Sortes Virgilianæ, a favourite mode of divination among the ancients, in which an oracular answer was found in a doubtful juncture by opening Virgil's Aeneid at random, and pricking a pin into the book, or taking the first passage on which the eye chanced to rest. Another method was to take a number of his verses, shake them together in an urn, and draw out one, from whose contents to infer good or evil. The ancient Sibylline oracles naturally afforded a subject, and the strange magical reputation early attached to Virgil helped to make his great poem the book most frequently used for this purpose. The mediæval mind read Christianity into Virgil, and consequently found no difficulty in ascribing equal value to the Aeneid and the Bible for purposes of divination. We are told that Severus fore-read his high destiny in the line, 'Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;' and Gordianus, who was to reign for but a few days, read his doom in the words, 'Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata, nec ultra esse sinunt.' Gundulf, afterwards bishop of Rochester, and two other monks one day at Caen turned over the pages of a book of the gospels to read their future fortunes, and the Abbot Lanfranc foretold from Gundulf's passage that he should yet become a bishop. Rabalais found his license to escape from the bondage of the convent in the line, 'Heu! fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum;' and we may see all the weakness of this method in the perplexity of the answers it yielded in the great question of Panurge's marriage. Dr Welwood tells us that Charles I. and Lord Falkland once made experiment of their future fortunes at the Bodlician in Oxford, and found passages equally ominous to each. The lines which the king read (Æn. iv. 615-620) from Dido's imprecation against Æneas plainly foretold rebellion, defeat, and a shameful death; Falkland opened at Evander's lamentation over the untimely death of his son Pallas (Æn. xi. 152-181). Unfortunately for this beautiful story, Aubrey in his Remains of Gentilisme and Judaïsme tells it of Prince Charles and the poet Cowley at Paris just before the trial of the king. At any rate Cowley himself tells us that he found some light from Virgil about the Scottish treaty, when employed as a secretary in affairs of state; and we read how the Lord Chamberlain used the passage in 2 Chron. xix. 5-8 during Charles I.'s miserable Sunday of hesitation about the execution of Strafford to convince the king that the responsibility really rested upon the judges. Sir Thomas Browne in his Vulgar Errors denounces the Sortes as an ancient fragment of pagan divination; and Dr Nathanael Home, in his Dæmonologie (1650), deplores the loss to the state and the sin to the church engendered through lots by sieves and books.
The early Christian writers denounced divination by lots as magical, and therefore a form of idolatry. Still the practice continued to be common—'per sortes sanctorum,' by the first passage found in the psalter or gospel, the lectionary or sacramentary. St Augustine condemned this as an abuse of the divine oracles, yet preferred to see men turn in this way to the gospels rather than to demons.
And we find that an unsought omen from a psalm ended the opposition to the choice of St Martin as bishop of Tours. The Sortes Apostolorum was a collection of pious sentences much employed for divination, a bread and water fast of three days being prescribed before using it. A similar use of the Bible long survived amongst Protestants, and indeed is not to this day extinct among people of simple faith in corners of England and Germany. A characteristic instance is told of his own experience by the great Cambridge evangelical leader, Charles Simcon, when downcast about the opposition to his ministry in his earlier years. 'I prayed that God would comfort me with some cordial from His word, and that, on opening the book, I might find some text which should sustain me. It was not for direction I was looking, for I am no friend to such superstitions as the Sortes Virgilianæ, but only for support. The first text that caught my eye was Matt. xxvii. 32. . . . Simon was the same as Simeon. What a word of instruction was here, what a blessed hint for my encouragement!' The obstinate survival of this superstition depends upon the naturalness of the notion, where there is a strong conviction of the power and watchful care of an overruling Providence, and a belief in the Bible as the literally inspired hand-book of divine guidance to man. Bibliolatry makes the notion of such divination perfectly rational, and we may well believe that its disuse has been merely a consequence of the decaying respect for the mere letter of Scripture. See DIVINATION, and MAGIC.