Friday, September 24, 2010

Bibliomancy and The Lucky Dip


So last night I’m in the grocery store perusing granola bars when I overhear two women talking about the Lucky Dip. The one who brought it up had a faintly British accent which is probably what prompted some deeply buried synapse in my brain to fire. From what I gathered, her Lucky Dip had something to do with a children's game – mine, of course, had something to do with books. Nonetheless, the voice triggered a memory of a long forgotten British book that referred in passing to the Lucky Dip as the ancient practice of using a book for divination. I haven’t a clue whether the book was fiction or nonfiction, but I appear to have stored the term Lucky Dip deep in the recesses of some cerebral vault.

Most likely it’s because The Lucky Dip used to be a slumber party game when I was in high school.Of course we didn’t have a name for it back then, but we’d ask a question about some pressing issue - will Sam ask me to the prom? – then grab a book -- any book -- close our eyes, open the book at random, and jab an index finger on a sentence. Whatever we landed on supposedly contained the answer. Of course whatever we landed on was usually vastly unrelated to either Sam, OR the prom, much less Sam and the prom together (“The average temperature in Madagascar is 18.3 Celsius...”), so the trick of course was to explore the “hidden meaning”. In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, I really knew how to party in those days.

I hadn’t thought about this in years -- make that decades -- so I figured it might be fun to give it a try for old time’s sake. We’ll get to that a little later on, but first I thought I’d share what I could find out about the practice. According to Wikipedia, it actually has a serious name -- bibliomancy – which is defined as, “the use of sacred books, especially specific words and verses, for ‘magical medicine’, removing negative entities, or for divination.” Another word for it is stichnomancy,“divinization by reading lines of verse in books taken at random.” Either way, it dates back to the ancient Greeks and its practitioners have spanned the spiritual spectrum, including adherents of many of the major religions, all seeking answers to life’s conundrums in sacred texts. It might be pointed out that the major religions aren’t real keen on it.

Anyway, I’ll spare you the rest of the history and segue neatly into literature with a charming story about the famous literary lovers Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett (Browning). It seems that prior to their marriage, Robert was in a quandary about the future of his romantic relationship with Elizabeth. So he did what any lovelorn poet would – grabbed a random book and decided to seek some otherworldly advice. But alack and alas! The book in his hand was an Italian grammar. How would THAT predict the future of his amorous intentions? It was the 19th century after all and slumber parties hadn’t been invented yet, so naturally he didn’t know about the hidden meaning thing. But that didn’t stop Robert. He gamely closed his eyes, opened the book, and dropped his finger on a random sentence. It read, “ If we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee to eternity.” The man had actually landed on a translation exercise! If you don’t believe it, go to Volume I, page 470 of The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and look it up.

So with that in mind, I am now ready to share my own recent experience with The Lucky Dip. For lack of anything truly pressing to ask, I decided to go generic. I would simply open the book and be led to the exact thing I needed to know on September 23rd, 2010 at 9:04 p.m.. The closest book at hand was on the floor next to me at the top of the stack of new acquisitions to be listed in the morning, so I picked up The Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper, closed my eyes, opened the book, and chose a passage.

“Your natural utterance is quick like my own. Quick utterance is never dignified and you should correct this.”

Whoa! This was pretty uncanny given the fact that when I get excited I sound like the end of those commercials that have five pages of legalese and four seconds to cram it all in. For years, just in case the books didn’t work out, my secret career move has been to read those ads on the radio. And now from beyond the veil, Cooper – well, I assume it was Cooper since we share the same problem and he did refer to me familiarly as “you” – just zapped my back-up plan.

Unless, of course, there’s some hidden meaning. I wonder if I’m too old for a slumber party.

4 comments:

Saturday Evening Post said...

"the major religions aren't real keen on it" and the major sciences are even less enthusiastic. But those must have been some wild parties....

tess said...

I'm sure they're not! Yeah, those were the good old days! :-)

You did see the post above I hope based on your previous comment about Elmer. I still can't get over how cool thatis AND you handed me an idea on a silver platter. So much appreciation your way for THAT!

Anonymous said...

My priest used to call using this the holy scripture, Bible Roulette. I did it anyway. I am up for a slumber party! We did this with a Quija Board. Scared me to death and I would cry and I mother would calm me down. So can we use The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson or perhaps one of Elmer's collection? An Elmer follower.

tess said...

Cool! But we have get fuzzy slippers like back in the 60's. I vote we try it with all things Emily. Can't go wrong with our girl. Then if we don't like the reply we can switch to Elmer. I think Elmer has a fan club here!