15th century). Fortune and Her Wheel:
Illustration from Vol. 1 of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium
(On the Fates of Famous Men)
 Burne Jones (1883)

"My wheel of Fortune is a true-to-life image; it comes to fetch each of us

in turn, then it crushes us," (Burne-Jones)
A critic: This Fortune is one of his most powerful compositions. The
wheel spans the whole painting from top to bottom, turning in a
relentless rise and fall, while the implacable, gigantic goddess forms a
pendant for the powerless mortals: a slave, a king and a poet.”
 Fortuna versus Sapientia

Sapience: Wisdom, Understanding, Science

Know Thyself? Celestial order.

Q: Describe and analyze some of these representations, or similar ones.
Summary: Fortune, holding a horn of plenty, a rudder, symbols of
universal power reigns, unstable, and blind, while human destinies rise
and fall on its wheel. Can Wisdom and Science liberate them?
Earlier, and until now, to cope with uncertainty, humans used a quite
different method, close to Magic: Divination.
 Divination
Anxiety about the future, consciousness of the limitation of their life and
fear of death lead human to look for protection and direction. Human heart
is restless. The belief that human destiny is in the hand of some
supernatural powers has been pregnant during all humanity history.
Divination is an attempt to get answers and to know about the future. It
could be for example questions related to health, success or travel. It is
defined as the practice of attempting to foretell future events or discover
hidden knowledge by occult or supernatural means, often by interpreting
omens1 to try to discover divine will.
Some traditions of divination are so old that it is probably impossible to
discover their original contexts. Over the centuries such practices have
survived many changes of culture and have become perennial attempts to
answer recurring questions about the human condition. We will now
describe some of them to see that divination methods involve
uncertainty.
This practice is mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel, in the Bible:
“For the king of Babylon stands at the parting of the way, at the head of
the two ways, to use divination; he shakes the arrows to and fro, he
inquires of the teraphim, he looks in the liver”.
The meaning of teraphim is now lost.
In Mesopotamia, divination was associated with sacrifice. The viscera of

1
Something that is considered to be a sign of how a future event will take place: The team's final
victory of the season is a good omen for the playoffs, which start next week.
Many people believe that a broken mirror is an omen of bad luck.
the sacrificial victim were examined, particularly the liver, which (rather
than the heart) was conceived as the vital centre., the source of the blood
and hence the basis of life itself. From this belief, the Babylonians thought
they could discover the will of the gods by examining the liver of a
carefully selected animal, e.g. a sheep. Priests were specially trained to
interpret the "signs" of the liver. Certain features of the liver vary between
different individuals. The liver was divided into sections, with each
section representing a particular deity. Babylonian scholars assembled a
monumental anthology of omens: the Bārûtu.

Priests or seers2 looked for signs in the liver of sacrificed animals to tell
them things about a patient's illness. Wooden pegs were placed in the
holes of the clay tablet to record features found in a sacrificed animal's
liver. The seer then used these features to predict the course of a patient's
illness.

Clay livers found by archeologists.

2
a person who says he or she can see what will happen in the future
I Ching divination, which dates from early China, has played a major role
in Chinese culture and philosophy for more than two thousand years. The
I Ching tradition is closely tied to the philosophy of yin and yang.

I Ching practice is widespread throughout East Asia, and commonly

involves the use of coins or (traditionally) stalks of yarrow.
It produces randomly a hexagram, which can then be looked up in the I
Ching book, arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. The
interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching is a matter of centuries
of debate, and many commentators have used the book symbolically,
often to provide guidance for moral decision. There are 64 hexagrams,
made of pairs of trigrams.
Hexagrams

Trigrams
Cleromancy

Cleromancy is a form of sortition, casting of lots3 in which an outcome is

determined by means that could be considered random, such as the rolling
of dice, but are sometimes believed to reveal the will of God, or other
supernatural entities.

The objects are placed in a receptacle such as an urn, a hat or a helmet,

which is shaken, the winner being the one whose name or mark is on the
lot that fall out first. In Ezekiel, the objects are arrows shaken in a quiver. In
some cases the lots were drawn by hand, hence “to draw lots”. The word
is Germanic but was adopted into the Romanic languages: Spanish lote,
French lotterie English lottery, Italian lotto.
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 used by the Shona people of southern Africa.

3
Object used to determine someone's share, anything from dice to straw, but often a chip of wood
with a name inscribed on it, also what falls to a person by lot.
They have been in use for thousands of years, and remain extant.

