Fabulous Folklore with Icy

Random Chance Divination: Casting Lots and Throwing Dice

Fabulous Folklore with Icy

Show Notes

Divination is a beautifully varied practice, with a plethora of tools and practices designed to give insight into situations. Practices like reading tea leaves or tarot cards already appear on this podcast.

But what about those forms of divination that rely on ‘randomness’ in order to work? You might cast lots, throw dice, or interpret the connections between items that fall where they may.

To what extent you believe the result is 'random' depends on your belief system. For some, the message comes from deities or spirits, and the tool is their communication method of choice. For others, the results come from the universe itself. Other diviners don’t accept ‘random’ as a concept, and their meanings come from the statistical results of divination. For others, the result might be truly random, but the diviner creates meaning by seeing associations between apparently disparate items.

But how it works is not our issue here. Instead, we’re going to explore the folklore of casting lots, casting stones, and throwing dice in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore!

Find the blog post with all the images and references here: https://www.icysedgwick.com/random-chance-divination/

Buy Fate or Fortune: The Art and Folklore of Divination: https://amzn.to/41SkWOF

Get your free guide to home protection the folklore way here: https://www.icysedgwick.com/fab-folklore/

Become a member of the Fabulous Folklore Family for bonus episodes and articles at https://patreon.com/bePatron?u=2380595

Get weekly articles and bonus content at Substack: https://fabulousfolklore.substack.com/

Buy Icy a coffee or sign up for bonus episodes at: https://ko-fi.com/icysedgwick

Fabulous Folklore Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/fabulous_folklore

Pre-recorded illustrated talks: https://ko-fi.com/icysedgwick/shop

Request an episode: https://forms.gle/gqG7xQNLfbMg1mDv7

Get extra snippets of folklore on Instagram at https://instagram.com/icysedgwick

Find Icy on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/icysedgwick.bsky.social

'Like' Fabulous Folklore on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fabulousfolklore/

More from Fabulous Folklore with Icy

Oct 17, 2026

For this special Spooky Season episode of Fabulous Folklore, I'm joined by my very good friends Rob Kirkup from the How Haunted? podcast, and Wayne Gilbert from the Eerie Edinburgh podcast.

Oct 10, 2026

It is the month of Halloween so welcome to the Fabulous Folklore Fireside, for we shall have some ghostly tales this week!

Oct 3, 2026

Welcome to Spooky Season! I'm talking to Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux from the Three Ravens podcast about ghost stories! We talk about the fascination we have for ghost stories, what ghost stories need to be creepy, what kinds of ghosts really need to make a comeback in ghostly fiction, and whether it even matters if a place is haunted, or we just think it is!

Sep 26, 2026

Thunder and lightning offer one of nature's more cinematic spectacles, so it's unsurprising they would accrue a degree of folklore. The danger that lightning particularly poses sees a range of practices to ward off storms, while other traditions offer a way to predict events using storms.

Sep 19, 2026

The autumn equinox falls on 23 September in the UK in 2026. This marks the definite slide towards the winter solstice!

See all episodes →