This report item is a reading of a bone or shell cast. The practice appears independently across Africa, China and the Americas, and the reading names which tradition it is working in rather than blending them, since the same fall means different things in each.

History

Bone and shell divination developed independently across at least three separate regions rather than spreading outward from one source. Chinese scapulimancy, reading the cracks produced by applying heat to prepared ox scapulae and turtle plastrons, is exceptionally well attested archaeologically in Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions, the same material this atlas's own Chinese Astrology page already cites as evidence for the sexagenary cycle's antiquity. A separate and independently developed tradition of bone throwing divination is documented across parts of Africa, notably in Southern African traditions where a set of small bones, shells and other objects is cast together and read by a trained diviner according to their fall and arrangement. And bone and shell based divinatory casting is separately documented among Indigenous traditions of the Americas, again independently developed rather than descending from either the Chinese or African lines.

How A Reading Is Constructed

A reading names which of the three independently developed traditions, Chinese, African or American, a given cast is working in, rather than reading a fall of bones or shells as though the three shared one universal meaning. Because the same physical fall can carry an entirely different traditional reading depending on which of the three systems it belongs to, naming the tradition first is what makes the rest of the reading honest.