It was a frequent method of divination among the ancient Romans. The

method involved the drawing of lots (sortes) to obtain knowledge of
future events. In many of the ancient Italian temples the will of the gods
was consulted in this way.
These sortes or lots were usually little tablets or counters, made of
wood or other materials, and were commonly thrown into an urn. The
lots were sometimes thrown like dice.

Astragalomancy is a form of divination that uses dice specially marked

with letters or numbers. Originally, as with dice games, the dice were
knucklebones which are bones in sheep or goats ankle with marks
(these small bones are named astragali or talus bones). They are
common at Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeological sites,
particularly at funeral and religious locations. For example, marked
astragali have been found near the altar of Aphrodite in Athens,
suggesting astragalomancy was performed near the altar.
Since astragalomancy is a form of sortition, numbers are scrawled into
the dice. The numbers are associated with letters, thus can be related to
the questions of the diviner. The diviner casts the dice, resulting in a
random sequence of numbers. The diviner interprets this sequence
 according to certain rules.

Pessomancy another act of divination which uses colored or marked

pebbles instead of numbered dice or knucklebones. These pebbles are
either thrown out of a bag after shuffling or drawn from the bag at random.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the lamas were 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 decisions. Tibetan divination has long
featured the mo in making everyday decisions, too.

Bibliomancy is the use of books in divination. The method of employing

sacred books for divination is widespread in many traditions of the world.
The book, which is believed to hold truth, is opened at random. A passage
is picked, with the eyes closed, and interpreted.
Example: Choose a name for a newborn child.
Augury is the practice from ancient Roman religion of interpreting omens
from the observed behavior of birds. The individual interpreting these
signs was known as the augur. Depending upon the birds, the auspices
from the gods could be favorable or unfavorable (auspicious or
inauspicious). Sometimes politically motivated augurs would fabricate
unfavorable auspices in order to delay elections.

In the Hebrew Bible, the Urim and the Thummim are elements of the
the breastplate worn by the High Priest. They are connected with
cleromancy. The precise meaning of the words is lost but there is a
general belief that they refer to a set of two objects used by the high
priest to answer a question or reveal the will of God. Urim and
Thummim would essentially mean "cursed or faultless", in reference to
God's judgment of an accused person; in other words, Urim and
Thummim would have been used to answer the question "innocent or
guilty".
Samuel 14:41: the passage describes an attempt to identify a sinner via
divination, by repeatedly splitting the people into two groups and
identifying which group contains the sinner.
Then Saul said to all Israel, “You stand on one side, and I and my son
Jonathan will stand on the other side.” And the troops replied, “Do what
seems good to you.” So Saul said to the LORD, the God of Israel, “Why
have You not answered Your servant this day? If the fault is with me or
my son Jonathan, respond with Urim; but if the fault is with the men of
Israel, respond with Thummim.” And Jonathan and Saul were selected,
but the people were cleared of the charge. Then Saul said, “Cast the lot
between me and my son Jonathan.” And Jonathan was selected.
In the Biblical account of the prophet Jonah, he is thrown into the sea and
swallowed by the whale after the sailors on the ship cast lots to determine
the guilty one who had brought about the storm.
In the Book of Joshua, to share the conquered territory between seven tribes,
Joshua says:
Ye shall therefore describe the land into seven parts, and bring the
description hither to me, that I may cast lots for you here before the
Lord our God.

Lots are still present in the Christian tradition, in the choice of an apostle
to replace Judas. (Acts of the Apostles)
It is necessary that one of the men who accompanied us the whole time
(…), become with us a witness to his resurrection.
So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas (…) and Matthias.
Then they prayed, “You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which
one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this apostolic
ministry from which Judas turned away to go to his own place.”
Then they gave lots to them, and the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was
counted with the eleven apostles.

.Alea jacta est

The die has been cast. Famous words of Julius Caesar, crossing the river
Rubicon (Italian border at the time) to move his army towards Rome,
started an adventure the outcome of which was uncertain, like casting a
die. He may have used divination before taking the decisive step
Summary: All these divination methods seem to include an action whose
outcome includes an element of unpredictability, as if they were simulating
the choice of destiny, and an element of interpretation. Fortune or God is
“forced” to give an answer.
Q: Find and describe other divination methods

But the tools of divination have been used for more mundane purposes: to
gamble.